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.