Polestar 0.2.5 test build 2

Test build 2. Not the release. An early build of Polestar 0.2.5 for community testing. CurseForge and the "latest" release stay on 0.2.4.

New since test build 1: no English on non-English clients

• Guides in your language. Every guide's titles, tips and notes are translated into German, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), French, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Every NPC, place, item and quest in the text is named exactly as your game names it.
• Every screen uses your game's names. The guide window, Lookup, Dungeons, Rares, Nearby, gear tooltips, travel and the journey panel all show names in your language. Forever-only NPCs are learned the moment you meet them.
• Complete interface translations in all nine languages, including the AddOns list.
• Text is never cut off. Settings, labels, dropdowns and the rare alert make room for longer languages.
• Contributors: the German interface is complete thanks to Peter, the French thanks to Yendi, and the Spanish (Spain) is reviewed by julen92.

The guide texts and six of the interface languages are AI-made for now. If you're a native speaker, tell us what reads wrong.

Install

1. Close the game.
2. Delete every Polestar folder in Interface/AddOns.
3. Unzip Polestar-0.2.5-test.2.zip there.
4. Start the game again (a full restart, not /reload).

Report problems with the in-game report button, and mention test build 2.

Polestar 0.2.5 test build 1

Test build. Not the release. An early build of Polestar 0.2.5 for community testing. CurseForge and the "latest" release stay on 0.2.4.

What's new

• Polestar in your language. The interface is translated into German (thanks Peter), Latin American Spanish (thanks CDVolvik) and French (thanks Yendi). Spanish (Spain), Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese are translated with AI for now. Native speakers, please tell us what reads wrong.
• Quest, NPC and item names in your language. On a non-English client the guide window, the target button and the quest tracker use your game's names, and Lookup finds things by their local name or the English one.
• Steps that never ticked off now do. On non-English clients, setting your hearth, picking up flight paths, hearthing and flying complete their steps (#83).
• Game terms match your game. Reputation levels, item qualities and gear slots read as the game writes them.
• Quests you can't take yet are marked straight away. A quest whose earlier part you haven't done reads "Requires first", and the guide no longer walks you to its giver (#121).

Install

1. Close the game.
2. Delete every Polestar folder in Interface/AddOns.
3. Unzip Polestar-0.2.5-test.1.zip there.
4. Start the game again (a full restart, not /reload).

Report problems with the in-game report button, and mention the test build.

Polestar 0.2.4

Polestar 0.2.4 is our biggest update yet. The arrow now walks real paths: round cliffs, walls and water, through town gates, into caves and down the Undercity's lifts, where our first version pointed in a straight line. Real paths are still a work in progress: now and then one may lead up a mountain or over an obstacle you can't climb, and we're improving them with every update. Around it, every trip is planned door to door, with flights, boats, zeppelins, the tram, lifts, portals, your Hearthstone and class teleports, and every leg timed in the guide window.

Also new: a Class category with 62 guides, party sync, Polestar in German and Latin American Spanish, group warnings on elite and dungeon goals, dungeon attunements you can be guided through, and dozens of guide fixes from your reports.

Polestar is still a beta. If something's off, tell us on Discord or GitHub Issues.

Install or update

• With the CurseForge app: update Polestar Guides.
• By hand: download Polestar-0.2.4.zip below (not "Source code"). Delete every old Polestar folder from World of Warcraft/_classic_beta_/Interface/AddOns/ (_forever_ from launch), then unzip this one there. You should see Polestar, Polestar_Guides, Polestar_Nav, Polestar_Codex, Polestar_QuestDB and Polestar_ItemDB.
• Then quit the game completely and start it again. 0.2.4 adds a new folder, Polestar_Nav, and a /reload doesn't load new addon folders.

Polestar_Recorder-0.2.4.zip is optional. SHA256SUMS holds the checksums.

