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Mars Before And After Citiy Lights+TUTORIAL!

Mars before and after city lights. If you came for the tutorial, scroll down.


It's very rare to find planets with cities on them. For me it's about a 1/400-600 chance to finding at least one or two. Lately, I figured out a new, more Updated way to do this. For anyone else that wants to do this to their own planets, there are rules.

1.The planet you want to make with cities has to have a stable temperature for life.(15 degrees C Would be good.) It does not need an atmosphere, and believe me, i tried with Mars. Mars needed a temp of 15 C and did not need water or an atmosphere.

2. If it does not work, add an atmosphere and/or water. This regularly happens with moons. While trying to give Io, a moon of Jupiter, Cities, It did not work all on its own. I had to add water, a stable temperature, an atmosphere, and a bigger mass. Moons like Io are too small to hold onto temperature, atmosphere, and water, etc. Increasing the mass to about 5.89 moons would do the trick.

3. Capitalization and spelling matter. One wrong letter or capitalization would mess the whole script.

Onto the tutorial.

First, you must download a file opener. Something that can open archives. WinRAR or 7zip would do. Next(this is optional), you can download a program called Notepad++. This will help you read the script of the planet better.

Now that you have that, you'll need a planet that you have saved before. When the planet is ready to be saved after giving it the requirements it needs, (READ RULES) , you can save. Making its name something easy to remember would help when looking for the file.

Next, you need to find the Universe Sandbox folder that holds the files. If you're on PC, what I recommend doing i"
s opening your documents and look for, "Universe Sandbox." If there is a folder called Universe Sandbox, open it, click bodies, and those will be your saved Planets. Once you find the planet's script, right click it, and If you have 7zip like me, You hover over 7zip and open archive. If you have WinRAR, right click and click the Open Archive button with a WinRAR icon next to it. You should see a few things; body.json, thumbnail.png, and version.ini. double click body.json to open it. If you opened it with Notepad++, you'll see there are numbers on the side. That's one line of code. scroll down to line 48(MAY NOT BE THE SAME FOR EVERYONE, BUT IT WILL BE FOR ANYONE ON NOTEPAD++). You'll see: EmissiveMapSource: " ". In between the two quotation marks, you'll need to add this text EXACTLY how it is spelled, how it is capitalized, etc.

Textures/planet_cities
(Feel free to copy and paste this if you need to, It'll still work.)

Then file<Save, and Exit out of it. Keep open the file that holds the Body.json, thumbnail.png, and version.ini In it. You'll see a notification that the file has been modified, and if you want to add it in. Click yes, and Bam! You should have lights on your city once you place it down.

If this does not work, please tell me. You may have done something wrong before saving the planet.

I know this simulation was supposed to be about Mars Before and After city lights but I decided to add a tutorial in for anyone that's wondering how people do this. Someone named Quarior https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/id/Quarior (check out his posts to the workshop, they're great!) also had a method, but used Earth's Own lights which made the planets look weird, so I showed him this method, and now he uses it. Hopefully you'll be able to do this too!

Enjoy!

-BlueMarble