Again, you'll have to excuse me if I'm going about asking this in the wrong way - I have done a search in the questions thread but I couldn't find anything (though it is a long thread and my search terms may not have been good enough).

I spent some of yesterday dabbling with the lua file for Sol, changing names of things, which worked a treat (I have a particular setting I use in stories I write, and I wanted to see if I could make Pioneer reflect it just for my own entertainment). I also added one surface starport on Earth, which worked fine. Having created the Sol system I wanted I got a bit overambitious and started messing around with neighbouring systems. Epsilon Eridani was the obvious first choice, because it already has a defined lua file and again it was just a matter of changing names.

But then I decided to create a new file and apply it to an existing star; set the position, change the star's name, define a couple of planets, give one a moon, and put a surface base down. I'm not a programmer, so I took baby steps: add one thing at a time, see if it works, then go back and add another. And to my surprise it did work - for a while. I got my star; I got my innermost planet; my next planet appeared; then my third - a gas giant; then the gas giant's single moon. And then I added the surface base and got some spectacular big red screens of doom when trying to start the game.

It was no-one's fault but mine: I was meddling in the affairs of wizards, and that's never a good move. I'm going to keep meddling, though, and I was wondering about something that I thought you true wizards might consider:

As I understand it, custom systems are those defined in specific lua files, such as Sol and EpsErid. Others are positioned by the list files (local_stars and bright_stars), but their actual contents are procedurally generated from a seed once the player enters those systems. (I may have that completely wrong, and I'm not sure whether inhabited systems all have to have a custom file somewhere defining spaceports and such - if so I can't find many of them.)

My first question, then, is this: I wondered if it might be possible to add a routine whereby the game can, on request, take the current, procedurally generated system and write out and save a lua file for it, so that that (reliable) file can then be edited later? I know the point of procedural generation is to save on disk space, and not for one minute am I suggesting it'd be a great idea to have billions upon billions of custom files - but for those like me who love editing superficial details, it'd be great to be able to tweak a little bit here and there and make the universe feel like our own. <img src=' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//king2.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

My second question is a bit more trivial. One of the moons I created in my custom system was supposed to be Earth-like (I had a sort of Endor affair in mind). I thought it would be a reasonable idea to take many of Earth's values and translate them over to my moon - but when I flew by it I found a bright red-orange glowing ball with a massively thick atmosphere. Are there other controls somewhere that I need to be using to set appearance elements, like colours and such?

Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the amount of text...