New to starcheat or just want to brush up on what it can do? This guide is intended to be a thorough walkthrough of everything. It will not hold your hand and go through stuff like editing items but will explain what all the buttons and menus do.

First and foremost, don't forget to back up your save files if you're doing crazy stuff with starcheat. While starcheat does a pretty good job of avoiding save file corruption during normal use, it's primarily targeted at advanced users and makes it very easy to screw things up.

• First Startup
• Open Player
• Main Window
• Edit Item
• Item Browser
• Manage Appearance
• Manage Blueprints
• Manage Techs
• Image Browser
• Mods
• Options

First Startup

When starcheat first runs, it will try to detect where Starbound is installed and set things up for itself.

If everything goes as planned, you should see these things:

• A yes/no dialog confirming that the detected Starbound folder is correct. If you don't think it is, clicking no will open up a dialog to pick the folder manually.

• A progress bar showing the current status of Starbound assets being indexed.

Why does starcheat need to do this? Starbound has 10s of thousands of assets now which takes forever to search through. This process flicks through every assets, picks out the most common information and stores it in an internal database. This means that viewing and searching Starbound assets is much faster. The index needs to be updated periodically to match up with Starbound and installed mods, but starcheat should do a pretty good job of detecting when this is required.

• A dialog confirming how many assets were indexed.

This setup is relatively complicated and one of the parts of starcheat most prone to error. If you get any crashes or error dialogs but you're certain everything is correct, please post a new bug report to the issues section.

Open Players

This dialog displays every time starcheat starts up or if you want to switch to a different player.

It is pretty basic and just consists of:

• Listing of all editable players.
  • Icons on the left of each entry is a live preview of your characters.
  • The center text is your player's name.
  • The number in square brackets is your current total play time.
  • Invalid players will be silently skipped.
• Trash player button.
  • This will not delete your player, it will move all relevant files from the Starbound folder to starcheat's own config folder. It will display a dialog to confirm you actually want to trash the player, this dialog will say exactly where it will get moved to.
• Refresh players button.
  • This will recheck the player folder and update the editable player list. This button exists because starcheat keeps a copy of all players in memory each time it starts up, which may not reflect what is currently on disk. It does this because players can take a long time to load up initially when you have a lot, this feature improves the speed of switching open players significantly.

Click the Open button to open the player (duh) and the cancel button to close the dialog. Cancelling the dialog on first load will close starcheat completely. Cancelling while in starcheat will not do anything else.

Main Window

This is the meat of starcheat, where you will access everything else.

First we'll run through the menu items at the top:

• File
  • Open: launches the open player dialog as mentioned in the previous section.
  • Reload: rereads the player file from disk. This is good if you're actively editing and checking a player in Starbound.
  • Save: save all current changes to disk.
  • Export...: exports a copy of the player file to the specified file. Basically makes a copy of the save.
  • Export JSON...: exports a copy of the player file as a JSON text file. This is the same format that Starbound items/mods are in and lets you edit places even starcheat doesn't support.
  • Import JSON...: imports files from the above command. This overwrites keys in the save file, it is possible to make a JSON file that only specifies some keys to overwrite, the rest will be untouched.
  • Quit: quit starcheat, prompts if there are unsaved changes.
• Tools
  • Item Browser: opens up a dialog to search and lookup all indexed Starbound items.
  • Image Browser: opens up a dialog to search and view all indexed Starbound images.
  • Mods: displays a list of installed/detected Starbound mods.
  • Options: opens up dialog to change basic starcheat settings.
• Help
  • About: opens up a dialog with basic version information, site and license links.

And the right side of the window, from top to bottom:

• UUID
  • The first part is the header of the save file. It will generally always be "SBVJ01". This is not used anywhere outside Starbound's own internals.
  • The second part is your player's UUID itself. This gives your player a unique identity that won't clash with any other save files in the world (in theory!). This is also the filename of the save file, it must always match.
  • The button on the right simply copies the UUID to the clipboard for convenience.
• Name
  • This is your player's name in-game. Set it to any text you like.
  • The button on the right will generate a random name for your player. This uses the same mechanism as the random name button in Starbound.
• Description
  • Not used much in-game, you'll occasionally see it above your player. Set it to any text you like.
• Game Mode
  • Change your player's current difficulty level.
• Pixels
  • Change your player's current number of pixels.
• Species
  • Change you player's current species setting.
  • Be warned, switching is not perfect and can end up with funky colours or facial images if you don't manually update things in the appearance dialog.
  • This will list all possible species in the game including those hidden in vanilla and modded species.
• Gender
  • Change whether your player is male or female.
• Health
  • Change your player's current health percentage.
  • This is not very interesting since the Upbeat Giraffe update. This value represents a percentage of your total health, not the exact number. If you want to change your max health you need to do it with an item.
  • The button on the right simply fills the health bar to full.
• Energy
  • Change your player's current energy percentage. Works just like health.
• Buttons, from left to right
  • Open the manage appearance dialog.
  • Open the manage blueprints/recipes dialog.
  • Open the manage techs dialog.

