Finally had some time to play, great work, here's some feedback:

good:

other comments:

Anyhow, great work so far!

Actually, if it was just a button, you could probably write a script to do it for you.

You don't have to, Photoshop has great support for batch processing of files, If you want to enlarge all pictures in the UQM folder and subfolders by 197%, want to improve the result by running a "sharpen"filter, and want to rotate each one by an certain amount, you would only need a few mouseclicks (and a lot of processor time) to have it happen.  Basicly -anything- you can do in photoshop can be automated so you can quickly process large numbers of files. I could not imagine life without this function.

More info at this link:

http://www.creativemac.com/2002/04_apr/tutorials/psbatch.htm

Thanks for the replies, it's good to hear that the game does accept images with higher color depth.
I have no coding experience whatsoever, but I've been toying with the idea of learning to program for a while.
I don't expect to submit any usefull code soon, but i'd at least like to better understand how it works, and learn to read code.
What would be a good place to start?

I was thinking about creating some art for the game (new planet surface creatures) as a resource for modders and was wondering about the graphic format etc.

I assume the game can only handle 256 colors?
I could not find information on the graphic format used by the game. can I save them as animated gifs? if so what color palette should I use, I assume I somehow have to use the same colors as the game itself?

Oh... wow.

We got a magma world prototype, but Mercury is funny in that if you stick a shattered world or a magma world there, it is a featureless gray ball.

Actually mercury is a geologically dead world, just like the moon, we have one real life example of a shattered/magma world in our solar system : io ,one of jupiters moons. I seem to remember that it's quite a friendly place in SC2, but in real life it has -HUGE- vulcanoes  and a very active geology.

Pending our understanding of production of new graphics there will be artificial worlds and mountian worlds. Not to mention a new lifeform, the Commander Keen inspired Yorps, that will be worth decent data but will crowd you harmlessly and annoyingly. 

Are yorps the little green one eyed creatures? In that case the graphics are already done
check out the list of SC2 creatures, and scroll down to the "Penguin Cyclops" all you need to do is change it's behaviour and make it more annoying. That said, I would love to see more creatures.

Hmm new planet types... Looking at real life planet types that are being discovered outside our own solar system might be a good source of inspiration. They're finding all kinds of crazy planets there: planets with masses inbetween terrestial and gas worlds, and searing hot jupiter sized worlds  that orbit very close to their stars. A nice site with scientific speculation on what these planets would look like can be found at : http://www.extrasolar.net/speculations.html (scroll down a bit)

Also, have you considered adding new creature types to the planetary surfaces? It always bothered me that the number of different creatures was so small, and that life all over the quadrant looked more or less the same. I'm willing to do the graphics if needed.