This mod functions by making two major changes in two places:

1. Changes the number of clusters to 1. The center of this cluster is set to 0 distance from the core, and the radius is set to cover almost all of the galaxy.
   
2. The ideal distance between empires is increased massively. This setting applies to all galaxy sizes and is set to be the same as the radius of a Huge galaxy. The result of this is that empires are spawned as far from one another as possible, since the ideal distance can rarely be met. The minumum distance is also increased to always give some space between empires.

The mod can also be found on github: https://github.com/Potawto/no-clustered-starts


Here is a complete list of all the files changed by this mod, accurate as of 26 Apri, 2017 (Patch 1.5 Banks). The fundamental changes detailed here remain the same in 2.0, but if you need help with any of this feel free to reach out to me.

Today, May 10, 2023, right after 3.8 (the Paragons DLC) came out, figured I'd update it again, seeing as they changed the name of a file a couple patches ago and I haven't touched this post in years! (base.txt -> galaxy_shapes.txt)

As of September 12, 2024, right after 3.13 (Vela/Cosmic Storms), this is all essentially up to date. There may be some number tweaks in the live mod, if the exact values are important to you I suggest double checking the downloaded mod files or the GitHub link.

This was a nice change as it made some settings settings scoped to each galaxy shape instead of global, specifically the distance between empires. In the past, some shapes had issues that resulted in compromises in the distance values. Now these values can be set separately for each shape. For best results each shape should be tested and the distance values tweaked for each. I have not done this yet.


(The "map" folder can be found in the Stellaris base install directory.)

• ./map/galaxy/galaxy_shapes.txt
  
• ./map/setup_scenarios/huge.txt
  
• ./map/setup_scenarios/large.txt
  
• ./map/setup_scenarios/medium.txt
  
• ./map/setup_scenarios/small.txt
  
• ./map/setup_scenarios/tiny.txt

Here are the changes made to each file:

./map/galaxy/galaxyshapes.txt


This change is essential. For each galaxy shape in the file, make the following change. The text after the # is just a comment and has no effect. The two pairs of numbers determines how far apart normal empires and fallen empires are spawned apart from each other.

ideal_sq_dist_between can be thought of as the maximum distance they are spawned apart, this basically means that if there is plenty of room the empires will be spread evenly up until this distance. The general idea of the mod is to make this number very big to get the game to keep pushing empires as far apart as possible.

This used to be much bigger than it is now, due to some game-breaking glitchy quirks like multiple empires spawning in the same system. This was tested a long time ago and I believe had something to do with some of the galaxy shapes. Now that these settings can be set for individual galaxy shapes separately, I think the numbers can be revisited and tweaked to get better results across the board: larger numbers for simpler galaxy shapes (like eliptical) and maybe mostly unchanged values for "tighter" galaxies (the ring shaped used to cause problems, for example).

to


./map/setup_scenarios/*.txt

A number of essential and nonessential changes are made in these files. There is one file for each of the 5 galaxy sizes. Some of the numbers are different, but the changes are otherwise the same. I will use medium.txt as an example.

NONESSENTIAL:
to

NONESSENTIAL:
to

This simply allows you to spawn more AI empires and fallen empires in your game by making the sliders during galaxy creation go to a bigger number. Does not have anything to do with spreading empires evenly, and trying to spawn too many of either can cause issues.

It was just a requested change a long time ago.


ESSENTIAL:
Lines 13 to 18 changed from
to

This is one of the key, magic changes. The game normally creates a number of clusters based on how many empires are spawning. For this mod to work, we set the number of clusters to 1 regardless of how many empires there are. We then set the cluster to be very big and centered on the center of the galaxy. All normal empires will now be part of this one cluster and their placement dictated not by clusters but by the distance between empires set in the galaxy_shapes.txt file above.

The cluster radius is another setting that has had many tweaks and eventually got a compromised value. If the cluster covered the entire galaxy, empires would constantly be spawned in the fringiest dead-end systems. This was exacerbated on some shapes.

To give empires further from the core more space, I set the cluster radius to to be about 20% shy of the galaxy radius. Systems are more sparse further from the core, so giving them a bit more space ends up fair-ish. This is another setting that is very tweakable but since this setting cannot be changed for specific shapes I think some compromise is inevitable.



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Please let me know if you know of a better way to do any of what this mod does. There is a lot of fog covering the details of modding, any tips would be welcome.