Required Tools

Modding Starsector requires different editors than you may be used to in your day to day work. The data types it uses are very sensitive to error, and most common editors do not have built in mechanisms to point out such errors, which will make your life harder than it has to be. Some editors may even open a file correctly but corrupt its contents when saving, as Microsoft Excel does with .csv files.

IDE

Notepad++ IntelliJ VSCode

Note on why you should use IntelliJ (documentation, setup, support)

CSV Editor

Rons Google Sheets Excel (don't)

Why the editor matters for CSV

JSON Editor

IntelliJ

• Custom JSON validator for SS (Is there anything else?)

Image Editor

Krita Photoshop Gimp ... what's vicegrip using again?