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Author Topic: Design your own Sector (Updated with graphics)  (Read 3630 times)

AugustineMa

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Design your own Sector (Updated with graphics)
« on: January 20, 2018, 01:10:43 AM »

Disclaimer: This post is a basic modding guide for ordinary gamers who wish to tweak some aspects of the game either to make it more realistic or to have more fun. All the information used here is based on personal experience of the game and is subjected to change if you use different version(0.8.1a) than I do.

Requirement: Notepad++
Warning: Be sure to keep a backup file if the game corrupts(drastic changes will permanently destory your old saves, so be careful of what you want or just fooling around and taking account of AI's behavior into your change, e.g. I once was dissatisfied by the underwhelming damage HELLBORE does, and hence I escalate it to 2000, half of a REAPER and AI still behave like before and eat my shoots without evading it, renders the weapon too powerful to use)

Potential Problems: When I was playing around with settings.json, sometimes game will crash at start and there's seemingly no solution to it. The way I manage to get over it is by reinstalling newest version of java and Graphic drives. It works but I don't know why so be cautious if that happens.

First, let us start with some easy ones. Changing Weapon and Ship Status
1.Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data
      #Here is everything you can alter about the game without any extensive programming knowledge.

2.Let us start with weapon, the initial driver for my modding motives
   Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data\weapons
      #Disregard all the wpn. files, most of them are effects you are not interested right now.
      #Find an excel file weapon_data.csv, this is what you want ;)
      #Open it in excel, the rest is obvious to see, you want to find the weapon you are engrossed on, for example, HELLBORE CANNON, Do NOT change ID, it's an identifier for the other important files, Tier reflects technology level of the weapon, which is not super important; rarity is the frequency it spawns in the corresponding market(based on rarity, generally high rarity require fully established market and maybe higher level.  ;)Usually, I just change Tier to 0 and remove all the numbers in Rarity column, keep the column!, this way you will have plenty of weapons to install on your ships ;D) Anything else can be played with but be aware of inputting text like changing Type, use copy and paste CTRL+C/CTRL+V to avoid errors, still best recommend just change damage and flux numbers, it's the safest.



3.Now we are done with weapons, let's jump right into  hulls and ships, still to keep it sample, we are not going to change weapon slots and so on and so on, it's not required for us, we love vanilla ships
   Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data\hulls
      #There are two excel files, we only deal with ship_data.csv, not wing_data.csv while status for wings can also be change in ship_data.csv file
     #Again, open ship_data.csv file in excel, everything is pretty much comprehensible to experienced players. So just to extirpate all possible issues, Do Not change ID, FLEET PTS, 8/6/5/4%(no idea what it does) and BREAK sections. (There are too many thing associate with them, changing one could result a failure of launch. FLEET PTS is equivalent to deployment cost in battle and affect factions' fleet size.)
     #Fun part, copy and paste other ships' SYSTEM ID to your designated ship and see the effect in game. Some small change will have major impact of how you play the game. My favorite is to strength somewhat useless ships like SALVAGE RIG to be a powerful but fragile launching deck(add 3 to fighter bay column) equiped with either reservewing or damper.


     #By far, the only issue that greatly affects the game in a negative way is how armor works, any armor over 2000 is nearly impenetrable for vanilla weaponry(can be damaged but imagine a naked ship withstands multiple nukes without failing)

Overhaul the Sector

1.Have you ever want to aggrandize your feeble little fleet into a mighty Armada? Want to make your sector into a warring battleground teaming with opportunistic pirates and deadly enemies? Insatiable desire for battle and glory? Populate Sector
   Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data\config
     #Open settings.json in Notepad++
     #To change Economic aspect of the game, Search/Find economy. A word of advise, "economyIntervalnGameDays":30, determines market update rate, if you simply want to fight and collect better ships then change the tailing number 30 to a number smaller, but doing so will significantly hamper player's trade experience since price of a good in a market updates so rapidly, you can no longer buy low and sell high due to long and distant travel time.
     #Search/Find mission, mission essentially is how you earn your money quickly and more excitingly, so I usually just price it high for a better reward

     #Seach/Find "shipBuyPriceMult":1.2, this determines price of ship on markets and there's a subsequent list of how much ship cost with or without d-mods
     #Ok, to energize the sector, Search/Find "maxPirateFleets":30, mark the number higher solely will have ostenibly no effect on the game, with some dismissible small pirate evades you everytime they detect you afar, we will get to it later
     #Search/Find "officerMaxLevel":20, to make your officer more efficient in combat by ranking up their skills
     #Search/Find "suppliesPerCrewPerDay":0; add a sense of realism
     #Search/Find "maxShipsInFleet":30, your Armada awaits, but try to size your fleet around the multipler of 5,e.g. 30,35,40,45 and so on, no big deal if you ignore it just look more naturally on screen

2.Ever want to setup your own economy in Sector? Tired of running small businesses like a mule? Build your own Economic system
   Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data\campaign
     #Open commodities.csv in excel, same rules applied, you can change base price, variance(distribution of price, larger the variance, higher the difference between high/low price), occupied cargo size, stack and so on.