The arrow walks real paths

• Real paths. The arrow follows the path Shortest Path Forever's routing engine finds from wherever you stand, and finds a new one when you stray. It never searches in combat, and if anything is missing you get the straight arrow as before.
• Polestar's own walking maps of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor: out of an inn by its door instead of through the wall, down into the Undercity by its lifts, and never swimming across open sea (the water the game tires you in).
• The right floor. A walk to an NPC or object ends on its floor: Andron Gant is reached down in the Undercity's Rogues' Quarter, not on the street above it.
• Caves first. The arrow leads to a cave's mouth before anyone inside it: Goldtooth in the Fargodeep Mine, Grik'nir in the Coldridge troll cave, the Den behind Gornek, the Burning Blade Coven, Skull Rock and the Jasperlode Mine among them.
• Told step by step. "Walk to The Great Lift, Bottom", then "Take The Great Lift"; through a zone's gate or into a cave, each leg with its own time.
• Route lines on the world map and the minimap: dots along the real path where you walk, flights along the way the flight master actually flies, and boats, zeppelins and the tram as solid lines, each in its own colour.
• Go anywhere. Shift-click empty space on the world map or the minimap and the arrow takes you there; Alt-click works over map icons too. /polestar near repair (or trainer, vendor, innkeeper, bank, flight, stable and more) finds the quickest one to reach by route, not just the nearest as the crow flies.
• Spawn regions. Where a step's mobs and objects spawn is now a shaded region on the map, not a dot, and the goal the arrow follows wears the arrow's colour.
• Still a work in progress. Real paths are a big step up from the straight arrow, but they can still lead up a mountain or over an obstacle you can't climb. The worst slopes are already avoided (the Raptor Horns hillside in the Barrens now goes round), and we're refining the rest update by update. Found a bad route? Press F6 with it on screen and add the report to #98.
• The arrow no longer vanishes on the Deeprun Tram.
• Rather have the straight arrow? Options → Arrow & routes → "Walk real paths".

Developers' notes: The routing engine is Cillian Berragan's (@cjber), from his addon Shortest Path Forever, and Polestar carries it with his kind permission. The walking maps of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are our own, built from the game's terrain, water and buildings in his map format; Zephras Isle uses his. They take about 26 MB of memory and load only while "Walk real paths" is on.

Travel, planned door to door

• Lands where the walk is short. The route measures the real walks from the flight masters, docks, portals, inn and teleports near your target, so it no longer lands on the far side of a ridge: a marker near Astranaar no longer sends you from Sun Rock Retreat straight over the mountains. The walks later on the route follow their real paths too, each with its own time.
• Zone crossings. Walks between zones go through the real tunnels, passes, bridges and gates, from Carbonite's zone crossings: from the Barrens to Astranaar the route now walks the Talondeep Path.
• Real timetables. Boats, zeppelins, the Deeprun Tram and lifts run to their real schedules, from the transport model the servers use, so a route weighs the actual wait and ride. Ride a boat, a zeppelin or the tram and Polestar times it: for the next six hours the arrow says "Next boat in 1:20" or "Boat docked, leaves in 0:40", and the route takes the boat you can actually catch. Untimed, it says "Next boat in about 2:55".
• Share boat times with your guild and group on your realm: Options → Arrow & routes → "Share boat times" (off by default).
• The journey in the guide window: under the step, every leg numbered with its own countdown ("1. Walk to The Great Lift, Top 11:10", "2. Take The Great Lift, leaves in about 0:15 · ride 0:10"), with the total time and distance on top. Click the header to fold it.
• Travel button. When the route says to hearth or teleport, a button under the arrow casts it, and you can bind it to a key ("Use the route's Hearthstone or teleport"). Right-click the arrow or use /polestar skipleg to skip a leg.
• Class teleports and portals. Routes can start with a mage's Teleport (with a Rune of Teleportation), a druid's Teleport: Moonglade or a shaman's Astral Recall when it's off cooldown and faster, and they use the Darnassus and Rut'theran Village portals.
• Transport alerts. 30 seconds before your boat, zeppelin or tram comes in, and 20 before your stop on board: a countdown banner, the ship's bell or the zeppelin's horn, and a flashing taskbar icon. Never in combat.
• The flight map highlights the route's flight and its hops.
• A point you set before dying (a map click, /way) comes back once you're alive again.

Works with Shortest Path Forever

Run Shortest Path Forever too? Polestar now hands it the route, so the two never guide at once. Each guide goal goes to it as a stop with the game's own mark (a quest's "!" or "?", a trainer, a flight master, a dungeon, a boat), and a kill or collect area guides you there, then stays quiet while you work it. Polestar's own arrow, route lines and journey step aside, and its walking maps aren't loaded.

