FDEV have said it’s deactivated by design which is very disappointing. I’m not entirely sure where we stand t&c wise but I’d love to know if there is a third party method of extracting visited stars data from journal and updating visitedstarscache.dat
Discussion The Visited Stars cache
- Thread starter hchalkley
- Start date
I knew that I had seen something on this before, and I just found it:
gazelle's post came just a few weeks before I gave the game a rest for nearly a year, so I think I never actually played with the edts code, but I just had a peek at it.
Short version: for the procedurally-named stars (the vast majority of those outside the bubble I guess?) it generates the ID64 straight from the name. For the others (ballpark 150,000 stars) it uses a brute-force lookup table to match names to ID64s. It knows the format of the VisitedStarsCache file and can read and write it (nice!!).
Another thing I just realised tonight: as far as I can tell, EDSM actually records the ID64 of all known stars as well.
So, while I've yet to try the vsc code in the edts project, it appear to fully replace the now-broken import functionality. Better still, it ought to be much faster than the import. (Other things I've read indicate that importing only handled one star per frame update so at 60 fps you could be waiting a long time if you had visited a lot of stars, OR wanted to import a file with (say) all known stars
)Only thing I'm really keen on is getting my own journal visited stars back in the filter. Grabbing all known stars sounds like trouble to be honest and is the reason the import was disabled so I'd probably not recommend that. However as a self-repair tool for one's journal it's clear to me there's a strong desire for it (certainly this thread suggests so).I knew that I had seen something on this before, and I just found it:
gazelle's post came just a few weeks before I gave the game a rest for nearly a year, so I think I never actually played with the edts code, but I just had a peek at it.
Short version: for the procedurally-named stars (the vast majority of those outside the bubble I guess?) it generates the ID64 straight from the name. For the others (ballpark 150,000 stars) it uses a brute-force lookup table to match names to ID64s. It knows the format of the VisitedStarsCache file and can read and write it (nice!!).
Another thing I just realised tonight: as far as I can tell, EDSM actually records the ID64 of all known stars as well.
So, while I've yet to try the vsc code in the edts project, it appear to fully replace the now-broken import functionality. Better still, it ought to be much faster than the import. (Other things I've read indicate that importing only handled one star per frame update so at 60 fps you could be waiting a long time if you had visited a lot of stars, OR wanted to import a file with (say) all known stars
Well, the FD person QA-Jack used the word "exploits" without saying what they meant by it. You reckon that's what was meant? (Not sure why programming your ship about visited stars should be regarded as an exploit.)
(Precise quote: "This functionality was disabled in 2020 to prevent exploits")
Yeah that's my take away. .
It's a major frustration that the data of the stars I've visited is right there in my journal but I'm presently unable to get this in to my visited star cache.
Well I'll probably get around to trying vsc.py Real Soon Now(TM) but I seem to have limited motivation, having not (yet) lost my cache. You may wish to give it a whirl more urgently though
From others who have worked with these, the changes seem to include A) a file format that includes CMDR-specific information, and B) the game client rejects the file if it contains significantly more stars than server-side tracking thinks you've visited. That sounds like it was aimed pretty specifically at people who were downloading a new VSC from external sites. It's not really clear why they considered that an exploit (that it potentially allows PC players an advantage over console players has been suggested but not confirmed), but I agree that's probably the "exploit" QA-Jack is talking about.
Following that logic, I don't imagine they're going to care if you use 3rd party tools to restore your own cache after a reinstall or similar. But it's definitely at your own risk, I wouldn't really expect them to clarify further what's allowed vs not.
Oooooh, so it's not just refusing to build from the import file, but actively rejecting a copied VSC file... That's news to me (all of the reports I had seen simply cited the import mechanism being stone dead).
That would imply that they should also have made it reject a manually constructed VSC file which is superficially correct (CMDR info) but has too many stars in it. It'd be kinda weird for them not to do that.
An even more awesome modification (of course) would have been for them to actually reconstruct the VSC file if it has gone missing...
100% agree.
Hi everybody,
If you have an account at EDSM, there's hope. These short instructions should work for Windows 10.
Oh, and the scanner tools are really great for all sorts of stuff, like finding unscanned planets etc.
If you have an account at EDSM, there's hope. These short instructions should work for Windows 10.
- Download the EDSM scanner tools by @Suremaker here: https://github.com/Suremaker/edsm_scanner/releases
- Unzip the binaries into some folder.
- Export your EDSM flight log via https://www.edsm.net/en/settings/export and save the ImportStars.txt into the same folder as above.
- Find the file VisitedStarsCache.dat. It's usually in
C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\[user_id]\. Copy it into the same folder as above. - MAKE ANOTHER BACKUP of the original VisitedStarsCache.dat, just to be sure.
- Start the Windows command prompt (cmd.exe), change into the folder with the scanner tools from above.
- Execute
VisitedStarCacheMerger.exe VisitedStarsCache.dat ImportStars.txt. This merges the systems from ImportStars.txt into VisitedStarsCache.dat. - After it finished, copy VisitedStarsCache.dat back into
C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\[user_id]\and overwrite the old version there.
Oh, and the scanner tools are really great for all sorts of stuff, like finding unscanned planets etc.