Here, I will give you what you need to start off your brand new modding career for the Us2 workshop.

First, you need the right archive opener. Personally, I recommend 7-Zip as it is easy to use, and will be more easy to use. WinRAR works as well, but it's personally not my favorite.

Now, all you will need to do is locate your Universe Sandbox folder. When you open your file explorer, on the right there should be a folder called "Documents." If you already have Universe Sandbox 2 installed, one of the first folders you will see will be called "Universe Sandbox 2."

This folder contains most of the stuff you see in the game. You have many options to choose from, such as, "Bodies, Images, Simulations, " so-on. We should rather focus on bodies as that is where you'll be doing most of your editing.

The bodies folder is where all of your saved planets, stars, and so on go to.

Before I give you some of the basic stuff you can mod into the planet files on Us2, you must know how to open the files.

Say you want to edit a planet. If you remember the name of your planet, you can scroll through your saved planets and find the one you want to edit. Once you find it, Right click < and you will see many options. For 7zip, "Open Archive" comes up first. WinRAR, same goes. You want to click "open archive", and there is where you can see 3 folders. There is the " body" which is the planet code itself, the image, and extra code which we do not need to focus on. You want to double click the body.json and it will open strings of code.

HERE is where the fun, yet somewhat complicated part, begins.

Now that you have the planet file open, you want to scroll slowly until you see "EmissiveMapSource" (You can CTRL+F And search for it.) When you find it, you will see:

EmissiveMapSource: ""

The quotation marks are extremely important. Most code goes in between those two marks.
For cities, the code you use will be case-sensitive.

Textures/planet_cities Is the code you will enter into the quotation marks. Now Your EmissiveMapSource should look like

EmissiveMapSource: "Textures/planet_cities"

NOTE: IF your world is INHABITABLE by any means, meaning the temperature is not high enough, there is no water or gravity, or a dense atmosphere, it may prevent your cities from loading.

When you are done, CTRL + S or CMD + S to save the code you added. Close ONLY the planet file, and are open the 7zip or WinRAR file. The app will ask you if you would like to save what you added. Click yes, and now all you have to do is open your planet in-game.

Now that you have cities, you may just want to add climate onto your custom world.

When you have The planet code open you want to scroll all the way down. Climate is usually added in a string of code called "$type." When you scroll all the way down, you want to scroll up VERY slowly until you see the $type symbol. It MUST be the first one that is closest to the bottom.

When you see that $type, it will say, $type:"TrailComponent". Trail is not what we want to have if you want your climate mode. If you want climate mode, you must replace "Trail" with "Climate". Your code should now say;

$type:"ClimateComponent"

All you have to do is restart the saving process and reopen the planet in Us2. The temperature section of the planet should now be climate.

Custom atmospheres are the fun part of doing all of this. Your customization on the color is essentially limitless.

Now that you have your planet file open, all you have to do is search for the atmosphere code. You should be seeing:

AtmosphereColor: "RGBA: (numbers)"

Now, find a website that you would want for finding RGBA's. ((I personally recommend rgbcolorcode.com, as it is a very simple site to find RGBAs.))

Now, say you want to add the color blue. Search for the color blue on the website.

Incase you didnt look it up, or already know it, the RGB of blue is 0,0,255

Paste this into your RGBA color area as a template.
(0.000, 0.000, 0.000, 1.000)

Now, your code is going to look like:

AtmosphereColor: "RGBA(0.000, 0.000, 0.000, 1.000)",

As you can tell, the 0,0,255 part will correspond to the 0.000's that are there.

255 is a 3-digit number, so it will go behind the decimal points.
So your color option should look like:

"Color":"RGBA(0.000, 0.000, 0.255, 1.000)",

If you had the number, say "25", It would be, "0.025". If you had the number "5", it would be "0.005".


All you have to do now is save and reopen the planet in Us2.

So here it is, my fully uploaded tutorial on the basics of modding. I was originally going to add more things you can mod, but decided I'd rather see what the community thinks of it, and if they think i should add any more techniques, or maybe even a new guide.

Anyway, I hope that this helped someone out there make their own worlds. I hope you enjoy your new planets, and your new career on Us2 Modding.

Sincerely,
BlueMarble.