Question Moving to New PC

Iced

I
I've been playing Elite Dangerous for five years. I have two commanders, which I access one at a time on a single PC via two Steam accounts. I purchased ED for each Steam account, and my two signons to Steam determine which Frontier credentials are used for the commander I want to play at the time.

All was fine until last week when I purchased a new PC. I installed Steam on the new PC and used each Steam signon to download Elite Dangerous for each account. I remembered to then copy the Bindings folder from my old PC so that my controls remained the same:

C:/Users/[username]/AppData/Local/Frontier Developments/Elite Dangerous/Options/Bindings/

Elite was up and running well on my new PC. I then noticed that the entire Galaxy Map was red, indicating that I had visited nowhere. I clicked on a system that I knew I had visited, and then displayed its System Map, as it should have if I had visited it. So ED knew that I had visited there, but the Galaxy Map stubbornly stayed red until I actually visited that system again.

I assume that means there are other local files/folders that I need to copy from my old PC to get the Galaxy Map visited systems to display correctly. Does anyone know what those are? As I have two commanders, there should be two sets.
 

Iced

I
Thank you. Found that there are several numbered folders at the same level as the Options folder (path above). One (per commander) will contain a single file VisitedStarsCache.dat which needs to be copied into the folder with the same numbered name on the new PC. This should be done before playing much ED on the new PC, as the copy will overwrite all newly visited systems prior to the copy.
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
Damn, I missed this when I got my new PC. I’ll have to go digging through my old backups now to find it.
Is there any way to merge my old and new cache files?
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
P.S. I ran through that process this morning. Seemed to work perfectly. Took less than 15 minutes to follow and carry out the steps and definitely increased the size of my VisitedStarsCache.dat file considerably, adding (I think) thousands of systems to it. Haven't had a chance to test in-game yet (I guess by filtering on visited systems) but I have a backup of my original file if anything went wrong so on the face of it that looks like a really good solution (assuming you use EDMC or similar to upload your discoveries to EDSM).
 

Lhorndra

Lhorndra
Iced said:
I then noticed that the entire Galaxy Map was red, indicating that I had visited nowhere. I clicked on a system that I knew I had visited, and then displayed its System Map, as it should have if I had visited it. So ED knew that I had visited there, but the Galaxy Map stubbornly stayed red until I actually visited that system again.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's the Galmap's way of operating. Although the game knows exactly where you've been (hence the visible System Map for a visited system), the "Visited" Galmap filter depends solely on the VisitedStarsCache.dat to display stars in red or cyan. I don't know if this was always the case. I first noticed this in 2022 after the Live/Legacy separation, and it hasn't changed since then. 🤷‍♀️

Alec Turner said:
P.S. I ran through that process this morning. Seemed to work perfectly. Took less than 15 minutes to follow and carry out the steps and definitely increased the size of my VisitedStarsCache.dat file considerably, adding (I think) thousands of systems to it. Haven't had a chance to test in-game yet (I guess by filtering on visited systems) but I have a backup of my original file if anything went wrong so on the face of it that looks like a really good solution (assuming you use EDMC or similar to upload your discoveries to EDSM).
Click to expand...
Cool, I'm glad it still works, presumably.

For those of you who use a batch file to start third party tools together with the ED launcher, it might be useful to include one more line to copy the VisitedStarsCache.dat to some backup folder. It certainly came in handy after I moved to a new PC.
 

varonica

varonica
Wasn't there a guide somewhere about transferring to a new PC? I mean I have done it twice now in the 9 years I have been playing but made sure to get everything I need, of course do a full backup of everything on a USB drive just in case I forget something.
 

aRJay

aRJay
varonica said:
Wasn't there a guide somewhere about transferring to a new PC? I mean I have done it twice now in the 9 years I have been playing but made sure to get everything I need, of course do a full backup of everything on a USB drive just in case I forget something.
Click to expand...
I have done it once by connecting the new machine to my router and then just copying folders across from my old machine which was still connected, the only issue was getting the *@#§ cloud not to intercept stuff. Then I just downloaded the game from the Frontier store to make sure that wasn’t messed up.
 

Lhorndra

Lhorndra
varonica said:
Wasn't there a guide somewhere about transferring to a new PC?
Click to expand...
Yeah, I do remember it too, but can't find it anymore. Maybe I'll do a new one in the future if I have the time. Maybe. Eventually. Perhaps. I wanted to post a summary of the most important tweaks and files anyway, because they are scattered all over the place -- on the web and quite literally all over the hard drive. Alas, one of my main "problems" is that playing the game itself isn't boring enough right now to do anything else Elite-related.
 
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