ShipNavPanel

Released as Cruise Navigation Panel on Nexus Mods. ShipNavPanel is the plugin's own name and stays on the DLL, the ini and the log; the two names are the same mod.

An Elite-Dangerous-style navigation panel for Starfield's cruise mode. Press the ship scanner key while cruising and a panel lists every body in the current system — planets, moons (nested under their planet), stations and points of interest — wearing the game's own map icons. The mouse wheel (or the D-pad on a controller) moves the highlight, a confirm key locks a body, and the game's own HUD marker points at it, updating live as you steer. Close the panel without confirming and nothing changes — which is also how you clear a locked target without picking another. Outside cruise the mod is idle and the scanner key keeps its vanilla job.

Or let the autopilot fly. Highlight a planet or moon and press your autopilot key — the one the cruise HUD shows as Autopilot On/Off, Spacebar by default — and it takes you there. Vanilla needs something targeted first; with the panel open it aims at the highlighted row instead. Press again on the same body to switch it off. With the panel closed the key is untouched.

On any other row — stations, points of interest, ships — the mod leaves the key alone and your press reaches the game untouched. That is deliberate: the game sends its autopilot through your target and so reaches what the panel's by-id route cannot, so target one and the same key still works, panel open or closed.

The row the autopilot is flying to wears an orange bar in the same colour the game puts on its own marker, whether it was sent from the panel or the ordinary way (bPanelCourseMark).

⚠ Player-facing wording is "autopilot", not "course lock". LockCourse is the internal user-event name and $CruiseCourseLock its token; what a player ever sees is the game's own English for them — $CruiseCourseLock = "Autopilot", $CruiseCourseClear = "Autopilot Off", and the cruise control hint $ShipHUD_CruiseMode_LockCourse = "Autopilot On/Off". The ini keys keep the internal spelling because that is what the mod matches on; the prose does not.

For everything else the mod points rather than targets: Starfield's UI layer has no by-id "set target", so the panel steers your eyes and you acquire the target yourself (E, by default). That reframing is what made the whole thing possible — the full story is in the phase documents below.

Controls (defaults)

key	user event	what it does
ship scanner	SHMonocle	open / close the panel (cruise only)
mouse wheel	ZoomIn / ZoomOut	move the highlight (hidden from the camera while the panel is open)
D-pad up / down	Up / Down	move the highlight, on a controller
POV toggle	TogglePOV	lock the highlighted body — or clear it, if already locked
autopilot (Spacebar; RB on a pad)	LockCourse	fly to the highlighted body — or switch the autopilot off

Every key is matched by user-event name, so rebinding just works, and one list serves both devices because a user event is not tied to one — the engine resolves it against whatever you are holding. The panel's hint pills render your actual bindings. Every control is configurable (sConfirmEvent, sBrowseUpEvent, sBrowseDownEvent, sLockCourseEvent — names or raw #id codes, comma-separated), and bLockCourse=false leaves the autopilot key alone entirely.

The autopilot key is the one control with no hint pill, on purpose: the game already prompts you with it in cruise, so a second prompt would be noise. While the panel is open the mod takes that key outright — the game does not also act on it, so you get one destination change per press, aimed at your highlighted row. Close the panel and it is the game's key again, unchanged.

The D-pad is free to borrow because vanilla spends it on power allocation and switches that off for the whole of cruise (PowerAllocationComponent.InitiateCruiseMode → EnableInput(false)), which is the only state this panel exists in. Confirmed in game: browsing the list does not move a power bar.

What it looks like

The panel wears the ship HUD's own dress: the loot-panel plate and header strip, vanilla map icons per row (station badges, settlement diamonds, the in-POV circle for gas giants), the game's own "…" truncation, a slim scrollbar, the scanner monocle's open/close sounds, a fade-and-grow animation tuned to them, and the cockpit displays' slight 3D tilt. Undiscovered stations and POIs show the game's own masked generic labels ("Starstation", …) in your language, unmasking live on discovery.

