2D Galaxy with Circles For Stellaris

2D Galaxy with Circles For Stellaris

I am a long time subscriber of the ‘2D Galaxy’ mod by dskod1. The little tweak to just two code lines made the galaxy map for me much more convenient both to play with and look at. 3600 fellow subscribers agree.

However, the unadjusted appearance of the hexagons around the stars always bothered me. In the vanilla 3D enviroment the hexagons have the purpose to A) highlight the actual position of the stars on the plane of the map and B) tell you by their colors to which empires the stars belong. But in the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod A) is no longer needed and B) is often obstructed by overlap with the star.

So the options are either to make the hexagons functional again or get rid of them for good. I offer this mod in three flavors so you can get what you prefer.

In this flavor the hexagons are increased in size and replaced by a circle so they no longer overlap with the stars. This way it becomes easier to quickly recognize the ownership of a star than with either the unmodded 3D galaxy or the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod.
To illustrate this point please take a look at the example star on the screenshot:

In the vanilla 3D galaxy the star actually appears at first glance to be part of the blue empire while the more telling red hexagon is obstracted by the resource icons.
In the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod the star itself appears right on the border (where it actually is) but it still needs a closer look to determine ownership because the small colored hexagon is now obstructed by the star itself.
Only with this mod (or with the large hexagon flavor) you can recognize the ownership at a glance by the color of the large circle.

Why circles? Well, Stellaris is neither a hex grid board game nor does if feature gigantic space bees building honeycombs around stars. Much more natural seems a circle as as resemblance to an orbit which also makes the galaxy map look more like a zoomed out version of the system view. If you think otherwise, you can try the flavor with the good old hexagonal shape: 2D Galaxy with Large Hexagons

As a bonus this makes stars also far easier to distinguish from stars on the galaxy background image than with the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod in warp and wormhole enviroments. If want to get rid of this problem completely for an even clearer and more functional look I recommend my Black Galaxy Background mod.

Another bonus for changing from the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod is that you will no longer get the outdated warning as I will try to keep up the version number up to date (it’s just changing one value for the mod author).

This is a purely graphical modification and can in my experience be en- or disabled in any ongoing game (I am not sure why the author of the original 2D mod claims otherwise). There should be no compability issues with any other mods as long they don’t modifiy the same speficic code lines for height of stars and size/shape of the hexagons. It is ironman and achievement compatible.

In theory distances should become a little smaller if your force the stars in a 2D plane but I couldn’t find any actual gameplay effect in my tests. So I suspect Stellaris only uses the X and Y coordinates for this and the whole 3D thing is just visual fluff.

The mod’s other flavors:

Do you prefer the good old hexagon shape but in functional size? Here is the flavor for you: 2D Galaxy with Large Hexagons.

But maybe you prefer an even cleaner look for your galaxy without the functional (but arguably unaesthetic) hexagons/circles? Get rid of them altogether with this flavor: 2D Galaxy without Hexagons.