Great image Dave, I love it. It does bring up an interesting question though. How does your game handle spawning new players?
Well, the old algorithm picked a random star, and then tried to find a star fairly close to it that didn't have a lot of neighbors, and had a certain minimum distance from any inhabited neighbors, and that was basically it.
The new algorithm makes a set of all inhabited sectors, and then grows that set by 2 sectors, then makes a ring of sectors around that, and picks a planet from that ring, and then does some of the checks above. It's drastically faster than the old algorithm (because it basically picks planets in sectors that are already fairly close to inhabited planets, but far enough away to provide a good start...)
Now to fix all this new player griefing...
