New Star Map for the site

Ghastly Knight Ghastly Knight Admin | Freestar Collective Freestar Collective Trailblazer Surveyor
Site News (edited) 129 views

Starfield star map that joins user photos, mods, and more with 2K+ locations

So I'm excited to reveal the new star map I've been working on for the site. You can visit it anytime on desktop or mobile using the Map link in the header/menu.

With it, I had a few goals that I'm aiming to achieve:

Explore Random Locations

I read once that we tend to discover the same things more often because, as players, we have patterns we go through while playing the game. If you were able to diverge from that pattern, you are more likely to find new things to discover. With that in mind, I added the Explore button in the upper right on the map. It will help you randomly pick a location to visit. You can filter the choices down to those more suitable for outposts if you like.

Attach Photos and Forum Posts to Locations

I've built in a way to select multiple locations on game photos you add to the site. When you do that, those photos will be available in a strip along the bottom of the star map when you drill down to those locations. Check out @Mars as an example where I've begun linking my photos from Cydonia to that location.

Attach Mods to Locations

I've updated the site so that as it indexing new creations/mods, it will detect the mention of locations and link any it finds together. One of my hopes with this is that it will eventually show how creations have continued to fill in the vast universe in Starfield. Other sites like Inara and StarfieldDB have star maps and they excel in different ways, but mapping out locations to creations is something I had a unique opportunity to do on this site.

Of course, it will be a WIP for awhile. In testing, I had to exclude creations that fall under Gear, Apparel, or Skins categories because they often mentioned locations in a context that made no sense to surface on a star map. However, there are ship mods that do similar things. I'm still experimenting with where to draw that line. Another example of something caught in testing was building in an exception for mods that mention Shinya Voss and them showing up on the moon, Voss.

I welcome any feedback anyone wants to share - whether it's issues you spot or suggestions to improve things.

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Dyeritso Dyeritso Valued Contributor Vanguard Scout
(edited)

I love this feature already. Will have to update some older pictures' locations eventually, but it's already proving to be a handy addition.
Thanks for adding it! 😁

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Ghastly Knight Ghastly Knight Admin Trailblazer Surveyor OP
(edited)

in reply to Dyeritso

That would be great if you can go back and add some locations to your images! I've gone through all of mine that I uploaded and I've added several. Systems like those below now have a decent photos strip below them:

Which I now see on Sol some of your shots appearing there. 😃

One of my goals will be to start filling in some photos on every system.

More Recent Map Updates

  1. I added a Find in Galaxy button on every system view to help spotlight where a system appears in the larger galaxy view. When you click on it, you'll zoom back out to the galaxy view and the system you were in will pulse for a few seconds.
  2. Added breadcrumb in upper right when you go down into any system/location.
  3. When you first visit the map and see the galaxy view, it will now list how many photos each system has on the site.
  4. Fixed some locations (Londinion was under Kryx) and mod mappings.
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kinesthesia kinesthesia Valued Contributor Mod Author Vanguard
(edited)

Wow; it's like geotagging but in-game. The search for speciific collectibles and easter eggs would come to mind with this. (Like the ducks, plushies and WIlby's 😄) Thanks GK!

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