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ZT's Better Sol & Neighbourhood

A minor mod that slightly adjusts the Sol System and its direct stellar neighbourhood. Like my other mods, it was developed mainly for personal use. If anyone likes it, all the better, and constructive feedback is welcome. But personal use will remain its main purpose.

Update: after a _very_quick test this mod seems to work with Overlord & its patches. Let me know if there is any issue you find.


The mod only contains the Sol System planets, moons and asteroids included in Vanilla game. Juno is replaced with Hygiea, but no Planet Nine and no 12 moons around Saturn. Planetary orbits are radically changed. The Inner Solar System is small, while outside the Asteroid Belt distances grow quickly.


The distribution of deposits is changed and is meant to represent the realistic economic or scientific use of bodies in the Solar System. Classic sci-fi tropes are sometimes met, sometimes not (sorry Mars and Ganymede, there’s no point in mining from large gravity wells, and sorry Io, your flux tube is good for energy production, but just being molten doesn’t mean your minerals are also valuable…). Compared to vanilla, there are +1 minerals and +2 energy deposits, because resources are a lot more evenly distributed and require more stations (more energy upkeep) to be mined, and because the initial starting stations cover a bit less resources.

READ ME: the balance between vanilla and in-mod starting deposits is built on the assumption that there is a ‘Life Signs’ anomaly on the Jovian moon Europa. I could find no way to add an anomaly to the starting system. In observer mode you see it, in player mode you don’t. :( As a fix, I suggest to use the following console command on Europe at the game’s beginning:

add_anomaly life_frozen_category


When used with my ZT's Small Settlements, which allows you to colonize uninhabitable worlds (for a significant cost), unique planetary features are added to every celestial body in Sol once they are prepared for colonization. For those that can also be terraformed (also allowed by the aforementioned mod for rocky planets and moons), a separate set of uninhabitable and habitable planetary deposits have been created. I think they look quite cool, but you will tell me.


Starting mining and research stations also reflect on a realistic roadmap for human expansion in the Solar System. The first permanent outposts are on the Moon, on Mars, and the Asteroid Belt, and not around Neptune.


Earth's lights are fixed. They are based on the real-life distribution of human population, with additional lights added to Africa (further pop growth and economic development) and to colder regions (further immigration). Also, to avoid oddly Earth-shaped lights on alien planets, random lights have been put where Earth's oceans are. (The same feature is included in my ‘Earth 21’ mod.)


Eleven real-life star systems will appear in Sol’s proximity, each with their right type and (as far as we know) planetary systems. The distribution of habitable worlds is more realistic. Alpha Centauri and Sirius are kept for their cultural significance, but they are not very good colonization candidates. Instead, expect habitable worlds around Teegarden’s Star and Luyten’s Star. A slightly changed Trappsit system also spawns when more than one habitable worlds are guaranteed. This amount of habitable worlds would be a little OP for a starting neighbourhood, so none of the three aforementioned systems have continental world in them.

This is already too many stars from Sol’s 50 ly bubble, so Procyon and Barnard’s Star have been replaced with a couple other, more distant (few hundred to few thousand ly), but very luminous and/or culturally significant stars (Betelgeuse, Antares, Rigel, Vega…).


Similar to my other mods (Earth 21 and Small Settlements), this mod was originally built for my personal RP use. It may not always be the best modding work, and constructive feedback is always welcome. If anyone likes it, I am delighted, but its main purpose will remain my own entertainment.


I use the mod together with the following ones without problem:

• Pode’s ‘Pre-FTL Players’
  
• Splodgenic’s ‘Designable Civilian Ships’
  
• Gaia’s ‘Realistic Star Names’
  
• CryoStasis’ ‘Interstellar OST’
  
• Cybershaman’s Imperium Galactica 2 OST
  
• my own ‘Better Sol & Neighbourhood’
  
• my own ‘Small Settlements’
  
• and sometimes with Okami’s ‘Human Variety’ or Wick’s ‘Wick’s: Humans’.

Visual mods should also not cause issues.

• ZT's Earth 21
  
• ZT's Earth 21 Addendum
  
• ZT's Small Settlements
  
• ZT's True Aliens