Each row's distance cell doubles as a survey meter: a slim grey bar for a partly surveyed body, and the vanilla SURVEYED banner at 100%, both lifted from the planet card. Bodies not yet read show nothing, so a late reading only ever reads as late.

On the HUD, the mod manages the cruise blip clutter: while the panel is open (or a body is locked) the off-screen ring blips stand down except the ones that matter, the locked body's marker wins overlaps, and stations get the same blip-to-icon handover planets have. All of it drives vanilla UI pieces — no SWF is patched.

Requirements and install

• Starfield 1.16.244+ and a matching SFSE
• Address Library for SFSE Plugins — CommonLibSF resolves the UI singleton, TESForm::LookupByID and the script VM through it, so it is required, not optional
• Install with your mod manager (or drop SFSE/Plugins/ into Data/)

The plugin is a single DLL + INI, with the PDB alongside so crash logs come back symbolised. No plugin file (ESM/ESP), nothing written to your save, and — since 0.17.0 — no files written at all: the planet/moon hierarchy is parsed from your own load order into memory each launch (a few hundred ms, on a background thread, DLC and mod-added systems included). Uninstalling leaves nothing behind.

Settings live in Data\SFSE\Plugins\ShipNavPanel.ini; override in ShipNavPanelCustom.ini so your changes survive updates. Note that the ini parser reads a same-line ; comment as part of the value, so keep comments on their own line. If the marker ever points wrongly on your setup, fArrowAngleOffset / bArrowInvertAngle are the first thing to try. The log is at Documents\My Games\Starfield\SFSE\Logs\ShipNavPanel.log. Since 1.1.2 bVerboseLog is on by default, so that log already carries the per-action trace a bug report needs — attach it whole, no settings to change first. Set it to false for a near-silent log; the [Recon] switches below it are the investigation instrumentation and are far louder again.

How it works, briefly

An SFSE plugin, no Ghidra and no SWF patching: the engine side is whatever CommonLibSF already publishes (UI singleton, form lookup, and for survey state the script VM), never an offset found by hand. It subscribes native functions to the ship HUD's own Scaleform data feeds (TargetLowFrequencyProvider / TargetHighFrequencyProvider), injects the panel into the HUD movie via SFSE's menu interface, and drives vanilla UI components (OffScreenIcon, DynamicPoiIcon, hotkey pills) with their own public APIs. The moon hierarchy comes from parsing PNDT records straight out of the load order — the one piece of galaxy data the engine exposes nowhere at runtime (see PHASE5-STARMAP-DATA.md for why the star map's own data pipeline is unreachable). Survey state is the one place a game function is called rather than a feed read: native Papyrus Planet.GetSurveyPercent() through IVirtualMachine::DispatchMethodCall, dispatched against a script object the mod binds itself — see PHASE6-SURVEY-STATE.md.

Repo guide: TODO.md is the current state — quick reference, open work, release checklist, and the settled-do-not-re-derive list. PHASE0-FINDINGS.md → PHASE6-SURVEY-STATE.md are the dated investigation records; STARFIELD-NOTES.md (one directory up, not in this repo) holds the cross-project engine facts.

Building from source

xmake + MSVC, C++23, CommonLibSF as a sibling checkout (see xmake.lua):

xmake -y

With XSE_SF_GAME_PATH set, the build installs the DLL/PDB/INI straight into the game; without it, into build/deploy/Data. xmake package -y builds the distributable archive. Confirm which build loaded from the version line at the top of the log.

Save safety

No forms are created, no serialization is registered, selections are plain process-lifetime state. The engine writes are two vtable hooks (input tap, camera-wheel splice) and HUD clip properties. The survey read binds a Papyrus Planet object to a body where the game has not already bound one, which is runtime VM bookkeeping only: measured across ten swept systems, save size did not grow, and a save made with the mod loads clean with the DLL removed. bPanelSurveyBind=false turns even that off. Full audit in TODO.md ("Save safety").

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, per CommonLibSF. Publishing a build obliges publishing the source.