World building tools: Environmental Territories

I think in terms of world building, SE1 had very limited options outside of purely procedural settings. Some (very popular) mods over the years have attempted to address this, such as "SEWorldGenPlugin" by thorwin99, but also "Procedural World" by Equinox and "Modular Encounter Systems" by MeridiusIX. These mods attempted to make the open sandbox world of Space Engineers feel more deliberate, meaningfully populated, unique and tried turning it into a "living breathing universe" in a sense. These mods could indeed make the gameplay feel like it had purpose and gave creators endless options of building a uniquely playable universe that made the game come alive and provide truly endless replayability.

Here is a simple but effective strategy as to the way the SE2 base game can be addressed to have the same if not more control over the generated gameplay experience (single and multiplayer).

It also addresses variety in the visual scenery that will enable the game to offset itself from the typical standard SE skybox and dull grey atmosphere and turn it into an ever changing landscape of breathtaking galactic scenery that we have come to expect of open world space games.

My suggestion is to have the possibility of making specifically shaped 3D "territories" or "zones" in space through the sandbox file. These "territories" would have their own adjustable asteroid generation, NPC spawn conditions and also environment settings (lighting, sun properties, perhaps even fog).

These territories could have different shapes, e.g. cylinder, sphere, box, pyramid, diamond and have the option to show gps location. For instance, a cylindrical territory with a large diameter and small height at a certain angle could be use to generate an asteroid ring around a planet (the asteroids would generate in the disk that represented the flattened cylinder and only spawn at a certain distance from the planet, causing a ring to form naturally). Also these territories could be used to generate the "volumetric gas clouds" that we have seen in Star Citizen, using environment variables to make the area have a different look and feel, e.g. color, less sunlight, perhaps particles or fog and a high asteroid density with specific voxelmaps and resources that spawned in the asteroids. On top of that, the territories can be used as conditions for certain NPCs to spawn, such as a specific faction or just a stronger type of NPCs.

The territories would be able to be used in lots of different ways to meaningfully populate the open world and turn it into a unqiue and engaging gameplay experience.

I think it would add some much needed variety to the game's original atmosphere and it could even result into some beautiful screenshots to better represent the tone of the game to new players.

basically going from this:

to this: