Planet modding guides

Planets are a bigger deal than parts. A part has to look right in the VAB and behave on a rocket. A world has to hold up upon scrutiny, from a dot on the map to a patch of dirt under your rover's wheels. That sounds intimidating. It mostly isn't: the work is just spread across more places than you'd expect, and the point of this guide is to tell you which place you're in.

Most of what defines a world is numbers and images. The numbers live in a body definition: radius, gravity, rotation, axial tilt, where the atmosphere stops, whether there's an ocean and how salty it is to crash into. The images are maps (height, biome, science region, resource) painted in whatever editor you already like, then handed to the SDK in Unity, which bakes them into the lookup tables and data assets the game reads at runtime.

A body that your mod ships loads only in campaigns that have your mod on. A player gets your bodies in a campaign in one of two ways:

• The player turns your mod on.

• The player selects a campaign pack that includes your mod.

A body can belong to one of the other features of your mod. In that case, set that feature in the Features section of the General tab of the planet inspector. The Redux bodies belong to the Ksp2Redux:Galaxy feature. A pack that replaces the full galaxy does not include that feature, and it names its own galaxy.

A word on what's here: this guide is being written one chapter at a time, and so far only the chapter on resource maps is finished. The rest is on the way, coming to you a million miles an hour.