Stellaris/Space Map

[LostCoastlines]

Hi guys

So I'm playing a game of Stellaris on a 4-arm spiral galaxy and I want to create a star map of the galaxy and my civilisation and I'm having trouble about how to map the galaxy and the positioning of the various systems

Does anyone have any tips or ideas on how to get this started? I'm planning to use GIMP to edit it all. I'm looking to get the current star map in stellaris (without any empires or anything, just the systems/stars) into GIMP so I can create all the civilisations etc onto it

Thank you!

[Creativetides]

will this be a large scale huge cosmos or like a solar system galaxy, are your going for hundreds of planets or 7, just wondering to understand the situation going on, I don’t know too much about gimp, (I’m a pen and paper kind of cartographer) but maybe I could give some artistic advice.

[LostCoastlines]

In between those two really, I'm going for a spiral arm galaxy if that makes any sense, with hundreds of systems/solar systems but only about 7 planets if that makes any sense, I'm not the greatest at explaining things, let me know if you need more clarification haha

[Voolf]

Here is something that can help. One of my fav artists

[Azélor]

It all depend on the style you want. If you could provide some examples, it would be easier to help you.
There is a lot of different ways to make a map.

I would not be surprise if there are only 7 worthy planets because most planets are not colonizable in Stellaris.
Most of them are barren wasteland, much like in reality I suppose.
It makes the game more playable. Otherwise it would run very poorly on computers.
I stopped playing because I felt the pace was too slow.

[DEWLine]

Another question: how much of your proposed galaxy do you want to focus on here? I'm not an astrocartographer either, but the field does seem to be growing a bit where our own real-universe Milky Way is concerned.