Prefer Polestar's arrow? Turn off Options → Arrow & routes → "Guide with Shortest Path Forever when it's installed".

Guides

• A new Class category with 62 guides for the class quest chains of every class, one guide per goal: Druid forms and Cure Poison, Rhok'delar and Lok'delar, the Mage robes and Polymorph: Pig, the Paladin's Tyr's Watch, Benediction and Anathema, Ravenholdt and the Rogue's poisons, the Shaman totems, the Warlock's felhunter, incubus and Orb of Orahil, the Warrior's armour and weapon chains, and more. Each one shows what it gives and why it's worth doing. The class mounts moved here too, and the Charger and Dreadsteed guides now walk their whole chains.
• Class quests on the leveling route. Every start takes its class letter to the trainer, and class quests come along the way: Cure Poison for Druids, Mirror Lake for Mages, the Hunters' taming quests and more.
• Refreshed leveling routes that take Forever's new quests: Shipment to Stormwind, Crown of the Earth, a Wetlands loop out of Menethil, Gloomrise, Stop the Screeching and more. The Tauren start no longer walks to Durotar.
• Group warnings. A goal that needs a group says so under it ("Elite: group advised", "Dungeon: Dire Maul", "Raid: Molten Core"), and guides with group content are tagged "Group" in the menu.
• Clearer goals. "Complete" goals show their progress (The Hunt Begins 8/14), and item goals say where the item comes from ("Kill Grellkin or Grell for Fel Moss").
• A class guide opened before your level says "Available from level 20" instead of sending you to a trainer with nothing for you.
• Quests Forever renamed carry their Forever names (Chastise, Dark Sacrifice and others).
• The published leveling times count only what a guide requires: about 130-132 hours to 60 for the Horde and 132-134 for the Alliance, as the simulator estimates them.

Dungeons and Lookup

• Attunements. Molten Core, Onyxia's Lair, Blackwing Lair, Naxxramas, Scholomance, Blackrock Depths, Stratholme, Dire Maul and more have an Attunement tab: what each key opens, whether you hold it, every step with your progress, and "Guide me through it".
• Hand in the quests. After a run, a dungeon's page builds a guide to every turn-in for its quests in your log, on the shortest path from where you stand.
• Dungeon quests list their whole chains, and their rewards show reputation, money and item counts (108 quests showed no rewards before).
• Dungeons list event and rare bosses and boss chests with their loot, and a boss's own drops come first.
• Lookup knows the reputation about 180 vendor rewards need, and 286 more NPCs show their level.

New features and options

• Party sync. In a party, the guide shows party members' progress under shared quest goals (Ana 5/8, Ben done) and who lacks a quest you took....

Polestar 0.2.3

Polestar 0.2.3 is a beta: a fix for the guide menu's search.

For players

• Clearing the guide menu's search takes its Codex matches away: they no longer stay drawn over the guide list (they did after searching for an item or mount, then clearing the search or changing tabs).

Polestar 0.2.2

Polestar 0.2.2 is a beta. This release includes the Codex, so Lookup, Dungeons and Rares work out of the box.

For players

• The release now includes the Codex (the Polestar_Codex folder, part of Polestar), so Lookup, Dungeons and Rares work: search items, mounts, pets, recipes, NPCs and quests and see where to get them; every dungeon and raid with its levels, entrance, bosses and their loot, and its quests; rares and treasures with their spawns and drops. It is built from the game's own data tables, the quest and creature databases Polestar already uses, and our recordings. If it is missing or disabled, Lookup, Dungeons and Rares say so: reinstall Polestar or enable it in the AddOns list, then /reload.
• The Codex knows more: the battleground war mounts and tabards show their PvP rank and reputation, the Orange Murloc Egg and Green Helper Box are companions, Molten Core and the other raids list their bosses' loot, more rares are known, and every dungeon and raid points at its real entrance (the Deadmines at Moonbrook), not the spot where a ghost returns.
• Distances can read in metres: Options, Arrow & routes, Distances.
• The starting zones follow Forever's new quest chains: a follow-up is taken once the quest before it is handed in, where the guides offered several links of a chain at once (Northshire's book chain and Jason Mathers' murloc quests in Elwynn Forest, Dun Morogh, Teldrassil, Durotar and Mulgore). The Big Picture and what follows it stay optional extras, as Shinyfinder Narf is elite.
• Profession quests are optional and say who they are for: Rough Wolf Pelts (skinners), A Pain in the Neck (enchanters) and The Quarry's Smith (blacksmiths). Other characters could not take or finish them.
• The Skyborne start points at the Ley Line, the Elemental Convergence and Raan's campfire again: their ids changed in Forever's data.
• The world map's zone level ranges are rebuilt from Questie 12.1.0's Forever creatures (Mulgore reads 3-11, no longer 3-27).
• Reading ahead with Next no longer stops quest automation for the step you are on: its quests are still accepted and handed in while the window shows a later step.
• The optional Recorder also notes what the Codex learns only in play, while it is on: rares you see (on nameplates, as target or mouseover, or on the minimap), treasures, what each corpse or chest drops and how often, the dungeons you enter and where, and boss encounters, plus the rewards quest windows offer. To share a recording, send the Polestar_Recorder.lua file from your SavedVariables folder (CONTRIBUTING.md says where); it is imported without your character's name or realm.

