Any tutorial on how to use Space Master?
The only ones I found so far are horribly out of date and not much help. Maybe somebody knows of some more up to date ones but I don't know of any. I'll try to give a quick overview.
You enter sm mode from the menu and put in the password (which is usually blank) And (SM) will appear on the menu bar title. As you can probably gather that tells you you are in SM mode.
In SM mode a number of buttons appear in various screens, usually having SM someplace in the button text or SM only in the tooltip. The buttons let you directly modify various things like planet populations research projects, planetary terraforming, system layout, stuff like that.
For example in the research screen 2 extra buttons appear, Instant and InstantRST. Push Instant with a technology highlighted and it will give it to you for free. Instant RST is the same thing, just it's a shortcut that instantly gives you all the techs you made yourself from the design screen, which are called racial techs.
In the shipyards screen you get SY mod which allows you to spawn extra shipyards or modify existing ones. And so on and so fourth There are too many buttons to go through them all. And I just learned them all by experimenting.
Having SM mode on constantly won't hurt anything. You can still do everything normally, you just have the SM buttons available as well. The only differences I could see so far is that the event log tells you why a pulse was cut short due to an NPR in SM mode, while normal doesn't. Also in what I assume is a bug you can't set the colors for your event log messages while in SM mode.
* No you cannot see NPR players in SM mode. You can only do that in designer mode. And since it is so easy to accidentally break the game in designer mode, Steve only gives out the password for it if you PM him directly.
* Some things not even the SM can modify. While an SM can change the mineral values on a planet, or create new systems and jump points out of thin air, the SM cannot modify a planet's atmosphere without there being a player owned colony on it. And the SM cannot modify the size or type of a planet at all. The SM also cannot modify the strength of a nebula.
* If you start a game without the assign starting tech points automatically and the checkbox that gives you starting ships checked. You will have to go into SM mode to assign them manually in the research and fastOOB creation screens. Fortunately there is a handy number convenient on those screens to tell you how much more you can use SM mode for freebees to make up for not starting with the random starting tech. Once they hit 0 any more is cheating.
* If doing a non-sol start you get an SM race (the game needs at least 1 race to function SM Race is just a blank dummy race) and you have to go to system information and create systems until you find one with a suitable homeworld. Then you click HW materials (to guarantee good starting resources) and create empire with the world you want selected. After that you just put together your new empire and can switch to it in the default race dropdown and start playing.