Starmade Main Menu Backgrounds, How to's and not to's.

[Master_Artificer]

So, you want to change Starmades Background, but don't know how?

Lets Fix That​

First, we need to find where the starmade installation is located. If you are using steam, you know where to find it (right click, properties, show local files, basic stuff). If you are using the beta launcher, you will need to go into your user files and find the AppData under Roaming, and locate the starmade folder.

Once located, follow the procedure in the images. Open the 'data' folder, and scroll down to "image-resource".

The image, in case you delete it and want it back, is shown below :p
You could also theoretically recreate it in game but have multiple daves hanging out or create a canteena/lounge/bar screen, or have a screen of your favorite server spawn/faction home-base hallways.

NEXT, replace the standard "loadingscreen-background.png" photo with your own. Now, you might want to follow these next steps. The photo needs to be specific dimensions or else star-made won't start, and the menu screen keeps blurring and warping the image in cycles so to make the blurring less intense you might want to have the image you choose to be fuzzy.

You need to take your image and adjust it to your own screen resolution if it is not already, then compress it and warp it to 1024x1024. Upon loading the game in fullscreen mode, the game will take the compressed and warped image and warp/stretch it again to match your resolution. The aim of this step is to effectively cancel this distortion out by feeding it this distorted picture in the first place.


The next step is Imgur.

You then redownload the image and name it "loadingscreen-background" and replace the default image with your new one. You can also then share the image you made with us, the rest of the community, here on this thread so people can save your images to use as their own main menu screens.

Taking this example to its completion, we can load up our game and watch the main screen as the game applies some basic warp and distortion to try and get your attention. You want to make your image you put in blurry by default, so it is more pleasing to the eye as it goes from blurry to more blurry and back again, because going from sharp to blurry to sharp just doesn't look good and is too distracting.

Spoiler: The main menu with the example image used in this demonstration.

Try to keep the area where the text appears on the menu to the bottom left clear of clutter. I adjusted the image so the spaceship was sitting on-top of it, and not making the wording harder to see.

Now, the main purpose of this thread:
Sharing Your [loadingscreen-background's]!
​

So, post your image in the 1024x1024 format and also give the screen compression ratio you made it at.


I will go first!
For people with 1600x900 screen resolution (also known as a 16x9 or 4x3 aspect ratio) can use this image:

I will include imgur links to the pre-blurry compressed image and the original full image that this was cut from, if people are interested in adding their own edits to the images.



I hope this helps people to modify their own main menu images easier and is informative to those that wanted to do it but didn't know what to do or how to do it before.

 

[Crusade]

tip: the image has to be a square, not a specific resolution.
I've tested 512x512, 1024x1024 and 2048x2048, all of which work. 2048x2048 is great for preserving sharp images if you don't want the bg to be blurred.

 

[DukeofRealms]

Nice tutorial



The Force, it's calling to you... just let it in.

I just had to say it.