For guide authors

• codex build uses only inputs Polestar may redistribute: the dungeons and raids (levels, entrances, bosses) come from the Forever client's tables (Map, DungeonEncounter, LFGDungeons, MapDifficulty, ContentTuning), boss loot from the drops in items.json, mounts and companions from Mount and BattlePetSpecies, rares from npc ranks. --local-extras adds AtlasLoot, RareScanner and DungeonJournal for a local-only comparison build. pack ships the Codex with its LICENSE-DATA.txt and refuses to run without a release-safe one.
• A release codex build measures itself against the last --local-extras build, entity by entity (data/local/codex-parity.md, codex parity), and lists what only play can fill with the Recorder event that fills it.
• codex wowhead fetches, one page at a time, Wowhead Forever's facts for what the parity report lists as missing (NPC level, rank, positions and drops with counts; object contents; item tooltip requirements) into data/sources/wowhead/codex/, which a release codex build reads. The parity report now checks every internal-only fact against Forever (the client, Wowhead) and says whether it is a gap of ours, not in Forever, or unverified.
• data build keeps the droppers of pfQuest's reference loot tables (raid and boss loot) at an unknown rate instead of dropping them: Molten Core's tier pieces now name their bosses.
• A skill for coding agents, skills/polestar-guide-pack/: the workflow from new to pack (look up every id with find, then lint and playtest until both pass) and the guide format on one page. new copies it into the pack's .agents/skills/ and .claude/skills/, and the pack's AGENTS.md points to it.
• data build reads Wowhead's Forever zone quest lists (cached a day in data/sources/wowhead/) and applies Forever's change notes: "Experience X instead of Y", "Level X instead of Y" and "Requires level X instead of Y" set X where the data still holds the old value (Scaring Shaky now gives 3300 XP, not 820). Quests still without XP take Wowhead's. --no-wowhead skips it; guide pack workflows and Codespaces build with it.

For contributors

• record import --anonymize for a file a player sent in: character names and realms are dropped, a short hash keys the character (its sessions still group together) and no raw copy is archived.
• npm test passes on Windows: AtlasLoot's missing-file warnings and the install test's file names use / there too (thanks @CDVolvik).

Polestar 0.2.1

Polestar 0.2.1: a redesigned welcome, quests that tick the right objective, an in-game bug report with our Discord, and guide packs explained plainly. Polestar is now open source on GitHub.

Install or update

With the CurseForge app: search for Polestar Guides (https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/polestar-guides). By hand:

1. Download Polestar-0.2.1.zip below (not "Source code").
2. Delete the old Polestar folders from World of Warcraft/_classic_beta_/Interface/AddOns/ (_forever_ from launch), then unzip this one there. You should see Polestar, Polestar_Guides, Polestar_QuestDB and Polestar_ItemDB.
3. Quit the game completely and start it again; a /reload does not load new addon folders.

Polestar_Recorder-0.2.1.zip is optional. SHA256SUMS holds the checksums. Questions and bug reports: the Polestar Discord, https://discord.gg/vMbee6F2e9, or GitHub Issues.

