[ 1.12.x] Everoth star cluster V1.2 [Currently just the Estrela Dobre system!]

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Estrela Dobre - A unique star system

This mod was mostly born out of the idea of a planetary system with a main sequence star that is not the usual perfect (or near perfect) sphere.
And that It seems that a star system mod with such a pair of deformed stars is quite rare!
Also, there are multiple objects in the system that are a bit rare in other mods, and it has some lore surrounding some of the bodies!

The current system
Epafi & Adactus

These two stars have a few nicknames lol... probably the most accurate one is "Beans", not "balls", because it would be a little... eh lol.

When the system was first discovered, it was long thought it was a single star, but when scientists measured the mass and the brightness of the system, something didnt add up, however, when the one Kerbal found out a possible reason by accidentally dropping a mk1 light infront of another, it all made sense. The two stars, Epafi & Adactus orbit so close together, that they actually Touch. The two stars are 95% and 60% the mass of Kerbol respectivley. and they whiz around the system barycenter at 70km/s. Their SOIs do overlap a fair bit, and you can pull off some insane gravity assists of upwards of 70km/s!

Ok, enough rambling about the two stars, now onto the planets!
But first, a system map! havent done the delta V yet

Size is to scale, but not distances
Oyst and its moons

Spoiler

Oyst

Oyst, the first planet,  bigger than Jool, and slightly more massive.
I was intending on having a landable surface, but the realistic density would be a bit low to have solid ground. I might put a worldwide ocean instead.

Avon

Avon is the first moon around Oyst, it has a very large impact basin that covers a large area. I have completely redone its surface, so now it has features instead of being a very smooth purely handmade object. It is about the size of Ike, with a surface gravity of 0.1g, it orbits within Oyst's ring system
Paxt

This moon looks like a chocolate ball lol... so i added some lore to it possibly rivalling Minmus with its chocolaty ice cream terrain, however, its likely heat resistant cholocate as it is too close to the stars to be normal chocolate ice cream. this moon spins fast, hence its oblate shape. This moon is very slightly larger than Duna, and has 0.3g polar gravity. its equatoral gravity is a little lower. also, i had fun messing with its rotation speed and catapulting at a few km/s off of the moon lol

Oyst is the closest planet, too close for liquid water to exist. It seems like a kinda boring gas giant at first, until you go into the clouds, as there will soon be some alien structures in the atmosphere (havent added them yet lol).

Collait and Culair and their moons The reason I want these two gas giants to have surfaces is so there is something to actually explore instead of a GLOBAL BOTTOMLESS PIT OF DOOOOOOM!!!! (lol)

Spoiler

Collait

Collait, the slightly larger of the two gas giants, a bit smaller and less massive than Jool, but has 1.2g surface gravity, and some thin rings! Collait has two moons, mostly due to its small SOI. The clouds are thin, and the planet was always unable to hide its surface entirely.

Xaxt

Xaxt is the first moon of Collait. It has a gray coloring in the higher areas, with brownish midlands going to slightly red lowlands. This moon is about the same size as pol, but has higher gravity. Xaxt is also being tidally stretched by its close orbit around Collait and its strong gravity. This moon's terrain, apart from its generally oblong shape, is generated using multiple layers of voroni crater pqs mod.

Correlae

Correlae is the second and last moon of Collait, it is a beautiful world with purple life, a between the sizes of Vall and Laythe, It has amazing views of the local system! However, dont let the looks deceive you! Although its life forms are friendly, the moon itself is very much not friendly to visitors due to its very corrosive atmosphere.
Culair

Culair is slightly smaller and less massive than Collait, and has a bit of different coloring, but very similar banding. ( yea.. I know its actually Collait's texture upside down and partly color shifted). This could be due to areal microbes in its atmosphere. Its colors do somewhat remind kerbals of Jool back in the old system.
This gas giant does not have oxygen in its atmosphere, it is one of the more challenging planets of this system, high science rewards for surface samples on its surface, it’s tiny moon will offer little in gravity assists.
Neptheis

Neptheis is the only moon that directly orbits Culair. It is, strangely, identical to Xaxt in its size, mass, and gravity. it has similar coloring, however, Neptheis' high elevations is yellowish, compared to Xaxt's grayish highlands. Neptheis' terrain is much different, having only a few craters, and having a lot more mountains and flat areas.

