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Summary

Captain's Log 2.8.0 has landed, and it's a big 'un. Two new headline features: the Mining Helper overlay for surface mining from the Rhino, and Galactic Genomics - habitat profiles worked out from your own survey history that tell you which species you'll find on a body before you even land. The main window is now resizable, the Galaxy Browser has a new MINING tab plus paging searches and full exports, and the installer is less than a third of the size it used to be. Grab it from the Download page!

New Mining Helper Overlay!

A live holo map of the planet under your feet: your position and heading, the SRV's 2 km scan ring, every mining location you've mapped, the scan areas you've driven over, and every commodity deposit you've marked - colour-coded by how good the deposit is. It keeps score too: per-deposit harvest counts and live RHINO and SHIP hold gauges so you don't overflow at the transfer. There's even a Mining Spot Location Estimator for those deposits you can see from the ship but can't be arsed to drive across the planet for.

New Galactic Genomics - Know Your Bio Signals Before You Land!

Captain's Log now works out each species' habitat profile from your survey history - and every rule carries its evidence ("83 of 92 finds"), so you can see how solid a profile is instead of taking it on trust. The Exobio Type Prediction then uses those profiles to tell you which species could be on the body you're looking at, with the odds and the Vista Genomics payout at stake - on the Planet Holo overlay, in the System View verdict panel, and in the Starsystem Exobiology Predictor. It'll even predict the colour variants.

New MINING Tab In The Galaxy Browser...

"Where have I found this rock?" - answered across your entire GALAXY database. Search every surface mining location and ring hotspot you have ever mapped, by commodity, closest systems first, with per-body mining dossiers and exports galore. SEARCH now pages through enormous result sets too, and the new EXPORT button saves every matching system - not just the ones on screen - as CSV or JSON.

And The Main Window Is Now Resizable!

Drag any edge or corner and the fonts scale right along with it. Speaking of display settings - PySide6 handles DPI automatically now, so the old DPI options have been retired.

Fresh Manual Pages

The manual has been fully updated for 2.8.0, including brand new pages for the two headline features: Mining Helper and Galactic Genomics. The Galaxy Browser page has been rewritten for the tabbed browser, and the Configuration page now covers the new Hotkeys and Alerts tabs.

v2.8.0 Changelog

[MAJOR CHANGE] - complete conversion from PySide2 (Qt5, old and busted, ancient) to PySide6.
[MISC] - Brought the loading of a trip database back up to speed since it turned REALLY slow after the move to PySide6.
[MISC] - Altered lcd stylesheet
[MISC] - Made additions to the Bio Map overlay - added min. distance, dist. from sample 1 and 2, update species name upon 1st sample, count of signals and analysed.
[NEW] - Added raw material % availability to the planet holo widget.
[MISC] - attempt at improving efficiency of application startup and trip db loading
[MISC] - Estimated planet value now displayed in planet holo widget.
[MISC] - set a proper/suitable minimum size for the standalone planet holo widget given the changes to it.
[MISC] - fixed some checkbox setting (true/false) errors introduced by changing to PySide6
[NEW] - CL2 now records the number of Planetary Mining Locations a planet has
[NEW] - Mining Location amounts displayed on Planet Table, the Planet Holo widget (and overlay version) and the original "main overlay".
[NEW] - In the Configuration page, under Trip Database tab, in the DB Tasks area, there is a new button "Update GALAXY from Journals" - this does what it says, updates CL's central database from the journal files, without needing to create a blank Trip database. The old method still exists as a way of creating a big Trip database (which also updates the central GALAXY database).
[NEW] - added Surface Mining Helper (SMH) overlay
[NEW] - SMH is mostly manual operation due to lack of Player Journal info
[NEW] - SMH procedure:
1) Centre of Surface Mining Location is marked by user.
2) Edge of Surface Mining Location marked by user.
3) A green dashed circle within the Area is drawn, this should be an optimal area for pinging the Mineral scanner.
4) Commodity Mining Deposits are marked by driving to them then hitting the Mark Cmod button in the SMH. A drop-down list of commodities tailored to the planet type will appear. Select the commodity type and then click OK to set the location.
5) All location data is stored in the Captain's Log GALAXY central database.
6) Location Maps can be recalled per planet per location.

