NEW RULES FOR PLANET DESIGNERS
by Hazed
If you are one of the very small number of players with a creative side, who isn’t satisfied with the stock planets we provide but who wants to design something unique, then we have some new rules for how you go about it.
We want you to use the auto-linking facility to get your planets set up and into the game, and then apply your design genius by amending the files, rather than starting from scratch.
The reason is that linking planet files in by hand is time-consuming, and there is a lot that can go wrong. You can make mistakes when you enter the system and planet data into the Workbench. Even if you check your files with the Tesla planet-checker, it is not fool-proof – there are some things it doesn’t flag up as errors that can cause problems.
Then Alan has to do a lot of fiddly stuff to get your files linked properly into the game, and although he would never admit it, sometimes he makes mistakes too.
The result: your planet doesn’t load. Or, it loads but you can’t land on it. Or a variety of other potential problems.
So from now on, if you are setting up a new star system, you need to use the ‘CLAIM’ command to get it into the game. Then you can ask us to send you the files, which you can load into the Workbench and amend. You can either keep the core stock planet locations and build extra locations around them, or you can wipe them out and start over from scratch. There are just a few things you should not do:
- Don’t move the landing pad.
- Don’t move the link/orbit location on the space map.
- Don’t add any new space locations that are numbered lower than the link/orbit location (that is, 460).
- Don’t add any new space locations in the places where future planets will go (that is, 461, 397, 459 and 524).
Numbers 3 and 4 are so that you can add future planets using the ‘COLONIZE’ command. You can then customise those planets too in the same way.
These rules apply to new star systems, or to existing systems that have been set up using the auto-linking feature. Anyone who has previously designed their star system from scratch will probably not be able to use the ‘CLAIM’ command because the space map won’t be set up the way the game requires it to be. In that case we will continue to link your future planets in by hand (or equivalent).