Circumbinary Moons

Petrichor

Petrichor is a temperate desert world orbiting both Collait and Culair. This moon is 650km in radius, and has a surface gravity of 1.05g, and has a thin atmosphere that has little amounts of oxygen (barely enough for air breathing engines tho). There is no water on this moon, but very high amounts of silicates can be mined from its glassy plains biome. It makes up for its scarce resources in its views of the gas giants.
Termania

Termania is a temperate circumbinary moon. it is the second and furthest moon that orbits both gas giants. It is slightly smaller than Kerbin, at 550km, with 0.95g, but has a thicker atmosphere at 1.4atm, and is at a breezy 286K surface temperature, making it slightly warmer than Petrichor due to its thicker atmosphere. Termania also has red oceans, due to the recent appearance of oxygen producing microorganisms, which is making the iron in the oceans react and change into red iron oxide, giving its bloodlike appearance. There is only unicellular life on this moon, some of which sparsely populate the land around the shorelines, it is a nice place to go to. 

Temporalis and its moon

Spoiler

Temporalis

Temporalis is a temperate super-kerbin. Despite it being slightly larger than Eve, it is actually the second smallest main body in the Estrela Dobre system. Even its status as a main body is disputed as this planet actually shares an orbit with Collait and Culair, residing in the L5 point of the binary gas giant on its way around Estrela Dobre.
This planet has the strange appearance of a tidally locked world, despite being far from it. There is a massive ice sheet on one side of the planet, covering approximatley 1/6th of its surface in well over two kilometers thick of ice, hiding whatever terrain is below.

The appearance is caused by the planet's mysteriously perfect 1:1 resonance with the rotation of the contact binary, where the ice cap is only ever exposed to the much dimmer of the two stars at local noon. 

Temporalis is named such due to it slowly losing its water to its massive ice cap due to winds blowing high level clouds to it more than the ice can melt to supply rivers to the Epafi seas

Coralos

Coralos is the only moon orbiting Temporalis, and is slightly bigger than Minmus. This is about where the similarities between Coralos and Minmus ends. Coralos orbits in a very close, elliptical orbit around Temporalis, dangerously close to its rhoche limit. Due to this, Coralos has a ring of lava where it appears to be getting ripped in half due to Temporalis' enormous gravity well. Not only that, Coralos has some brownish snow on its highest peaks, which are rumored to be cinnamon flavored, the opposite of Minmus' rumored mint flavor. The views from the surface of this moon of Temporalis are simply breathtaking.

Hados and its moons

Spoiler

Hados

Hados is a large super-kerbin orbiting further than the binary gas giants, It is covered in Lava from a recent large impact, it has four lava filled impact craters, with the largest being about 500km in diameter. This planet will have high concentrations of water in its atmosphere, since the impact vaporized its ice. the other impact craters are from large chunks of debris falling back into the planet. i will add an expansive ring system, which will be nearly aligned with the plane of the planet's orbit (as if the largest crater is where the main impactor struck, creating rings). This planet has three moons; two shepherd moons and one distant icy moon that has lava filled craters. There is no water or ice in this system except for Ieros. There is, however, superheated steam that makes up most of Hados' atmosphere.
Basa

Basa is the closest moon to Hados, shaped more like a walnut due to ring material that has gathered around its equator. Despite this moon being the closest to Hados, it is still a decent distance from the surface, making it pretty challenging to reach this moon for refueling after launching from the surface.... if that is even possible with stock parts, which it likely is. This moon is one Hados' shepherd moons. Basa is quite warm for its distance from the stars due to the heat the planet gives off, and is at a pretty comfortable 293K

Altic

Altic is the second moon around Hados, and is the second shepherd moon. it is a similar shape and size to Basa. pretty much everything is similar except for it having fewer heavier elements.. The heat outputted by the parent planet heats this moon up to 231K 
Ieros

