States of Power Scenario Editor and Scenario Browser Guide

The Scenario Editor is the feature that turns States of Power from a small game into an open-ended one, and it is the thing reviewers single out most often after the HOI4 comparison.

What the editor does

From the official store description:

With the built-in Scenario Editor, you can easily create custom countries, redraw borders, design entire scenarios, and script your own events — alternate histories, what-if conflicts, fantasy worlds and anything you can imagine. No external tools, no modding headaches.

Four distinct capabilities are named there, and the last clause is the important one. There is no separate SDK to install, no mod manager, no external map tooling.

The Scenario Browser

Finished scenarios are not just yours:

When your creation is ready, publish it to the Scenario Browser for the whole community to download, rate, and play.

So the loop is create → publish → others download and rate. This is confirmed as working rather than promised: the launch-week patch fixed “the scenario browser sorting dropdown being hidden behind other UI”, and update 1.0.11 added the ability to remove scenarios directly from the scenario details screen. Both are the kind of fix you only ship for a feature people are actively using.

What players are doing with it

The clearest signal comes from a Steam reviewer with 17 hours played, writing about the editor as the game’s standout:

Amazing modding potential. I will be recreating kaiserreich in this game and it is by far the best feature of the game.

Recreating a large, well-known alternate-history total conversion is an ambitious use of a launch-week editor, and it tells you the scope of what the tool exposes: enough to rebuild a different world, not just to nudge a border.

Another reviewer lists “being able to make you own scenarios” among the reasons to recommend it at the price.

Scenarios change the tech tree

A detail worth knowing before you build: the research tree size is not fixed. The research meter in official screenshots reads 20/195, 78/182 and 218/270 across different games. Different totals mean the set of available technologies varies with what is being played — see the tech tree page.

If you are authoring a scenario, that is a dimension you appear to have control over.

Practical notes

• Removing a scenario: since update 1.0.11 you can delete one straight from its details screen rather than hunting through menus.
• Sorting the browser: the sorting dropdown was fixed on 27 August. If yours is misbehaving, update the game.
• Steam accessibility tags: the store lists a Mouse Only Option and Save Anytime, both of which make long editor sessions less painful.

What is not documented

There is no official manual for the editor, no published list of scriptable event triggers, and no documented limits on map size or country count. The official Discord is where scenario authors are congregating, and the developer is active in the Steam discussions.

If the developer publishes editor documentation, it will be announced through the Steam announcement feed, which we re-read for every entry in the update log.