For players

• Quests with several objectives check off the right one: a goal counted the objective at its place in the quest's text instead of its place in the quest log, so in The Guns of Northwatch "Kill Cannoneer Smythe" showed the 10/10 medals and Captain Fairmount never ticked. 135 goals in 46 quests of the leveling guides now count the objective they name.
• A new character's welcome survives the intro cinematic: the cinematic closed it as it started and it never came back. It now waits for the cinematic to end, or comes back on the page it was on.
• The welcome is redesigned: three pages under a starlit hero (two for a later character), with step dots. It shows the guide window, the arrow and every guide at a glance; setup shows each choice's description and the colour schemes as cards that apply as you click; the last page shows your first guide on its zone painting, the beta note, the Discord invite as a link that opens it ready to copy, and what guide packs are.
• The guide menu lists only the guides your character can follow on your own faction: an Undead no longer sees the Orc and Troll Durotar and Barrens guides there. The other faction's button and All still list every guide.
• Guide packs page: the problem report box grows to fit long problem messages.
• Options > Guide packs says plainly what a guide pack is: someone else's guides in a separate addon, supported by its author. Its link opens docs/GUIDE_PACKS.md, a new page on packs for players and for authors.
• Search ranks an item first as covered by a guide only when a guide Lookup would open for it collects it: one of Polestar's own, or one from the pack chosen under Suggest guides from.
• Polestar is open source: the code, the guides and the tools that build them are on GitHub under the GPL-3.0.
• Report a problem from the game: the bug in the guide window, beside Skip, opens a report on the step on screen. Say what went wrong and Polestar writes the rest (the step and each goal's state and position, where you stand, your race, class and level, the versions and any errors it caught), sized to fit one Discord message, for you to copy and paste on the Polestar Discord (the game can't open links: "Get the invite" gives the invite once if you haven't joined yet). The guide window's menu and /polestar report open it too.
• The Polestar Discord is one click away: Discord's mark at the foot of the hub's and the settings' sidebars, and /polestar discord, give its invite to copy.

For guide authors

• A pack reads as a pack in the game's AddOns list: its TOC title is "Polestar Pack: <title>", it sits under Polestar's entry next to Polestar's own addons, and without notes in pack.json its line is "Guide pack for Polestar by ". Polestar's menus show the title as written.
• docs/GUIDE_PACKS.md: what a pack is, the steps from new to publishing, what the tools require and what we ask of authors.
• playtest plays a step for a class none of the guide's races can be, and a guide with a class header, as the first race on the guide's side that can be that class: an only Druid step in a Horde guide is played as a Tauren.
• play and dev --play stop the Lua session and exit when it cannot start, instead of waiting on it; the page redraws on its own after a rebuild.
• new keeps the port of an http origin (http://host:3000/...) in the pack's workflow and dev container.
• lint reports a | in a second or later pro or con at that entry's own line, once for each entry that has one.
• compile no longer reads data/forever/dungeons.json: a quest only DungeonJournal knows gives its title and lvl in the guide, so nothing from DungeonJournal reaches a guide pack.
• find and lint number a quest's objectives as the game lists them in the quest log: creatures, objects, items, kill credits, then exploration, with QuestieDB's exceptions. quest Q.O in a guide written before 0.2.1 may point at another objective: check each against find <quest>.

For contributors

• THIRD_PARTY.md, docs/RELEASING.md and the README say what a release holds from each data source: QuestieDB facts in the guides and the quest markers, credited; never the Codex or the zone crossings pack.
• Two more independent route searches (the fourth on the data 0.2.0 ships with) back the README's numbers and docs/SIMULATION.md; the charts compare the guides with those of 0.1.0.
• The README charts display again: an SVG's generated header no longer holds --, which XML comments forbid, and a test checks every committed SVG for it.
• docs/curseforge holds the CurseForge listing: the description to paste, the summary, the project settings and what to upload where. readme brand draws the project avatar and, with rsvg-convert installed, writes the listing's PNGs (avatar, banner, route charts) beside it.
• preview draws a multi-line edit box's text wrapped from the top, and the report window and the Discord invite are scenes of their own, held to the text-fit audit. THIRD_PARTY.md credits Discord's mark, the one piece of art Polestar ships that it did not draw.

Polestar 0.2.0

Polestar 0.2.0: guide packs, reworked leveling guides with every class's quests, and a welcome for each new character.

