@Oatmeal Problem - thank you for fast reply, this will defo help with narrowing it down then.

@alankraskow nope, this mod doesn't change planet deposits at all (or even the generation of anything inside a system)

@Oatmeal Problem - Does this mod affect deposit spawn on planets? If yes, I noticed that with my current playlist it spawns very little deposits or districts on planets and I have to go around and manually reroll them via console commands.

(I'm using WP's collection mods for better Planet View and I'm suspecting there might be some compatibility issue there)

Updated for Stellaris 4.2 (just a version bump)

@alankraskow

1. if you set a single "preferred spawn" and you're playing single-player, then the player should always spawn in that location

2. yep, suggestions always welcome, either here or on discord

Hey @Oatmeal Problem! Man! This mod is literally my dream come trough! Thank you from the bottom of my heart! I'm having a blast with it! I have two questions:

1. Is there a smooth way to determine which spawning spot on the map is in the script, to be able to assign specific initialiser and force spawn in that spot? If not, would it be possible to implement such feature?
2. Can I send some suggestions for few "quality of life" type of features?

@laissemoi yes, the center of the galaxy is the center of the canvas (marked by a faint + symbol).
If you are not using a mod like Gigastructures and you do not paint there, there will be no stars in the core (like a vanilla random map). If you want a core (and aren't using Gigastructures), paint there, densely if you want a dense core.

I'm honestly not sure what the size of Gigastructure's core is. I have a TODO to research that, and add an in-app guide to show its extent.

"If you are using a mod that changes the core (eg Gigastructural Engineering), don't paint stars there" but where is the core located? is it automaticly in the center of the canvas? how big is it? or do i have to make it by myself via painting high density area?

@MartianLeo I double checked preferred spawn. It seems to be working for me both with a single preferred spawn (player always spawns there) and multiple preferred spawns (player spawns randomly in one of them). Can you check if you're still experiencing issues?

The only thing I can think of is that perhaps Steam did not automatically update the mod for you for some reason (that happens sometimes). You could try unsubscribing and resubscribing. If you keep your custom galaxies in this mod's folder, you'll want to copy them somewhere before unsubscribing.

Planned as well :)

I'd love an ability to zoom in on the web app, would make editing some things much easier

<3

Planned :)

symmetry feature for the paint tool?

@MartianLeo I made some changes to that code recently and it seemed to be working for me then... I'll double check, but I won't be able to for the next week or 2

@EnemyFighter since this mod doesn't affect anything after galaxy gen, you might be able to start a game, then remove the mod and manually edit your save file to re-enable achievements

uh, when i set a preferred spawn i still end up somewhere random and i have to use console and otter editor just to spawn in the extragalactic cluster i made for my thing

am guesing not ironman comp

Update released fixing the last of the known issues:
- Remnant origin had incorrect homeworld
- MSI didn't fully spawn when playing Broken Shackles / Payback
- Player location was not random if you had multiple preferred spawns

@NotEnoughLigh_t1 yeah, I meant customizing the locations of unique systems. Maybe someday, no short term plans. Sol in particular has a lot of special logic (over the years, there's been many duplicate Sol bugs), so I'm hesitant to add more to the mix.

If you want to experiment with manually editing the downloaded txt file, see my comment from September 10 about customizing marauder systems (which are essentially unique systems), and TheDongsmasher's reply.

something like, you designate a star to be the sol system, once playing it any empire that has sol system as home system will spawn there

and what about unique star systems being added?

if by customize systems, you mean customizing the planets within a system, then never. for customizing the locations of systems, maybe someday but no short term plans

so, when the app will be able to let us customize systems and also put unique systems (ex: alpha centauri, sol, deneb, etc), wish to make a near real life replica of our local stellar groupd

@Xialchicken7 and @Captain Bart, thanks for confirming that forced spawn empires are indeed working. I'll add a note to the known issues that they aren't listed in the galaxy setup screen though

@Captain Bart yep, feedback is always appreciated :) I didn't intend to sound annoyed, just wanted to let you know that I won't get to it soon (a few weeks at the earliest)

@Xialchicken Wierd, I can spawn custom empires, at least I think so They are modified versions of base game ones.

No problem I'm just asking, I know how hard coding is take your time. I simply wanted to leave feedback.

Apologies for all the comments, but I think I must have just been blind the first time I tried this. Empires I specify to spawn do spawn in the galaxy, but don't show up in the little pre-game menu. Sorry for the confusion!

Hi Oatmeal Problem! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I had cooked up a small galaxy using your tool, and set a single other empire to spawn, with all others being random. The forced empire never materialized. Unlike usually, the forced empire didn't appear in the little bar below the mock galaxy on the setup page – I wonder why it fails so soon. I was running only this mod and tiny outliner. If you do find time to see if this was an issue on my end, or something inherent, I would be very grateful! Thanks for all the great work nonetheless.

