StarEdit

StarEdit is Blizzard Entertainment's official level editor for StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War. The editor's trigger system allows users to change maps radically and create custom map scenarios. The StarCraft community has constructed new editors and functionalities that grant users even more power to modify the game. The company Microstar sold a CD with new levels created with the StarEdit feature, but was forced to stop when Blizzard won their court case against its distribution.[1]

Scenarios are generally either melee or Use Map Settings (UMS) games. Melee games start all players at a random location with only their main base building (Command Center, Hatchery, or Nexus) and four mining units. This is the most popular type of game, used in tournaments and ladder games. Most casual melee games are played on "money" maps, maps with extremely large amounts of immediately available resources. Initial mineral and gas deposits are often set to a cap of 50,000 or more units to eliminate the need for expansion sites. "Money maps" have been criticized for failing to challenge players to develop key skills such as order-building and expansion-taking, favoring weaker players. Defenders of money maps claim that the game still requires strategy and skill.

Use Map Settings games are less structured and often incorporate liberal use of specialized triggers and setups to change gameplay. Scenarios based on 'genres' have surfaced, including Defense maps, wargames, Diplomacy, RPG's, Cat & Mouse, Bounds, Golems, Evolves, Madness, ect.[2] Single-player "campaigns," long scenarios played out over several maps that have been edited together with StarEdit, have gained prominence. Following the lead of the Antioch Chronicles, many campaigns include modifications that add new "heroes." Mapmakers create new art files, creating completely new units and characters, which StarEdit can't do. Popular campaigns include Campaign Creations' The Fenix, Legacy of the Confederation, Life of a Marine, the Vision of the Future tetralogy (Vision of the Future, Black Dream, Prophecy, and Final Destiny) and StarCraft.org's official campaigns, The Shifters and Fields of Ash.

More powerful, third-party map editors, including StarCraft X-tra Editor, StarForge, and SCM Draft 2, along with various simple utilities, allow users to do many things that StarEdit does not allow, such as "stack" multiple mineral fields and buildings on top of each other, change player colors, use hidden AI scripts, protect maps, play sound effects and music directly from the StarCraft data files, change the color of text, place raw sprites, and compress their map to reduce file size. It is generally accepted that the best third-party editor currently available for Mac OS is StarFire Edit, or Emerald Aspect. In addition, the Mac version of StarEdit was not carbonized along with StarCraft and Brood War. It may be run in Classic, but is not compatible with Intel Macs.

Some custom maps and campaigns, including StarCraft: Insurrection and StarCraft: Retribution, were released commercially via third parties. These add-ons met with mixed criticism[3][4] and did not sell well.

Many websites including StarCraft.Org, Staredit Network, and StarCraft Index, and StarCraft Map Makers Guild have been built around the capabilities of StarEdit and other respective custom StarEditers.