2D Galaxy with Large Hexagons
I used to be a long time subscriber of the ‘2D Galaxy’ mod by dskod1. The little tweak to just two code lines made the galaxy map for me much more convenient both to play with and look at. About 3600 fellow subscribers agreed.
However, the unadjusted appearance of the hexagons around the stars always bothered me. In the vanilla 3D enviroment the hexagons have the purpose to A) highlight the actual position of the stars on the plane of the map and B) tell you by their colors to which empires the stars belong. But in the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod A) is no longer needed and B) is often obstructed by overlap with the star.
So the options are either to make the hexagons functional again or get rid of them for good. I offer this mod in three flavors so you can get what you prefer.
My personal favorite is this ‘2D Galaxy with Large Hexagons’ flavor where the hexagons no longer overlap with the stars. This way it becomes easier to quickly recognize the ownership of a border star than with either the unmodded 3D galaxy or the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod.
To illustrate this point please take a look at the example star on the screenshot:
In the vanilla 3D galaxy the star actually appears at first glance to be part of the blue empire while the more telling red color of the hexagon is obstracted by the resource icons.
In the classic ‘2D Galaxy’ mod the star itself appears right on the border (where it actually is) but it still needs a closer look to determine ownership because the small colored hexagon is now obstructed by the star itself.
Only with this mod you can recognize the ownership at a glance by the color of the large hexagon.
As a bonus this makes stars also far easier to distinguish from stars on the galaxy background image than with the original ‘2D Galaxy’ mod in warp and wormhole games. If want to get rid of this problem completely for an even clearer and more functional look I recommend my Black Galaxy Background mod.
This is a purely graphical modification and can in my experience be en- or disabled in any ongoing game. There should be no compability issues with any other mods as long they don’t modifiy the same speficic code lines for height of stars and size/shape of the hexagons.
In theory distances should become a little smaller if your force the stars in a 2D plane but I couldn’t find any actual gameplay effect in my tests. So I suspect Stellaris only uses the X and Y coordinates for this and the whole 3D thing is just visual fluff. Despite not touching gameplay the mod doesn’t seem to be ironman or achievement compatible.
The mod’s other flavors:
Maybe you ask yourself why it actually needs to be hexagons in the first place? Stellaris is neither a hex grid board game nor does if feature gigantic space bees building honeycombs around stars. Much more natural seems a circle as as resemblance to an orbit which also makes the galaxy map look more like a zoomed out version of the system view. If you think this way you can try the flavor 2D Galaxy with Circles.
But maybe you prefer an even cleaner look for your galaxy without the functional (but arguably unaesthetic) hexagons/circles? Get rid of them altogether with this flavor: 2D Galaxy without Hexagons.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