Ieros is the furthest moon from Hados. It is an ice world, in contrast to its parent planet's lava seas. This moon does, however, have four impact craters that have gone deep enough to create lava at the bottom. Ieros is 497km in radius (without craters, it would be 505km, craters are 9km deep), has an atmosphere, and has 0.67g surface gravity. it does have oxygen in its atmosphere from reactions, tho its atmosphere is consisted of water vapor, which would rapidly form into clouds since it is a bit too far for liquid water. Lorewise, the reason why it has lava is similar to Hados, the main impactor that struck Hados let out a large amount of debris, most of which crashed back into Hados, but some pieces escaped from low orbit and reached Ieros, where most got pulled in  and impacted. most of the impact craters on Leros got filled with warm slush that was created from the heat of the impacts. there are temporarily habitable regions on the moon, it is warmer than it was. Only four impactors were large enough to fully penetrate the ice, and launch away the slush/water to keep from filling in the crater and extinguishing the lava. the lava on this moon is nearly cooled, but is still dangerously hot. realistically, the lava craters would produce intense thermals, where very hot air meets very cold air, creating thunderstorms the moon has never seen in billions of years. There are high concentrations of ore inside of the craters.

Ichor and its moon
 

Spoiler

Ichor

Ichor is a frozen super-kerbin close to the edge of the Estrela Dobre system. its surface temperature is very low at just 114 Kelvin, and a thin atmosphere that barely extends 20 km above its surface.  This planet's atmosphere consists of primarily Nitrogen and Argon, and has trace amounts of oxygen in it, which is too thin for jet engine operation. This planet's moon, Anos, is much more forgiving as it has oxygen and is smaller.

Anos

Anos is Ichor's frozen moon. It has intense winds along its equatoral regions, which sweep up some pretty impressive dunes of hydrocarbons.

Glacios - A large, oblate ice giant orbiting at the very edge ofthe Estrela Dobre system. It is 3 times the mass of Jool and will have five moons orbiting it.
I decided to add Glacios due to discovering that the SMA of all of the planets in the system were for 1 solar luminousity instead of the actual system luminousity of around 0.76 solar luminousities. (Epafi is 0.76L while Adactus is 0.08L, but they constantly eclipse so it would average out to be around 0.76L)
Glacios is technically landable, but due to general bugginess, its not reccommended to land here as there are 'magnetic anomalies' which upon entering its atmosphere, is like hitting a brick wall and will vaporize your craft.
Glacios' moons - 
Pados  - a duna sized moon that orbits near its rings
Moon 2 - A kerbin sized moon that is covered in methane and ethane
Periculum - an unstable duna sized moon that is covered in methane ice, but also has lakes of liquid oxygen and a thin oxygen atmosphere. 
Also, in the lore, Glacios is the only place in the Estrela Dobre system not touched by civilization due to its remoteness and difficulty to spot, and due to the way Excelsior was captured during the formation of Estrela Dobre, large bodies beyond Glacios just.. dont exist, the dust was disrupted there and unable to clump into planets.

Next update will include these bodies (Scatters postponded to update after due to PQSCity being very difficult to work with)

Excelsior - 0.1 solar mass, 12% the size of Epafi, and has 0.00081 solar luminousities. Orbited by a tiny wormhole and four lifeless worlds - system inclination is approx. 1 degree
Calidum - eyeball planet dominated by desert, has a ring of water around its terminator, and a thin ice cap.
Canite  - devastated planet with a large portion of its surface blown off
there will be a noticeable gap between planets 2 and 3, where stuff screams 'there should be a planet here'
Periphial - a cold eyeball planet that is barely habitable, lost what little life it had in the great event, in a 1:4 resonance with planet 2
Neybiri - a strange, ice planet further out, has techno signatures, but no life. in a 3:2 resonance with planet 3.