3.Economy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
   Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data\campaign
     #First Open market_conditions.csv in excel, copy and paste ids, it will be used in managing any individual market scattered around the Sector, and if you wish, read through their descriptions to get a sense of what this specific id does, e.g. vice_demand == The demand for vice goods is unusually high here. --> High demand for illegal drugs/organs
   Then Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data\campaign\econ
     #You will see alot of json files with familiar names. Yes, they are names of different vanilla star systems populated with orbital stations or controlled planets. Open them with Notepad++, and now you will be able to manage all the attributes the settlements have(little graphic tags you see on the top of market screen)

     #Here I frequently setup home or capital planets for all factions and boost their goods storages to make sector look more enlivening, e.g. magec.json the system I designated to Tritachyon's home
         "entities":["tibicena", "achaman_enterprise_station"],
         "faction":"tritachyon",
         "size":8,
         "startingConditions":[
            "trade_center",
            "free_market",
            "orbital_station",
            "population_8",
            "ore_complex",
                                "ore_complex",
            "outpost",
            "tectonic_activity",
            "no_atmosphere",
            "high_gravity",
            "ore_ultrarich",
            "rare_ore_ultrarich",
                                "urbanized_polity",
            "autofac_heavy_industry",
                                "autofac_heavy_industry",
            "ore_refining_complex",
            "ore_refining_complex",
            "ore_refining_complex",
                                "headquarters",
                                "headquarters",
            "military_base",
                                "regional_capital",
                                "shipbreaking_center",

*If you wish to use mine as an exampler, simply copy and paste starting condition portion and change the number trailing "size" to any number below 10, 10 may work but suffers a possibility of crashing

4.Ok, finally how to create a dynamic yet chaotic Sector world
     #Prior to this section, we discussed how to increase number of pirate fleet roaming around sector but saw no impact in game mainly due to evasion machanism(fleet will not actively attack another fleet whose noticably bigger than the attacker itself). Since we are not into changing the machanism directly, we need to find an alternative solution to the problem, to increase enemies fleet size.
   Go to D:\...\Starsector\starsector-core\data\world\factions
     #Here I will use pirate as an example but similar logic can be applied to virtually any faction besides non-aggressive scavenger
          Open pirates.faction in Notepad++
          Search/Find "doctrine", it represents the possibility of spawning ships with respective sizes, for pirates, it shows following:
                "small":10,
      "fast":6,
      "medium":8,
      "large":4,
      "capital":1,

          Isn't it confusing? No worries, it is not an absolute value for spawning the respective fleets but a relative number. For example, it has 2 times the chance to spawn a median size fleet relative to spawning a large fleet since 8/4=2, and 8 times to capital size fleet, 8/1=8
         The size of fleet spawn can be understood by viewing tags before each fleet names, "freighterMedium" and "combatMedium" are both in category of median but has very different response and combat capability. Often times, minor factions like pirates don't have capital ships:
                        "combatCapital":{
         "fallback":{"combatLarge":2},
      },

           You can manually add them into composition by selectively copy and paste other factions' fleet into it, here I use hegemony's combat capital fleet as an example:
              "combatCapital":{
         "onslaught_Standard":10,
         "onslaught_Outdated":10,
         "onslaught_Elite":10,
         "onslaught_xiv_Elite":3,
         "fallback":{"combatLarge":2},
      },

         Just like in "doctrine" section, the number here also reflect possibility of a spawn, and fallback part possibly reflects when fleet size reduced to Large then remaining fleet should evacuate.
        There's still a lot to play with the codes here, faction specific "hullMods", "illegalCommodities", officers' "traits" and so on.

I give full authority to anyone who wish to use it for referencial purpose only, and if you have any questions, leave a post below but since I have attempted many combinations with this game already and found somewhat restricted by its buildin java code(too exhausted, wish the developer can allow us to conveniently modify effects of battle_objectives and navigations in hyperspace, want to create a connecting highway in hyperspace), I may not be able to respond your questions immediately and readily. --AugustineMa

Best Wishes!
Have Fun!
Saturday, January.20, 4:06AM
« Last Edit: January 20, 2018, 08:13:02 PM by AugustineMa »
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Dudok22

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Re: Design your own Sector (Updated with graphics)
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2018, 11:45:29 PM »

This is really neat! I like how easily moddable Starsector is.
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AxleMC131

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Re: Design your own Sector (Updated with graphics)
« Reply #2 on: January 21, 2018, 12:27:48 AM »

Y'all need to head on over to the Discord channel and find out how you really mod Starsector.  8)
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Darloth

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Re: Design your own Sector (Updated with graphics)
« Reply #3 on: January 30, 2018, 05:51:56 AM »

Indeed - if you've put in all the work suggested here, it's maybe 5-10 more minutes to make an easily removable, safe from game updates mod that does everything you want, since you only really have to copy across the files you're changing and write a short modinfo.
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