Yes, that is one thing that we do not yet know -- how the game knows which planets are colonizable. It may be stored in a table, or the game may simply check the characteristics of the planet and come up with an answer (and reward value) on the fly, based on a certain formula.

That is one thing I would like to know.


Well, it would be difficult ot make the world completely random without knowing a little more about how things are done. For instance, the area of influence for the Uhl is probably buried in the code somewhere (good luck finding it).

It's probably possible to change a lot things (alien names and homeworlds, trading good names and values, trading styles), locations of star systems and planets, but it's probably also true that other parts of the code 'depend' on things be a certain way or they won't work. For exmaple, trying to add more star systems than are there already would probably not work well...