Pythros - 1.7 solar mass, with 3x the luminousity, it is a white main sequence star with five planets - system inclination is 26 degrees (avg of all planets)
Prixos - a hot planet with planet of liquid lead orbiting quite close to Pythros
Kataigída (pronuctiation of 'storm' in greek) - a very stormy planet with two moons
Proxility - a habitable world that is 80% the size of Kerbin with just 0.8g and three moons that are around 110km radius! 
Bink and Bonk - a (nearly contact) binary rocky planet! Each planet is 790km radius, but spin so fast that the tips are at 0.6g.  The binary will have seven moons, (the first two are  Gongi and Dringo, a swamp and desert moon respectivley)


Arcturus - 1.9 solar masses with about 10x the luminousitiy, it is a bright, light blue main sequence star with six planets - system inclination is 2 degrees (tho planets 3-5 have 0 inclination)
Solis - the core of a gas giant with two asteroid moons, by far the most colorful planet in the sector with its surface coated in Bismuth with some seas of the metal
Tumidam- a puffy gas giant with two moons
Claudere - a planet between the sizes of Duna and Kerbin with one moon, covered partially in cities (name is 'close' in latin, as its orbit is the closest to Solaris
Solaris - a large planet with two moons covered entirely in cities 
Adurere - a kerbin-like planet with sections of its surface burnt to ashes with one moon and a few fragments in orbit, has some cities
Messis - a fairly large gas giant with five large moon, a couple of them having been terraformed for farming, a couple have mutant plants n stuff. name is latin for 'harvest'. the first moon is habenaro. there will be four other moons
planet 7 - a gas dwarf with three moons

(planned 5th system?? will not add in update due to lack of ideas of what to put around as it is a dying red giant being slowly sucked up by the black hole it orbits)
Longinquus - a distant planet around the center of this system

Bugfixes in the next update:
Fixed normal maps for all planets
Adjusted the inverseRotThresholdAltitude of various bodies to be higher than their pqs fades to solve the 'surface breaks apart' bug

Distances to:
Excelsior - ~44 kerbin au - takes half a year going 100km/s to arrive (by arriving, I mean literally smacking into the star)
Pythros - ~771 kerbin au - takes about 12 years going 100km/s
Arcturus - ~1800 kerbin au - takes about 27 years going 100km/s

The systems are close together to not require interstellar warp drives or crazy engines, but not so close that they illuminate each other. The only exception of this is Excelsior as it is technically a satellite system.

 

A few fun facts:
-You can sometimes see Oyst from the surface of Temporalis when they are at their closest to each other!
-You might sometimes see Hados from Temporalis due to its dust ring!
-(unreleased) The wormholes are tiny, and near the stars, so going too fast past them could result in not going through to the other system, or will send you flying in a very sub-optimal trajectory like straight into a star
-(unreleased) Excelsior is in an ideal position for a homann transfer despite its inclination! It will take about 60 years to get there though.. 
-Ichor's terrain goes sky high! literally! It goes to 19km, meaning theres just 1km between it and space! (next update will move the entire surface 900m downwards so the lowest point is much closer to the actual stated atm pressure)

 

To Do:
-Name bodies
-Add bodies
-Fix various atmospheres
-Add biomemaps

Misc. To Do list:
-Sciencedefs! flavor text for every single experiment in (nearly) every single situation!

-Add kerbal konstructs KSC on Termania

-Add custom part model to the H-1 hybrid electric scramjet

Recent update:
-Changed Temporalis' inclination from 3.6 to 7.6 degrees to make it easier to travel to planets without insane inclination changes
-Added a few more sciencedefs
-Change the SOIs of the contact binary stars to 500,000km.

 

REDOING FORUM PAGE

(I DO have access to ksp while at college, am working on planets! woo! tho PQSCity is such a pain)

DOWNLOAD

Github
Release v1.2

Spacedock
Release v1.2

This mod is available on CKAN
Credit for the gas giant textures goes to NathlessOne for creating them via gaseous giganticus

 

Dependencies:
Texturereplacer - adds the custom skybox, if not installed, you will just see the stock skybox
Kopernicus and its dependancies - planet packs require kopernicus
KopernicusExpansion - for the emissiveFX and wormholes (Glacios has a wormhole config part just for the effect of being right next to it)
KSPCommunityFixes (disable stock maneuver planner as the game freaks out over Temporalis being a trojan and far away objects)
In the next update, CTTP will be required as some bodies will use textures from there

Recommended mods:
(while it can be fun with just stock parts, these mods can greatly improve your experience)
Near future tech
Far future tech
Kerbal atomics (dont use a nuclear reactor on Hados, I am fairly sure it wont end well)
Procedural wings and parts (mainly reducing partcounts as rockets here tend to be quite big)

 

Known issues:
-Odd emissive clipping when next to lava
-Desert airfield spawning somewhere on Temporalis when making history DLC is installed (I dont have that DLC, so i didnt know that was going to happen)

As usual for planet packs, kopernicus is required for this mod to work.