Install or update

1. Download Polestar-0.2.0.zip below (not "Source code").
2. Delete the old Polestar folders from World of Warcraft/_classic_beta_/Interface/AddOns/ (_forever_ from launch), then unzip this one there. You should see Polestar, Polestar_Guides, Polestar_QuestDB and Polestar_ItemDB.
3. Quit the game completely and start it again; a /reload does not load new addon folders.

Polestar_Recorder-0.2.0.zip is optional. SHA256SUMS holds the checksums.

For players

• Guide packs: guides written by other players load beside Polestar's own. A Guide packs page in Options (/polestar packs) shows each pack, turns it on or off and reports its problems.
• A centred welcome greets each new character by name, with the guide Polestar suggests; its Set up page appears only on the account's first character.
• The leveling guides of both factions are reworked: quests that block a solo player are dropped or made optional, rare drops are optional, flight paths and training come at the right levels, and Forever's own additions, fixed points and level tips are in.
• Class quests are in the leveling guides of both factions, at the start and level where each class gets them: Shaman totems, Warlock demons, Hunter pets and Beast Training, Paladin and Priest spells, Warrior stances, Druid forms and Rogue poisons.
• Each training stop in the leveling guides is for the classes whose trainer stands there, with stops of their own for Horde Druids (Thunder Bluff), Undead Paladins (Brill, the Undercity, Thunder Bluff), Alliance Shamans (Ironforge) and Alliance Druids (Stormwind, Darnassus), no Horde gap of more than about five levels, and riding at 40 from each race's own riding trainer. Alliance guides add training in Ironforge on the way out of Dun Morogh, and in Stormwind after Duskwood and on the way to Stranglethorn, drop it in Auberdine, which has no class trainer, and take every race to the Sentinel Hill flight path.
• Alliance 40-50 grinds less: Keeping Pace on the ride through the Shimmering Flats into Tanaris, and The Curse of the Tides, Pearl Diving and Return to Corporal Kaleb on one loop through northern Stranglethorn.
• Stranglethorn Vale and Un'Goro Crater, which were split into parts, are now one guide per stay in the zone. Inn names are the ones the game reports, so binding and hearthing check off; Northwatch Hold's step names its levels; and no travel step comes before goals that lead there themselves.
• Collectible, Legacy and reputation guides have clearer notes (warlock mount hand-offs, Merchant's Favor camps, Timbermaw and Cenarion Circle standings) and mark optional extras as such. Gathering loops in Mulgore and Redridge point at the nodes, and an exploration area the game names twice is listed once.
• The guide arrow knows every place a target spawns: the map marks the other places, fainter ("It also spawns here"), and a click on the arrow, the arrow button or a mark moves on to the next one.
• Quest markers cover every place a quest's mobs and objects spawn (before: at most 8 areas per mob per map), and a kill no longer redraws them all. Quest nameplate icons sit beside the health bar you see, on replacement nameplates as well as the game's own.
• Guide window: each tab shows its guide's level range; a narrow tab cuts the title, not the range.
• Windows fit their text in any font: a page's subtitle wraps to two lines inside the header, no text runs past a window's edge in the game font or in Inter, and the hub's search placeholder picks the first of its wordings that fits the box.
• Beta wording everywhere, and British spelling in the interface.
• The Recorder's command is /psrec, replacing /lsrec; /polestarrec still works.
• The README starts with a quick start for players, a download button and screenshots from the game.

For guide authors

• Guide packs: write your own guides in a pack of your own, with new to start one from a template, lint, playtest, dev (rebuilds into the game on every save), play (the real addon in the browser), compile, install and pack (the release zip). See docs/PACKS.md.
• Lint checks the places of sethome, hearth, fly and getfp, and warns on a goto whose next goal is within 200 yards; route drafts no longer write one.
• lint, compile, dev, play, install and pack stop with one clear message when the reference data is missing.
• dev reports a deleted pack.json, keeps the last good build and builds again once it is back.
• find lists inns and flight points as guide lines.
• sim compare takes the pack folder as its argument, like the other pack commands.
• Docs: the guide format on one page (docs/GUIDE_CHEATSHEET.md), and what the fly check accepts.

