Asterism - Every Skill Draws Its Own Star (RPG Maker MZ)

Every node in the tree draws its own star, generated from that skill's own data. No icon sheet, no node art to commission, nothing loaded from disk.

A skill tree is thirty icons you have not drawn yet

Every skill-tree plugin on this store hands you the structure — the nodes, the prerequisites, the point spending — and then asks you for the art. Thirty skills is thirty icons: a commission, an asset pack, or thirty evenings in a pixel editor. The alternative the existing plugins actually offer is a shape picker: choose a square, a circle or a hexagon, and every node in your game looks like every other node with a different letter in it.

Asterism generates the mark instead. It reads the skill you attached to the node and derives a star from its own properties — the core from its type and damage type, the corona from its element, the orbit from its scope, the mantle from the effects it applies, and the palette from its element. 20 cores × 14 coronas × 10 orbits × 12 mantles is 33,600 distinct mark forms, and 10 palettes takes that to 336,000 stars. Every one is composed as vector geometry at draw time. The plugin ships 0 image files.

The picture teaches the mechanic

This is not decoration with a lookup table behind it. A player who learns the visual language can read a skill off the chart without opening anything: a single-target skill wears one companion star and an all-enemies skill wears a full ring, every fire skill flares the same way so a school reads as one family, a ring of thorns means it inflicts a state, a wreath means it buffs, an aura means it heals. Change a skill's element in the database and its star changes to match — in every playthrough, on every machine, forever. The derivation is a hash, so nothing is stored and nothing can drift.

An unlit star still shows you its shape

A skill your player has not taken hangs unlit: the same mark, in outline, at low light. They can see the shape of a branch before they spend on it — what it is, what school it belongs to, roughly what it does — without the plugin spoiling the name or the numbers. Nothing is hidden and nothing is given away. Look at "An unlit star still shows you its shape" in the gallery: those are the same eight marks twice, identical geometry, different light.

Constellations converge, so the prerequisites do too

A node's Requires field takes any number of parents. By default all of them must be charted; prefix the list with any: and any one will do. So a star can sit where three branches meet, which is what a real constellation looks like — and the chart draws a line to every parent and brightens it as the path becomes reachable. The demo tree in the gallery ends on a star that requires two convergences, each of which itself requires two parents.

It fits your tree, not the other way round

You place stars at whatever coordinates you like. The chart measures the tree you authored and fits it between the header and the reading panel automatically — it will shrink a large tree, and it will never magnify a small one, so your stars always draw at their proper size.

What ships

• 4 plugins, 2,866 lines of raw, readable, heavily commented JavaScript. No minification, no dependencies, no build step — you can read it, debug it and extend it.
• 56 hand-authored motifs across four axes, plus 10 palettes.
• 4 plugin commands — open a chart, grant points to one actor, grant points to the party, reset a chart.
• Trees scoped per actor OR per class.
• Points from four sources — level up, a <AsterismPoints:n> notetag on a class, on an item, or on an enemy, and the plugin commands.
• Refunds, with load-bearing stars protected. A star another charted star depends on cannot be released, and the panel says why rather than just refusing.
• Mouse and keyboard. Movement is nearest star in that direction, not a grid step — because a constellation is not a grid.
• Zero stock RPG Maker windows. The scene contains no Window_Base at all, so it cannot inherit your windowskin and cannot restyle anything else in your project.

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⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. AsterismStars.js — [Asterism] The star corpus — 56 hand-authored motifs across four
2. AsterismChart.js — [Asterism] The renderer — turns a star spec into pixels. Draws
3. Asterism.js — [Asterism v1.0.0] A constellation skill tree whose every node
4. AsterismScene.js — [Asterism] The chart scene. Contains NO Window_Base and NO

Order matters here, and a wrong one fails loudly rather than silently: each file throws a named error telling you exactly which plugin to move. AsterismStars is the motif corpus and draws nothing; AsterismChart renders a star spec; Asterism holds the system, the tree parameters and the plugin commands; AsterismScene is the chart screen. Configure your trees on Asterism.js — the other three take no parameters at all.

Core methods extended — all 3 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Game_Actor.prototype.levelUp, Game_Party.prototype.consumeItem, Game_Enemy.prototype.performCollapse.

Because nothing is clobbered, Asterism co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

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More from Core Systems Asset Factory

Asterism is part of a family of plugins that all do the same thing in different places: they generate the art your game needs from the data your game already has.

• Sigil Core — every spell generates its own animated seal from that skill's own properties
• Herbarium — every reagent mounts as a generated botanical plate
• Armorial — a coat of arms generated from each character's own deeds
• Lineage — a generated evolution atlas of every species your player discovers
• Hallmark — a struck guild mark for every item your loot system rolls

Everything by Core Systems Asset Factory →