IMPORTANT: the maneuver planner MUST be disabled for the mod the run properly or the game will die attempting to calculate a transfer to Collait-Culair barycenter, which has the exact same SMA as Temporalis (current homeworld)

the latest Kopernicus has disablefaraway colliders enabled by default so no need to go into its settings anymore

Liscense is All Rights Reserved! this will likely change to one where if i vanish for a while it can be modified but I dont know how to specify that and I am still working on this mod so it is still AAR

Edited September 11, 2023 by JcoolTheShipbuilder

[Spaceman.Spiff]

Kool Beans

[Minmus Taster]

EPIC!
Is any scatterer compatibilty planned?

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

1 hour ago, Minmus Taster said:

EPIC!
Is any scatterer compatibilty planned?

Hmm.. yes, I am planning for scatterer compatibility mostly for the sunflares, as the stock flares make them seem to merge a bit too much lol.

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Hmm... im thinking "OystD" should be a small desert-ish moon, where it is just dry, and has a thin atmosphere,
Doesnt that sound cool?
Hmm... in that case, then it will probably be a bit bigger than Duna lol.

[ssd21345]

cool flag in discord

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

On 2/4/2021 at 4:57 AM, ssd21345 said:

cool flag in discord

Thanks!

[DunaManiac]

Looks like this has a lot of potential so far, I particularly like Avon and Xaxt, but I have a few suggestions:

In case you're on Windows or Linux, I recommend using Gaseous-Giganticus for making gas giant textures. If you're not, one thing that would go a long way would be to get rid of the specularity (the white spot facing the sun) on the gas giant. The specularity makes it look more like a glass marble than an actual gas giant, which I had several problems with when doing my own planet pack.

Secondly, Correlate looks strange to me. I don't know if it has oceans, but if it does it's oceans look more like flat rock than an ocean. If you have an ocean, you should have the ocean as a separate map, with transparency for land. You should put that map in ScaledVersion, and the regular map for the land in the VertexColorMap section of PQS. Doing so causes specularity to only be on the ocean and ignore the land, making the oceans look more like oceans rather than flat rock. The color palette of Correlate also doesn't agree with me. As a general rule, vibrant colors always look bad on planets, so I think you should cut saturation in half and readjust the color palette to make it look a little better.

Third, Paxt looks to me what's called a "noiseball." A noiseball is a planet where it's only terrain is rolling hills. I have made a few of those, if you want to see them look at the older versions of the planets in my Japris Stellar Neighborhood. Now they all look much better, of course. Adding craters to Paxt's heightmap would go a long, long way in making the moon nicer.  OystD also suffers from this problem.

Finally, it looks like your gas giants need a normal map. Simply make a normal map using any normal map plugin out of a grayscaled version of your texture, and save that as your normal map in your config.

Also, is adding alien structures floating in the atmosphere possible? It is possible to add easter eggs, but I don't know if it's possible to add one floating in the atmosphere. Even if you did add one, it would be exceedingly hard to pinpoint one of these, assuming your alien structure is 1 km in size, and your planet is 8,000 km in radius, then the surface area of your planet would be 8.04*10^8 km, or your alien structure would take up 1/804000000  of your planet's surface area. I'm going to assume here because I don't know the maximum distance an easter egg is visible, but let's put that at 100 km.  The volume of a sphere with a radius of 100 km is 4.9*10^6 km, or 4190000 km. This sphere is roughly 0.5% of the planet's surface area. So that means that at any given time, you will be able to just barely see one of these 0.5% of the time, if , there are 10, that adds up to a poultry 5% of the time picking at random you will end up in at least one of these spheres. It is possible to randomly find these but the fact that most people just drop probes in the gas giant and do nothing else it's unlikely anyone will find it without seriously searching. What compounds the problem is that there is no easy way to go searching, especially since there is no surface to refuel at and no oxygenated atmosphere.

