This is a step-by-step guide to editing this mod for your personal use. This can be used to merge two mods that edit the same file.

Following these steps will lead to having a local, editable copy of a mod downloaded from the workshop. If you are looking to merge two mods, you will need to know how to extract and look at both mods but only need to create a working local copy of the one you want to make the changes to.

1. Start Stellaris. You need to fetch some information available through the launcher.
   
2. Go to the Mods tab and click on "Mod tools" in the top right.
   
3. Click "Upload Mod" on the left.
   
4. Find the mods you want to edit. Click each one and write down the Mod ID for each. You will need this number later.
   
5. Closer the launcher and navigate to your steamapps\workshop\content folder. For me, this is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\workshop\content"
   
6. Here there should be one or more folders, each named with a number. These are the AppIDs of games, the Stellaris AppID is 281990. You should see that folder here.
   
7. Inside you fill find more folders with number names. These are the Mod IDs of the mods you have downloaded through the Steam Workshop for Stellaris. You wrote down the Mod IDs you care about earlier. (No Clustered Starts should be 687226658.)
   
8. In each folder is a zip file. Grab the zip files of the mods you want to edit and put them on your desktop or wherever you want to work on them.
   
9. Extract the zip files into individual folders, for example "noclusteredstarts.zip" into "noclusteredstarts".
   
10. You should now have one folder for each mod you want to edit. Within each folder you should find some number of folders, these will differ from mod to mod as it is the actual content of the mod. You will also find a file named "descriptor.mod"
    
11. Open "descriptor.mod" and find the line beginning with "archive". Remove this line and replace it with "path=mod/nameofmod" making sure to keep the name of the mod the same, it should be exactly whatever the zip file was called and the name of the folder you extracted it to.
    
12. Find the line beginning with "remote_file_id" and delete it. Save the file.
    
13. Navigate to the Stellaris folder in your Documents (for me, this is "C:\Users\X\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\", you should see a "mod" folder. Inside you should see a list of .mod files named ugc_#####.mod. The number is the ID of the mod, corresponding to the folders with the same IDs that you saw earlier.
    
14. Move the mod folder you extracted earlier to this folder. For example, if doing this with No Clustered Starts, there should now be a folder named "noclusteredstarts" next to all these .mod files.
    
15. Open the folder you just moved here and find "descriptor.mod". COPY this file, go back to the list of .mod files and paste "descriptor.mod" here.
    
16. Rename "descriptor.mod" to "nameofmod.mod". For No Clustered Starts, this should be "noclusteredstarts.mod". This should be the same as the name of the folder.
    
17. Find the mod you did this to in the Steam Workshop and unsubscribe to it. May be a good idea to favorite it, if you want to easily find it again.

If you did everything correctly, when you start Stellaris you should see the mod in the list of mods as if nothing happened. The difference is that now you can go into this mod folder you created and make any changes you like and have them instantly take effect, just requiring a restart of the game for you to see the changes in-game.

Now comes the task of actually editing the mod. For more information about No Clustered Starts, check the discussion thread Files changed by this mod. For other mods, check their respective workshop pages or dive in and do some detective work! Look below for steps on how to detective.

These steps will help you find vanilla Stellaris files and compare them to mods, for all your detective needs. Do not change any files in the Stellaris install directory, any and all changes should be made in the mods!

1. Navigate to the Stellaris installation directory. For me, that's "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Stellaris"
   
2. Some of the folders you see here may look familiar from looking at mods. No Clustered Starts, for example, makes changes in the "map" folder.
   
3. Look at the folder structure of the mod you want to compare with vanilla files and navigate to those files in the Stellaris installation. For No Clustered Starts, open "map". No Clustered Starts makes changes in both "galaxy" and "setup_scenarios".
   
4. For example, to compare the changes made to the "huge" starting scenario, open "map/setup_scenarios/huge.txt" in the noclusteredstarts mod folder as well as in the Stellaris installation folder. Look at them side by side and it should become clear. Opening a second mod's copy of this file you should see how this mod makes changes compared to vanilla Stellaris and compared to No Clustered Starts. Your goal will likely be to take the changes one of the mods makes and make those changes to the other mod, hopefully keeping both mods edits.

Hopefully these steps are accurate and thorough enough to get you started. If you have any questions or comments, they go below!