For contributors

• A second, independent route search checks the first; the README's numbers and charts show both.
• version sets guides/pack.json too, so the guides addon's TOC carries the release version after compile; docs/RELEASING.md separates private test builds from public releases.
• The UI renders in docs/preview show this release's windows and come out byte for byte the same from any checkout: textures go through a zlib encoder of the preview's own (Node's zlib gives different bytes from one Node to the next), quest markers are built in quest ID order (LuaJIT walked the quest log in another order and stacked overlapping markers differently), the test client's date() is UTC, preview refuses local inputs unless they render outside the repository, and the guide menu scenes load frozen copies of six compiled guides, so they change only with the UI, never with a guide recompile.
• CI runs npm test on pushes and pull requests, and fails when the committed textures differ from a fresh media build or the committed UI renders differ from fresh ones.
• --help prints a command's usage and never runs it; test helpers live in tests/helpers; one copy of each client helper in Core/Compat; every AddOns and WTF folder lookup goes through tools/lib/addons.js ($WOW_FOREVER_ADDONS first, then the detected clients); .gitattributes and .editorconfig.
• A docs map (docs/README.md), READMEs in the main folders, CONTRIBUTING.md and issue forms for wrong steps and bugs.
• The design system is docs/DESIGN.md, which now also says who the windows are for and what they must do (formerly PRODUCT.md and docs/UI_BRIEF.md).
• The tools share one copy of each foundation: the repository's folders (tools/lib/paths.js), the argument parser (tools/lib/cli.js), the XP rules (tools/lib/game/xp.js) and the races and classes with their mask bits (tools/lib/game/races.js).
• Fields the addon sets on game frames share one prefix, ps, explained in addon/README.md.

Known limits

• Not play-tested end to end on Forever yet: please report anything that reads wrong or gets stuck (Issues has a form for a wrong step).
• Forever's new 30-60 content is not in any data yet.
• Hours to 60 are the route simulator's model estimates, not measurements.
• Lookup beyond the guides, Dungeons and Rares need a data pack that is built locally and is not part of this release.

Polestar 0.1.0

The first beta of Polestar, a free guide addon for World of Warcraft: Forever.

Install

1. Download Polestar-0.1.0.zip (and, if you want to help improve the routes, Polestar_Recorder-0.1.0.zip).
2. Extract it into World of Warcraft/_forever_/Interface/AddOns/ (_classic_beta_ on the beta client). You should see Polestar, Polestar_Guides, Polestar_QuestDB and Polestar_ItemDB there.
3. Quit the game completely and start it again: a /reload does not pick up new addon folders.
4. Type /polestar in game. The window suggests a guide for your race, level and zone.

SHA256SUMS holds the checksums of both zips (sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS).

What is in it

• Leveling 1-60 for both factions, from every race's starting zone (Zephras Isle for the Skyborne included): 63 guides that hand over from one to the next. Hubs are done in one loop, side trips for one or two small quests are left out, and where the level falls short a step names a camp to grind at, with an optional dungeon for the long ones. Elite quests only appear as optional extras.
• More guides: the twelve professions from 1 to 300, 17 reputations, exploration, the Legacy challenges, and collectibles (mounts and pets): 164 guides in all.
• The guide window: one person or one objective at a time, goals that tick themselves off as you play, Skip and Undo, looking ahead without losing your place, tabs for up to six guides, transparent and compact styles.
• Waypoint arrow and travel planner: walking, flights you know, boats, zeppelins, the tram and the Hearthstone, each leg captioned on the arrow, with trail dots on the world map and the minimap.
• Quests and gear: quest markers on the map (off by default), auto accept and turn-in, an upgrade indicator on item tooltips and on the quest reward panel.
• Quality of life: quest item, target and Hearthstone buttons, XP per hour, selling and repairs, flight map helpers and more, each a toggle in /polestar options.

How the routes were made

A simulator models every quest Forever's data offers a faction, plays millions of complete 1-60 routes for each start and keeps one shared route per faction from level 12. Under that model the guides reach 60 in 122.4-123.5 hours played (Horde) and 128.7-129.3 hours (Alliance); the best route found takes about 119-121 hours. These are model estimates, not measurements: no recorded play exists yet. The README explains the method and the numbers.

Known limits

• Nothing has been play-tested on Forever's live servers yet; please report anything that reads wrong or gets stuck.
• Forever's new 30-60 content is not in any data yet; the routes take it in when it is.
• Lookup, the Dungeons journal and Rares need a data pack that is built locally and is not part of this release; without it Lookup still searches the guides.