Edited February 5, 2021 by DunaManiac

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

22 minutes ago, DunaManiac said:

Looks like this has a lot of potential so far, I particularly like Avon and Xaxt, but I have a few suggestions:

In case you're on Windows or Linux, I recommend using Gaseous-Giganticus for making gas giant textures. If you're not, one thing that would go a long way would be to get rid of the specularity (the white spot facing the sun) on the gas giant. The specularity makes it look more like a glass marble than an actual gas giant, which I had several problems with when doing my own planet pack.

Secondly, Correlate looks strange to me. I don't know if it has oceans, but if it does it's oceans look more like flat rock than an ocean. If you have an ocean, you should have the ocean as a separate map, with transparency for land. You should put that map in ScaledVersion, and the regular map for the land in the VertexColorMap section of PQS. Doing so causes specularity to only be on the ocean and ignore the land, making the oceans look more like oceans rather than flat rock. The color palette of Correlate also doesn't agree with me. As a general rule, vibrant colors always look bad on planets, so I think you should cut saturation in half and readjust the color palette to make it look a little better.

Third, Paxt looks to me what's called a "noiseball." A noiseball is a planet where it's only terrain is rolling hills. I have made a few of those, if you want to see them look at the older versions of the planets in my Japris Stellar Neighborhood. Now they all look much better, of course. Adding craters to Paxt's heightmap would go a long, long way in making the moon nicer.  OystD also suffers from this problem.

Finally, it looks like your gas giants need a normal map. Simply make a normal map using any normal map plugin out of a grayscaled version of your texture, and save that as your normal map in your config.

Hmm.. ok, yes I will remove the specularity, but I think the bright spot is also somewhat due to the stars having no intensity curves. 
But yes I think removing specularity will help a lot.

hmmm.... ok yea I’m thinking less vibrant colors will look better on Correlae. 
Also, certain areas on that moon is still a little.. less detailed?, also I will add an atmorim to it.

Im planning on adding some ice lakes at the poles, but yes, some craters will make it look a lot better. Should some mountains be taller, and other areas be large flat areas too? Also, I’m going to make have a bit more color, and not just one color.

also, OystD does not actually have a proper height map as I had no idea what it should be for a while. I’m going to make a height map for it soon as I decided it is going to be a small desert moon.

hmm.. I’ll try that for the gas giants. Would this add a slight variation to the lighting? Or just make it look better?

[DunaManiac]

1 hour ago, JcoolTheShipbuilder said:

hmm.. I’ll try that for the gas giants. Would this add a slight variation to the lighting? Or just make it look better

I think what it does is to make the gas Giants have less of a bright spot, and lowers specularity, because I've seen planets have a bright spot artifact like that without a normal.

I don't believe that the stars not having intensity curves has anything to do with it, as I am working on something different, my star doesn't have an intensity curve and it doesn't have specularity.

Also, just a question, are the terminators misaligned on your gas Giants? By 90 degrees?

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

1 hour ago, DunaManiac said:

Also, just a question, are the terminators misaligned on your gas Giants? By 90 degrees?

Nope, no misaligned terminators. The gas giant terminators are facing the correct direction.

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Hmm... I just looked up how luminous a star that is 0.96 mass of the sun (or kerbol), and found the luminosity to be around 75% that of the sun, putting Oyst just inside the habitable zone, which makes it more than possible for ice lakes on Paxt to exist at the poles I think...

Is a star that is only 4% less massive than the sun actually about 25% dimmer?

[DunaManiac]

2 hours ago, JcoolTheShipbuilder said:

Hmm... I just looked up how luminous a star that is 0.96 mass of the sun (or kerbol), and found the luminosity to be around 75% that of the sun, putting Oyst just inside the habitable zone, which makes it more than possible for ice lakes on Paxt to exist at the poles I think...

Is a star that is only 4% less massive than the sun actually about 25% dimmer?

I'm not very knowledgeable about star luminosity, but I thought that using the L = M^3.5 equation that would put Luminosity at roughly 86%? Not as much as 75% but still substantial. If someone knows a little more about the subject correct me please.

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

55 minutes ago, DunaManiac said:

I'm not very knowledgeable about star luminosity, but I thought that using the L = M^3.5 equation that would put Luminosity at roughly 86%? Not as much as 75% but still substantial. If someone knows a little more about the subject correct me please.

