How to use StellarMaps without Stellaris installed

[canonimo]

Hey man, I'm a writer currently looking for software to worldbuild my new project and I fell in love when I saw the screen captures of yoy StellarMaps However, I think I made a mistake when installing it. I have two drives, I installed it on one yet all the programfiles got saved in the main C: drive and now every time I open the program I get this image:

I'm not exactly sure how to solve it, I tried opening several folders of the : "C:\Users\Usuario\AppData\Local\games.michaelmakes.stellarmaps" file but nothing seems to work. To give you full context I've never played Stellaris nor have i worked with any ilustration software I kinda just wanted to use your software standalone. I there is anything you can do to help me, thankyou.

[MichaelMakesGames]

Hey, I'm afraid this isn't really built for your use-case. This app visualizes maps from Stellaris saves, and to do so loads some data from a Stellaris install. The editing options let you customize the appearance of that map, but not the underlying data. For example, you can change the border colors, but you can't change who controls a solar systems or create new solar systems.

You could potentially use this still, but it will require a few steps:

• First off, you need Stellaris install data
  • Easiest way to do this is to buy Stellaris on Steam. It is currently on sale for 80% off I misread; it is not on sale currently
  • Alternatively, you build some fake data yourself. You'll need color and loc data. I can help out if you decide to do this
• Next you need a Stellaris save file
  • Easiest way to do this, start a game of Stellaris
  • To "fill out" the galaxy, you could run the game in observer mode for a while, using the observe command of the built in command console
  • Next easiest, find a save file online (many people attach save files to bug reports) and put it in the expected location (C:\Users\Usuario\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\save games\<any name you want>\<file name>.sav)
• This should be a enough to get the application working, but again, you can only change the styles, not the underlying data. To do that, you need to edit the save externally. You have a few options (in order of easiest to hardest, but most powerful):
  • You can use Nro's Galaxy Editor to edit the locations of stars
  • If you buy Stellaris, you can use in-game console commands then save the game
  • You can use the save editing features of Pdx Unlimiter
  • You can manually edit the file

In the future, I'll probably make this usable in a "demo" mode if you don't have Stellaris installed, but that's not high priority. I also might add some save/map-editing features in the future, but that's even lower priority.

[MichaelMakesGames]

Also, if you don't mind sharing, how did you find this project?

[canonimo]

Hi @MichaelMakesGames thanks for the fast reply!. To answer and put and end to the issue, I can't buy the game since I'm currently very tight on budget (venezuelan kind of tight) plus don't even have a GPU on my pc. So let's close this issue here, I'll use some other software, thanks anyways and best of lucks with this man it looks great.

And to answer your other question regarding how I found out, I searched in google how to create a stellar map for space opera and some link in reddit lead me to this page and that took me to your github.

Again, thanks a lot for the reply, cool project and nothing but the best for you tootles

[MichaelMakesGames]

Yeah, this would be pretty troublesome to use without Stellaris

Look into SVG editors. That is the underlying image format used in this application. It is well-suited for this style. Boxy SVG is free and usable right in your web browser. Inkscape is also free, but has a more complicated interface.

[canonimo]

Cool man, I already started to learn inkscape