[NEW] - For each mining spot, user can set some pieces of information:

Field	Values
Spot size	Large, Medium, Small, Tiny
Amount	High, Medium, Low
Density	High, Medium, Low
Workability	Great, Okay, Annoying, Unworkable
Rigs	1–12

[NEW] - Planet Holo Widget(s) now show Planet Mining Locations count and mapped count.
[NEW] - Planet Table widget Info column now shows Bio Signals count at top and analysed at bottom, for the DNA icon.
[NEW] - Planet Table widget Info column now shows Mining Locations count at top and mapped count at the bottom, for the pickaxe icon.
[NEW] - Planet Table widget now has a Helper button which only displays if a highlighted planet has mining locations. This button toggles the Mining Helper visibility.
[NEW] - Captain's Log's main window is now resizable.
[NEW] - Since we moved to the old new-hotness that is PySide6, DPI handling is automatic and there is no longer a "legacy" way of dealing with DPI. Therefore the DPI options added in recent versions of Captain's Log have been removed.
[MISC] - The Materials List in the Planet Data was a clever dynamically generated web page. Because I removed the pretty much useless Donut pie chart ages ago, there was no longer a need to keep the materials list a web page. So it's now been rewritten to use just the Qt toolkit.
[NEW] - Added new option "Keep Main Window in Overlay Mode" which as it suggests will keep the main Captain's Log window displayed even when going into overlay mode. This is handy if you have >1 monitor setup. ALT-C to toggle the main window will still work.

[NEW] - Surface Mining Helper overlay has instantaneous tooltips on mouseover giving the saved stats for a particular mining spot/commodity.
[NEW] - font sizes change in line with making the main window larger or smaller.
[NEW] - font sizes also change in line with making the newer Planet Holo Widget overlay, the Mining Helper overlay, and the Rings Hotspots overlay.
[NEW] - The Galaxy Browser overlay has a new MINING tab - search every surface mining location and ring hotspot you have ever mapped, by commodity, across the whole GALAXY database. Closest systems to your current location are listed first. Selecting a system shows per-body mining dossiers: snapshot plates of each mapped surface location, the planet holo and ring hotspot readouts, and export of the body's entire mining dataset as CSV, JSON or a smart-looking PNG survey card.
[NEW] - The Galaxy Browser SEARCH tab now pages through results in blocks of 2,000 - scroll past the bottom or top edge of the results table (or ride the arrow, Page, Home and End keys) and the next (or previous) block slides in, with the highlighted row following along - top of the new block when paging down, bottom when paging up - so even enormous searches stay fast. A new EXPORT button beside SEARCH saves every matching system (not just the ones currently on screen) as CSV or JSON, with a header block explaining which search produced the list, and including the x/y/z coordinates for feeding into external plotting tools.
[MISC] - The Exobio Type Prediction banner on the Planet Holo overlay now lists species grouped by Genus (alphabetical), then by value, and the CR values line up in a neat right-aligned column.
[MISC] - Fixed some Windows-only visual gremlins: the click-to-copy text boxes now appear styled straight away instead of staying plain white until clicked, the Galaxy Browser's table and gallery scrollbars are now properly holo-styled instead of native Windows ones, and the snapshot plates in the MINING dossiers (and PNG survey cards) no longer get a washed-out pale background on Windows.
[MISC] - Galaxy Browser searches are now much faster and no longer freeze the app while they run - the SEARCH and MINING queries run in the background, so the window keeps responding and a "Searching..." indicator shows while results are on their way. Heads-up: the first launch of this version spends a few seconds adding new database indexes to GALAXY.db - that is a one-off, and searches are snappier after it.
[MISC] - Exobiology FIND SYSTEMS results (from the CATALOGUED and UNRESOLVED SIGNALS tables) are now listed nearest to your current system first, like every other Galaxy Browser search - click the column headers to re-sort them however you like.

[MISC] - The Starsystem Exobiology Predictor tab now uses bigger, easier-on-the-eyes text.
[MISC] - The Galaxy Browser window no longer forces itself on top of everything - it is now an ordinary window that you can hide and recall with the Galaxy button whenever you fancy a browse.
[MISC] - The MINING dossiers have had a tidy-up: the system name now appears once at the top of the dossiers in a click-to-copy box, each body's details are merged into a single banner line with the OPEN SURFACE MAP and EXPORT buttons riding on the right, and every map plate now has an info box attached to it listing the materials found at that location plus the best deposit spot - commodity, amount, density and workability, colour-coded as usual.
[MISC] - Exported survey cards and search exports now stamp the full Captain's Log version number in their footer instead of just "v2".

