Guides Hub/Racing Tracks
Racing is a very niche part of cosmoteer that can be extremely fun. But how are those racing tracks being built?
The primitive method just uses long asteroid lines. You just place a lot of copies and arrange the parts in some way to form a track.
Special Parts
Most racing tracks use the Redstone's Minigame Utilities mod which has the useful ghost blocks. For those one can disable hitboxes or textures which makes them ideal to connect floating blocks or to make a finish line.
Painting Method
If you want more precise control over what the shape of your racing track should look like you should use an outside tool to paint the track and then import it afterward.
To import such a picture use the "load from png" option that's below the other load options.
You can use pretty much any drawing program, but I recommend inkscape because its easy to use and free.
When importing the picture as a png it will be cut off if it is outside the building grid. For that reason it is recommended to run the huge ships mod or a custom mod that allows for even bigger ships. Lastly the modded parts can be used to connect the track.
Using Inkscape
Here are some tips when using inkscape in particular.
After creating a new document you can press ctrl+shift+d to change the aspect ratio to a square and background color to black (cosmoteer imports bright pixels as corridors). Then you can use the pen tool (1) to click and hold which creates a spline. Use the bar at the bottom and hold shift to remove the background (4) and select a spline color (3).
My recommendation is to just create a few splines randomly and only use the node tool (2) to modify the curve later.
When the outline is finished create a copy of the outline and use the hotkeys ctrl+shift+) or ctrl+shift+( to move it inwards/outwards. This way you get a double line in the rough shape which may still have to be adjusted slightly.
When you are done go to export (5) and select the correct size (probably 1000x1000).
Importing really big tracks
The issue with importing big ships is that those are extremely resource intensive and might even freeze your game. Because of that I recommend splitting the picture into many smaller pictures with some picture splitting site. Then you can import the parts one at a time to split the load. The annoying part is repositioning those parts since moving those ships close enough is not possible with the current creative game tools. You would instead have to connect the lose parts of each track section with ghost blocks and use thrusters to position them.