And finally the left side. These are all inventory slots where you can store items. Double click a slot to open the item edit dialog for it, right click to see a context menu with more options.

Right click menu

• Edit...: open the item edit dialog for this slot. Identical to double clicking a slot.
• Import...: open the import item dialog. Explained further in the item edit dialog section, this is just a way to import items onto empty slots.
• Trash: delete the item. It will prompt you to confirm before it does it.
• Sort By...: only shows in the main and tile bag. Lets you sort your items by name, asset category and item count.
• Clear Held Items: only shows on essentials bar, wielded and action bar. This refers to your active held item and the one it swap to when you hit "x" in game. Can be useful when developing mods.

Bags/slots, full slots will show the items basic inventory icon and has a tooltip displaying the item's name and current amount.

• Back, Head, Chest, Legs: these all function the same. The slot on the left is your vanity item, the slot on the right is your main. Be careful putting items here that aren't meant to be equipped.
• Wielded: currently wielded weapons. Corresponds to the left and right hand same as in game.
• Essentials: the set of three slots you see at the top of the screen in Starbound. Normally these are locked down, but you can put whatever you want there from starcheat.
• Mouse: this is a special slot which says what item is currently attached to the mouse, this is updated when you're moving items around in game. Can be useful for removing mod items that crash the game.
• Action Bar: the set of 10 slots at the top of the screen in game.
• Main Bag/Tile Bag: your main inventory bags, they function identically.

Edit Item Dialog

If you get serious with starcheat, this is generally where you'll spend most of your time. It is accessed by double clicking an inventory slot from the main window. This dialog will let you change any options/parameters set on an item and search for new items to set. If you try edit an empty slot, starcheat will prompt you to pick a new item to generate first.

First, the left side of the dialog:

• Icon: currently this displays whatever item image starcheat can find first, this can either be the inventory icon or the item's normal sprite when held or placed somewhere. It does not currently show modified colours.
• Item Info: this displays a basic overview of an item's properties. Currently it doesn't cover too many properties and only those actively set on the item (no lookups from the assets), this will change in the future.
• Trash Item: will display a dialog confirming whether you want to delete the item or not. If so, the inventory slot will be immediately cleared and the dialog will be closed.
• Export Item: allows you to export a copy of the item as a JSON file, prompting you for a filename. This is the same format Starbound uses for mods, this lets you edit your item in a text editor or share it with people.
• Import Item: imports an exported JSON item file, prompts for location.

And the right:

• Item ID: this is the unique item key that refers to the type of item this is in the Starbound assets. You can set it to what you like but be warned, if it doesn't match back to an existing asset or if the parameters aren't right, Starbound will destroy the item and convert it to a Perfectly Generic Item. Generally you won't touch it.
• Find An Item: this button will launch the Item Browser dialog and allow you to search for and choose a new item type for the slot. If you do pick an item, it will completely replace the old item.
• Count: set the current amount of the item on the slot. Goes up to 1000 by default.
• Max Count: this button will simply set the current count to the max possible value. If the item has a key called maxStack, it will prefer this value (items like armour and weapons that shouldn't be stacked use this), but it can still be manually set up to 1000.

Item Parameters: this is where the magic happens for making custom items. Each entry in the list is a separate parameter you can edit, what each one does depends entirely on the type of item and won't be explained in this guide. Check the guides section on the wiki for some information or find some modding guides on the Starbound website.