@Xialchicken I haven't tested for that specifically and you're the first to report it, so I can't confirm if it's a known issue from this mod. If it is though, then that's a limitation of static galaxies and there's nothing I can do about it (the force spawn mechanic is almost entirely unmoddable)

@Captain Bart I have a to-do to add a counter, and a to-do to improve the clustering behavior. Life is busy at the moment though

Hi Guys, let me know if I'm being stupid, but I am unable to force spawn AI empires. Is this a known issue/intended? Thanks, and great mod!

Also loosen clusters seams to not be working as intended, I'm not sure if it's the image or if it craps out at the 2000 stars I'm trying to make it do. It has stars just clumped into groups that in game make them very hard to click on.

Could you pretty please add a counter to stars and spawns, I'm fighting the generation to make a milkiway map and need to able to figure out how many stars there is.

nice, thanks!

@SEZER that's expected for now, copying some previous comments:

"the max number of AI empires determined by the number of spawn points on the map, but it will always be less than the number of spawn points (2/3). This is a work around for some bugs in static galaxies (empires that aren't counted as AI empires use those spawn points too, and there will be bugs if it runs out of spawn points to use).

I have a to-do to investigate the underlying behavior more thoroughly. Potentially, I can change that so the max AI spawns equals the number of spawn points minus 1 (reserve one for the player). More research needed, so not putting anything in the description or discussion yet"

thanks for the kind words! no vlog, but I do blog (infrequently) at https://oatmeal.gg

i created galaxy with 666 stars and 16 spawns but when creating a game it only allows me to add 10 AI empires, please fix.

besides that, this is awesome mod and i wish some dev-vlog vid on how you menaged to do it :D

For anyone still playing v3.14, there's now a patch available courtesy of Recon1o6:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3573084816

This mod probably works as is with 4.1, but I'll verify and update if needed in the next day or 2

I noticed that as I was playing around with it. I think what I'll do instead (also crazy) is link the only preferred start system to every other system and play as a gate-builder empire with only primitives. Cool mod, thanks for uploading!

@The Law Mostly no... The mod only supports up to 100 custom wormhole pairs, so there just wouldn't be enough wormholes to connect anything beyond a very small map. You could achieve something kinda similar by setting the hyperlane distance low, and allowing disconnected clusters. That should give you a bunch of "islands" of hyperlane clusters, which you could then connect manually with wormholes.

Is there a way that we could have no hyperlanes and only wormholes/gateways? I know it's probably not ideal for playing but I want to try it out.

Thanks for reply

@Eragon PYRUS if Fallen Empires are off, there are no incompatibilities. If they're on, I think they are not game-breaking, but I haven't tested much. Load order makes no difference.

And which one should below(which one must overwrite other)?

"Mods that edit common/fallen_empires have minor incompatibilities (I only know of Ancient Cache of Technologies and Ethics & Civics: Bug Branch; I will coordinate with these authors to fix)" what kind of incompabilities game breaking or ignorable(For ACOT)?

I think as long as they have different names (both file name and the name inside the the file) they should both work, even without changing priority

edit: i found out how. if im correct you move the priority up.

Im curious how do you make 2 maps into the mod? i put maps - setup_scenarios- map1.text - map2.text its not showing up. how do i make a multiple maps in a single mod? i google it and it just shown me to add by map1 so map 1 and 2 are in the same folder.

Thanks for sharing! You've definitely earned a spot in the "special thanks" when I get around to writing that manual editing guide <3

This works as long as marauder_n_1 is set first, so it would work even in this order

system = { id = "2" position = { x = -355 y = 156 } initializer = marauder_1_1 }
system = { id = "286" position = { x = -368 y = 120 } initializer = marauder_1_3 }
system = { id = "367" position = { x = -343 y = 120 } initializer = marauder_1_2 }

This forces them to spawn even if Marauder Empires are set to off in the galaxy generation settings, but if they are set to randomly spawn, this seems to take the spot of the randomly spawned one.
They appear to be initialized by line number: I made the game generate a ridiculous amount of AI empires(390 in a 400 star galaxy) and an AI took the spot where marauder was supposed to spawn. The marauders did spawn every time when I moved the line of the system they're in to the top of the file, however.

Marauders aren't spawned in the same way as "normal" empires. I don't think spawn weight will affect them at all. Instead, you should set "initializer = marauder_1_1" (or 2_1 or 3_1). You can optionally also set neighboring (by hyperlane) systems to marauder_<1/2/3>_2 and marauder_<1/2/3>_3. If you omit those, the mod has logic to "insert" those 2nd and 3rd systems.

I'm not sure how important order is. Definitely 1_1 should be spawned before 1_2 or 1_3. They might also need to be before random (no "initializer =") systems, so that a random system doesn't use that initializer first. I also don't know if the order that systems are initialized is just by line number (in which case you can just move lines around) or by ID number, which would be trickier since those are also used to link hyperlanes.

Again, please share results if you test this out! I want to write up guides for this later (and maybe someday build it into the app)

I'm guessing it just ignores(always returns true?) the "if" when it doesn't have "limit", but I'm also surprised it didn't break everything and didn't cause any errors in the log(that I could see).
I'm now trying to figure out if it's possible to spawn the marauders at a set point. They seem to have a special civic (civic_anarcho_tribalism), so I might just try to do something with that.