I have not updated the original spreadsheet with the new approximations, because that part of the SS is locked (not by me).
So the up-to-date speadsheet is the new one :
here. As you say slice 17 is rows 99611 to 100110. And those rows now include the slice number.
Also, slice 17 is all stars between longitude 97.8394 and 103.0012 degrees, which is still valid in the new spreadsheet.
In the original SS the stars were ordered within a slice by longitude, in the new ss each slice is ordeed by HIP number.
It is unfortunate that the row numbers don't match. But having the slice numbers in the ss should make things easier.
Here is a plot I made of slice 17 stars from the new ss.
View attachment 260889
The circle in the centre is Sol. So they are in a line, but it should only be in the 8 o'clock position. All the stars to the right of Sol have +ve x values, which is wrong.
It turns out that the stars to the right of Sol also have negative parallax values in both the original HIP catalogue and the spreadsheets (both old and new). That was transformed into positive x values by the new spreadsheet. A negative parallax value doesn't make physical sense, and I think it was there because of the error margins in the source data. Afaik, all of these stars were ignored by FDev when the galaxy was created, so all are now "not found".
In any case, I am going to use the absolute value of parallax for the calculation of coordinates, and this should bring these stars back to the right sector.
Finally, don't forget that the positions Apx ED x, Apx ED Y and Apx ED z columns are only an approximation. They should be accurate to within a few percent for most stars. In the original HIP catalogue there were error margins for the parallax values, so Fdev could have generated a random parallax value within the given margins of error and used that.
I suppose if I was doing a PhD thesis on this I would use the margins of error in the original data to produce a range of coordinate values for each star. Don't hold your breath.