Strategic Zoom

Before the space age expansion, you could navigate the entire map just through zooming far out and then zooming back in to the location of interest. This mod brings back that functionality, by allowing you to zoom out from a planet all the way to space. Then you can hover any planet or ship and zoom back in, seamlessly transitioning to your destination.

To make this happen, I had to recreate the entire vanilla space map as a new custom surface. The planets, the ships, route drawing, sun animations, hover panels, almost everything is recreated from scratch. During this recreation, I took the liberty to include some small adjustments, to improve the new star map beyond its vanilla original. This includes:
- Animated sun with various visual effects
- Docked ships displayed hovering in orbit around a planet
- Ships rendered as their actual shape with a thruster plume during travel
- Star/Nebula background picture

Most of the effects can be toggled in the mod settings.

Disclaimer: 100% Vibe Coded.