Sectors Without Number: Custom Tags & Faction Manager
It’s been a while! First up, let’s review the latest feature, Custom Tags. Afterword, we’ll dive into the faction manager. It has been live for over a year, but is a little-used part of Sectors Without Number, so I thought it best to review its capabilities.
Custom Tags
One of the earliest requests I received upon launching the site was the ability to create custom world tags. It was a challenging problem, but one that had to be done correctly, as this is the first piece of data shared across each of your sectors.
There are two ways to begin managing your custom tags once you have logged in. The first is to go into the sector generation configuration view and select “Manage” next to the “Use Custom Tags” toggle. The second is to select the gear icon from any entity tag header at the bottom of the details sidebar. Each of these will open a new custom tag configuration modal where you can manage all the tags available to you and to your sectors.
A significant change in this branch will allow these custom tags to be associated with any entity. Do you want to create a grouping of tags for every generated moon in your sector? You can do that. Space stations? You can definitely do that. You may specify in the form whether or not a custom tag is associated with one or more entity types.
This is the most straightforward implementation of custom tags that I could build, allowing for the possibility of new features; import/export, filter by entity type, edit/disable core world tags, and more. Feedback on how this feature could be improved would be helpful going forward.
Faction Manager
You’ll find the faction manager hidden behind the element icon in the left sidebar. From here, you’ll be able to create your factions with a particular force/cunning/wealth rating, homeworld, goals, tags, and more. Each faction may also have assets located on any location throughout your sector.
A faction color is randomly assigned upon creation but may be changed at any time. The faction color is essential as an automatic faction layer is created in the main sector view. This allows you to see, at a glance, where each faction is located. Additionally, any entity that has a faction or asset on it will show that information in the attributes section of the details sidebar.
It is important to note that currently, the faction list, automatic layer, hex hover state, and links in the sidebar attributes section are all hidden from players. This functionality may change in the future.
Odds & Ends
Although development has slowed in the last year, there have still been a handful of notable features added.
Sector Deletion
Mistakes happen, and sectors that you’ve put so much hard work into could become accidentally deleted. Now, when a sector is deleted, it soft-deletes on the back-end. Your sector is hidden but not gone, and if you need to retrieve it for any reason, please contact me, and we can get it back.
Mobile Devices
When viewing Sectors Without Number on a mobile device, the sidebar now expands to fill the view so you can navigate through your sector and manage your entities.
Attribute Consistency
Occupation & Situation dropdowns have allowed custom content for quite a while, but there were three entities unique to Sectors Without Number that never got those options. Black Holes, Systems, and Moons now allow custom occupations and situations.
Multiple Layers
Multiple sector layers can now be selected at once! Want to see your faction layer combined with your alien menace layer? That might be important…
Closing Thoughts
I want to say thank you all for the positive feedback and continued excitement . It’s been a joy working on the website and interacting with the community. Your financial support through Patreon has helped keep the website up and running for many months now. I couldn’t do it without you all. Thank you!!!
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 on discord at warpig#9483.
