Official News page 4

PUTTING IN A SECOND PLANET

by Hazed

If you've made it all the way to Magnate without taking advantage of the facility to add new planets to your system - either a new Agri planet at Mogul or a bio planet at Gengineer - you need to come up with a new world pronto, otherwise you won't be able to promote to Plutocrat.

To add another planet to your system, you design the new planet just like you did the first one, or use the ground map from one of the stock planets (you can download them here). You don't need the stock space map since you already have some space in your system - more about that in a moment. The new planet should have an exchange, and it can also have a hospital/insurance office, although if players die anywhere in your system they will always be transported to the hospital that is on the planet that is loaded last.

You need to amend your space map, adding an orbit location for the new world somewhere on the map, and then add that orbit location number to the map information for the new planet map. When adding the orbit to your space map, you are advised to put it reasonably close to your first planet. Even though you can use the remote trading controls to fiddle with your planets' economies, you are still going to spend a lot of your time commuting between the two. Remember to set the space property on the new orbit location.

Don't forget to check over the rest of the space locations, to make sure that mention of the new planet and its location is made somewhere - otherwise players won't be able to find it easily!

There's a couple of things you need to know when submitting a new planet:

• You should only submit one new planet at a time. You might decide that if you're going to add one new planet you might as well go the whole hog and add your bio planet too. Fine, but you have to do it in two stages - set up an orbit location for the agri planet, and submit the files for the new planet. Then once the planet has been linked into the game, set up the orbit loc for the bio planet, and submit the files for that planet.
• Don't make changes to your existing planet at the same time. If you want to change files that are already in the game, you need to do it separately - submit the files for the new planet, wait till it's linked, then submit the files for the changes to the existing planet.

The reason for these two prohibitions is that putting a new planet into the game is very complicated - there's a whole lot of files that have to be updated, and permissions that have to be set right, and new files created. So Alan has written some scripts that automate the process, and there's no facility in those scripts to do more than one planet at a time, or to chuck in replacement files.

When you're ready, send in the space map and the new planet files, giving the system name, the new planet name (which obviously must be different from the original planet) and your character name.

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