[NEW] - Galactic Genomics: Captain's Log works out each species' habitat profile from your survey history - which species you have sampled, and what the bodies they were found on had in common. Body class, temperature, pressure, gravity and atmosphere, all worked out from the finds already in your GALAXY.db.
[NEW] - The Exobiology tab's habitat flowchart draws those rules, and every rule carries its evidence - "83 of 92 finds" - so you can see how solid a profile is instead of having to take it on trust.
[NEW] - The flowchart header and the tab footer tell you where a profile came from: "from your surveys", or the Captain's Log reference set that ships with the installer and stands in for species you have not sampled three times yet.
[NEW] - New REBUILD GENOMICS button on the Exobiology tab re-derives every profile from the finds already in your database. Worth a click after a big journal import.
[NEW] - Species CR values come from what Vista Genomics actually paid you. Sell organic data and the figures sharpen; until then you get a reference figure, clearly labelled as one.
[NEW] - BioSample colour variants are recorded against each find, and the flowchart lists the colours you have actually pulled off a species.
[MISC] - The Exobio Type Prediction banner, the System View verdict panel and the Starsystem Exobiology Predictor all predict from these habitat profiles.

[MISC] - Journal import tidy-up: organic scan finds that used to be thrown away silently are now recorded, some ring hotspot rows that pointed at nothing have been cleaned out, and importing a big journal archive is around two and a half times faster (638 journals: 234 seconds down to 92).
[MISC] - The Planet Holo widget now draws the near side of planetary rings in front of the planet sphere (the far side stays hidden behind it), so ringed planets finally look properly three dimensional.
[MISC] - The Planet Holo widget now sizes ring systems to their true scale relative to the planet, so on wide ring systems the inner edge of the rings no longer digs into the planet body.
[MISC] - The Planet Holo widget's atmosphere indicator is now a smooth soft glow around the planet's limb instead of the old concentric circles.
[MISC] - Fixed: on planets with very wide ring systems the inner edge of the rings could still be drawn inside the planet's girth - the rings now always clear the planet body.
[MISC] - Ring bands in the Planet Holo widget are now colour coded by ring class: icy rings glow an icy pale blue, while metal rich and rocky rings keep the classic sand tone.
[MISC] - The ring info readout in the Planet Holo widget now sits in a translucent holo panel, so it stays readable when a ring band sweeps behind it - the rings still linger through the glass.
[MISC] - The Planet Holo widget's latitude/longitude grid now leans at the same angle as the rings and spins about that tilted axis, so ringed planets look like one proper spinning system (tidally locked worlds still hold still).
[MISC] - The Planet Holo widget's rings are now lit evenly all the way round, with the planet casting a soft-edged shadow across the far side of the ring system - no more half-bright/half-dim bands.

[NEW] - The Galactic Genomics flowchart now shows how each colour variant of a species is decided - a gold COLOUR FROM CORE DEPOSIT / COLOUR FROM HOST STAR panel hangs off the result node, one row per variant from the core deposit it grows over or the class of star its body orbits, in mint for colours you have sampled yourself and sand for ones predicted from known parameters.
[MISC] - The Galactic Genomics zoom window now redraws the flowchart live at whatever zoom you are at instead of stretching a baked bitmap, so text and hairlines stay crisp at every zoom level, and the census strip snapshot is baked at exactly its display size for high-DPI screens.
[NEW] - The UNRESOLVED SIGNALS tab now lists the worlds behind whichever genus you select: a SIGNAL BODIES table shows every body where you already have a biosignal for that genus, with its planet class icon, a mint tick for worlds a probe has mapped and a sand dash for ones still needing a probe run before you can drop in, and the distance from your current system, nearest first. Double-click a row to open that system in the Galaxy Browser's SYSTEM VIEW tab with the planet selected.
[MISC] - Genus rows on the UNRESOLVED SIGNALS tab now get their own habitat flowchart when the genus has a profile, the genus readout no longer claims you have not sampled a genus you have dozens of finds in, and the FIND SYSTEMS button has moved up next to the SPECIES CENSUS tables it acts on instead of hiding at the bottom of the HABITATS panel.

[MISC] - Captain's Log's animated spinning rings logo (splash, About and the Imgur upload spinner) is now a native Qt widget - the embedded web browser has been shown the airlock, so the app starts faster and the installer is much smaller.