Hmmmm..... ok that’s closer to what I was thinking lol... I was thinking it was about 90%.

Also, using the L=M^3.5 equation, the 0.6 solar mass star would have about a 0.16 solar luminosity, which... hmm... since the two stars are pretty much touching, would the luminosity be added when both are visible, and vary since they are eclipsing?

also, idk how they affect each other’s brightness since they contact.. wouldn’t their temps be closer together than if they are separate?

Also, since the planets orbit almost on the plane, and the stars eclipse from the planets POV, would the light they receive over time, be less than if they were in a polar orbit?

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

ok, hmm.. yes since they eclipse, the light level will be a little lower, but i will still have ice lakes on Paxt, and add flat areas all over... rn its just a noiseball...
Should Xaxt be a more... greyish color? (yes it does use the exact color heightmap as Avon, thats why ima change it)

[An Amongus Sussy Player]

On 2/3/2021 at 1:20 PM, JcoolTheShipbuilder said:

custom terrain textures to all of them

I have tried . . .
just use the stock stuff

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Just now, Weak Player said:

I have tried . . .
just use the stock stuff

ok

[An Amongus Sussy Player]

@JcoolTheShipbuilder It will automatically do that of the template
so use the appropriate template body

Edited May 10, 2021 by Weak Player

[wpetula]

Good work so far on your first planet pack! However, I do have some tips to improve the quality of your celestial bodies.

1. Try to avoid using noise for your height maps. Sometimes, noise is good,  but other times, it makes your celestial bodies samey and boring. I recommend creating height maps by stitching together google satellite images. There's a tutorial for that in the forum below.

 

2.  Gas giants textures are ridiculously hard to make by hand. I recommend using Gaseous Giganticus, a free, versatile program that does the hard work for you. The tutorial for that can be found in the forum post above.

3.  When working with textures, I recommend using 4096 x 2048 or greater. This helps make the celestial body look good up close and in ScaledSpace.

4.  Always focus on quality over quantity. I'm not saying that you aren't doing you're best, just make sure that each celestial body is unique and challenging. I would personally rather see a planet pack with two absolutely amazing celestial bodies than one with 20 celestial bodies that all look and feel the same. 

Hope you find this helpful, and good luck on your modding journey! 

Edited May 10, 2021 by wpetula
edit

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

37 minutes ago, wpetula said:

Good work so far on your first planet pack! However, I do have some tips to improve the quality of your celestial bodies.

1. Try to avoid using noise for your height maps. Sometimes, noise is good,  but other times, it makes your celestial bodies samey and boring. I recommend creating height maps by stitching together google satellite images. There's a tutorial for that in the forum below.

 

2.  Gas giants textures are ridiculously hard to make by hand. I recommend using Gaseous Giganticus, a free, versatile program that does the hard work for you. The tutorial for that can be found in the forum post above.

3.  When working with textures, I recommend using 4096 x 2048 or greater. This helps make the celestial body look good up close and in ScaledSpace.

4.  Always focus on quality over quantity. I'm not saying that you aren't doing you're best, just make sure that each celestial body is unique and challenging. I would personally rather see a planet pack with two absolutely amazing celestial bodies than one with 20 celestial bodies that all look and feel the same. 

Hope you find this helpful, and good luck on your modding journey! 

This is all good advice! Thanks!

I am indeed redoing Paxt’s terrain, and using a gradient for its slight oblateness and going to make a new non noise heightmap

 

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

I worked on it some more, and I used tangram heightmapper for Petrichor’s desert heightmap. I do need to add an atmorim to it.

[ffx]

8 hours ago, JcoolTheShipbuilder said:

I worked on it some more, and I used tangram heightmapper for Petrichor’s desert heightmap. I do need to add an atmorim to it.

ffx is happy

 

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Hmm… I’m thinking of redoing Avon’s heighmap, since it is currently very smooth… kinda.

its impact basin is ok, but can be a little smaller, and having craters inside it.

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Perhaps, the next moon, could be named... Termania?

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Is it normal to start thinking of names of the next system while creating a moon’s lore (and I haven’t done the next two planets and four moons of various sizes lol)?

 

im thinking that it’s normal… however it’s unlikely the other system will get to release before I’m going to college.