Sectors Without Number: Additional Points of Interest
Hello all,
Your sector is about to become quite a bit more populated as all of the additional points of interest from the newly released revised edition have been added into the generator. If you’ve already generated your sector, you can easily go in and begin adding them by hand.
All of this and more is now live over at sectorswithoutnumber.com.
New Sidebar Design
If you haven’t visited the website in the last month, a large update was released that changed a lot of things under the hood. The biggest visible change was to the sidebar where the entity type (sector, system, and planet) is specified in the header. Now you know exactly what you’re looking at.
When you enter edit mode on any entity in the sidebar, it switches into text inputs/dropdown elements instead of opening up a modal that blocks the rest of the view.
Now that additional points of interest have been introduced, each of the entity groups have a way to toggle their open state so you can see only the things that mean the most to you at any given point. This functionality is available in the normal and edit states of the sidebar.
Additional Points of Interest
The traditional sector generation setup is great. It gives you planets to explore and world tags to give flavor to those planets. In the freshly minted revised edition, additional points of interest were added to fill out your sector.
There are now two entities that can exist on your sector. A system as before and a black hole. The photo above shows asteroid belts and deep space stations at the top level as well but spike drives are only able to navigate to stars and black holes so those entities have been moved under a system. Underneath each of these entities are their children. There is a relationship between entities so that moon bases can’t exist around a black hole for example. That relationship is defined below.
Now that multiple different types of entities can exist at a point in the sector, the create entity modal that opens when you click and hold on an empty hex has changed. You can select the entity type and decide what children you’d like to add to it.
If you’re a traditionalist, do not fear. In the customization section is a toggle to turn off additional points of interest in the generator.
Sectors Without Number Roadmap
Here we are. The most exciting section of the article. What comes next.
- Game Master & Player Views: I know this has been on the backlog for a while. This is the next feature that will be added.
- Notes: A way to take notes on any entity, save, and share. Hidden game master notes will be available with the game master vs player views feature.
- Alien & Faction Generation: A major part of Stars Without Number are the aliens and factions that can exist throughout your sector.
- Custom Tags, Attributes, and Entire Entities: The rewrite that occurred at the beginning of the year was done in such a way to facilitate adding custom items into the generator. Prepare your bodies.
As always, if you run into any problems or have any suggestions for new features, feel free to message me on reddit at /u/mpigsley or directly at mpigsley@gmail.com.
Deprecation Notices
If you are one of the few that keeps your sectors saved locally, I’m sad to say that feature will be going away very shortly. When the time comes, you’ll be able to sign up and sync your local sectors but not persist any more local changes.
You have been able to freely sync any number of sectors on your account. Very soon accounts will be capped at a maximum number of 3 synced sectors. Server costs have increased dramatically with all the new users and data flowing into Sectors Without Number.
Finally, if you saved a sector to your account last year and haven’t logged in since then, you’ll need to login to re-sync your sector (this will occur automatically upon logging in). If you don’t do this within the next few months your sector could be lost.
