Visited stars the same in Legacy and Live?

Lhorndra · Jul 9, 2023

Frankymole said:
I'm a bit confused. All these folders (well, most of them) with numbers as the folder names, contain a "VisitedStarsCache" file.

Are they all different - separate chunks of visited stars lists, or does the latest one contain ALL the visited stars?

Basically: what do I have to back up?

Directory / location is c:\<username>\Appdata\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\<userid, i.e. all those gobbledegook digits in the folder name>\VisitedStarsCache.dat

View attachment 360690

Short answer:
Back up everything.

Long answer:
I'm not sure how exactly those folders work, but at least some of those numbers are commander/account IDs. If you search your journal files for "FID", you'll find entries like this:

Code:

"FID":"F6106412", "Name":"CMDR Name"

In my case at least, the corresponding folder (folder name = FID number without the "F") contains only one file: VisitedStarsCache.dat. That contains all the stars that my commander with above FID has visited. I have a second commander, and again, in the corresponding folder, there's only one single VisitedStarsCache.dat file. So I simply back up both files and rename them VisitedStarsCache_[My-1st-CMDR].dat and VisitedStarsCache_[My-2nd-CMDR].dat

The other folders with numbers that I can't explain contain files that seem to be cached trade route data. Maybe the GalMap uses these to show current trade routes.

Frankymole · Jul 10, 2023

Neilski said:
Pretty strange that you have more than one - do you use more than one account/commander?

Yes, I have four accounts (one Frontier, one Steam, two Epic). But there are 8 folders

Northpin · Jul 10, 2023

Frankymole said:
Yes, I have four accounts (one Frontier, one Steam, two Epic). But there are 8 folders

Maybe they've split the visited star caches sometimes after U14
You can check by visiting in Live a previously unvisited star and see what file gets updated - then check in Legacy if the star appears as visited, if not go there and notice if a different file gets updated.

Frankymole · Jul 10, 2023

Over the last few days I've only been using my original Frontier CMDR account, and two of the files have updated. One contains "trade" files and the other has two different star caches:

Not sure if I need to backup the trade ones.

Lhorndra · Jul 10, 2023

Frankymole said:
View attachment 360857

Yeah, it seems that RecentlyVisitedStars is a, well, cache for the cache. RecentlyVisitedStars will be merged into VisitedStarsCache regularly and then deleted. Don't know the specifics, but at least it seems that way if you watch this folder as compulsively as I did.

Frankymole said:
Not sure if I need to backup the trade ones.

I don't. It can't hurt, but I don't think it's relevant.

Esteban · Jul 10, 2023

The trade files are just price data for transactions. You can back them up but they're certainly not critical. Prices are subject to change after all.

Frankymole · Jul 10, 2023

Is it possible to open (A cope of) the visited stars cache file and look inside? I'm not sure what application to do it with, though.

Esteban · Jul 10, 2023

Frankymole said:
Is it possible to open (A cope of) the visited stars cache file and look inside? I'm not sure what application to do it with, though.

Yes! It is simply a text file. In Windows, you can use the "Open with..." function found by right-clicking the file. You can then select Notepad as the application to open the file.

One note though is to uncheck the box that says to 'always open files of this type" because that creates a file association that you may not desire.

Sorry. It is not a text file

Neilski · Jul 11, 2023

Frankymole said:
Is it possible to open (A cope of) the visited stars cache file and look inside? I'm not sure what application to do it with, though.

You can look inside it with a hex editor (IIRC the main chunk of data is just a bunch of 64-bit system IDs, discussed somewhat in another thread). I can't recall if there's any tool to decode them all though.

Lhorndra · Jul 11, 2023

Frankymole said:
Is it possible to open (A cope of) the visited stars cache file and look inside? I'm not sure what application to do it with, though.

It's binary. Maybe @Suremaker is able to answer your question, as he is the programmer of the VisitedStarCacheMerger tool.

Suremaker · Jul 13, 2023

Lhorndra said:
It's binary. Maybe @Suremaker is able to answer your question, as he is the programmer of the VisitedStarCacheMerger tool.

The cache file is in binary format, where every visited system record consists of system ID, number of visits and last visited date (all stored as numbers).
It is possible to open the file and read it's content in hex editors, but without using specific programs it won't be possible to read anything interesting (human friendly) from there.

The codebase of VisitedStarCacheMerger is here: https://github.com/Suremaker/edsm_scanner/tree/main/VisitedStarCacheMerger, where file reading code is located here: https://github.com/Suremaker/edsm_s...7bb91b3bd/VisitedStarCacheMerger/Cache.cs#L23