• Buttons
  • Edit Option: will open up a dialog to edit the selected item parameter. Double clicking a parameter will open the same dialog.
  • Add Option: opens a dialog that lets you create a brand new item parameter, this dialog is explained in the next section.
  • Remove Option: deletes the selected item parameter. Note, if there are multiple parameters with the same key name, this button will delete all of them!
• Parameter Editing Dialogs: when you edit a parameter, starcheat has some special dialogues to edit certain types of parameters for convenience. The different types are:
  • Boolean: this will immediately toggle the value to True or False.
  • Integer: will display a spinbox letting you pick a positive or negative whole number.
  • Float: will display a spinbox similar to above, but with decimals as well.
  • String: displays a textbox to edit a single line of text.
  • Image: some keys will display the image browser dialog which will let you search for images to fill it.
  • JSON: this is the default dialog for all parameters not matching above types, this dialog lets you edit the parameter as raw JSON and update the parameters name key. It will also let you change the overall type of a parameter.
• Right click menu
  • Edit...: identical to clicking the edit button.
  • Edit Raw JSON...: let's you skip straight to the JSON edit dialog, ignoring any of the helper dialogs mentioned above.
  • Remove: identical to clicking the remove button.
  • Remove All: clears out every single parameter currently set on the item.

Click OK to save your changes, Cancel to discard them. All saved changes will be reflected in the slot you were editing.

Item Browser

This dialog allows you to view and search through all indexed Starbound item assets. It can be launched from the Tools menu in the starcheat main window, or using the search items button in the item edit dialog.

On the left, how you search for item assets:

• Category: use this to filter down searches to certain categories. Categories are determined simply by the assets file extension at index.
• Filter: use this to search for assets by name. Matches to both the asset id/itemName and shortDescription keys.
• Results list: where the search results will show. starcheat will prefer to show the shortDescription and fallback on the asset id. Results are live updated as you change the filter/category.

On the right:

• Item Info/Icon: this is identical to the item info in the item edit dialog.
• Default parameters list: this is a list of every top level JSON item in the read asset. These are the default values written when a new item is generated, Starbound doesn't need all of them to work (it will lookup default values for missing keys) but this method works fine.

When the item browser is launched from the main window, it will only have a close button. From the item edit dialog, it will be OK and Cancel, OK will completely overwrite the current item in the item edit dialog.

Appearance

This is where you can change all the appearance values in a save file. Each set of combo boxes maps directly to the folder of assets that matches up to this species and gender. If a combo box is disabled, there are no files to set for that species.

• Player preview: this is a preview of your character with all current changes applied, it is updated live.
• Hair: sets the hair image to use.
• Face: sets the face image to use. This is used for different things on different species, often may not be used at all.
• Mask: sets the "facial mask" image to use. Same deal as face, not used often.
• Personality: this picks the stance the player defaults to. It corresponds to a certain offset of the species' body sprite sheet (the idle ones).

Each eye dropper button will open up a dialog to pick replacement colours for each relevant image that makes up the body. The "Favorite" colour is an exception, it only allows you to set a single colour, which will open a standard color picker dialog.

Colour picker dialog This can be confusing at first, but it should make sense once you understand how it works.

This dialog shows the same method Starbound uses internally to replace colours on images:

• Load up the original image
• Starting from the top of the list of colours, replace the colour in the left column with the column on the right
• Repeat from each remaining row in sequence

Replacements further down the list can override the ones before it. For example, if the first row replaced red with blue, and the second row replaced blue with green, all colours replaced in the first step will be included in the second replacement.

• Colour table: double click a cell in the table to open a standard colour picker dialog to replace what was in it.
• Add button: add a new blank replacement row.
• Remove button: remove the currently selected row. Note, if there are multiple identical rows (same colours on both sides) they will all be removed.

Updated colour replacements should show live in the appearance dialog under it.

Manage Blueprints

This dialog let's you manage your player's know recipes/blueprints and search through all indexed ones.

• Known blueprints list: this is a straight list of all known blueprint ids. Multiple can be selected at once.
• Learn Blueprint <-: copy the selected blueprints on the right to your to known list.
• Unlearn blueprint ->: remove all selected blueprints in the known list.
• Category: filter all blueprints by category. This is taken from a key in the blueprint assets.
• Filter: filter further by the blueprint's name/id.
• Results list: all results based on the above filters. Live updates.
• Blueprint info: basic info about the first selected blueprint in the results list.
  • Craftable in: list of crafting stations it can be made in.
  • In: item ids that go in to craft the items and the amount.
  • Out: item id that comes out of the crafting and the amount.
• Clear new blueprints: Starbound maintains a list of "new" learned blueprints to show the new badge in game. This button just clears out that list.

Changes to blueprints will save as soon as you click Close.

Manage Techs

This dialog lets you manage your player's known, enabled and equipped techs.

• Available techs list: this is a list of all indexed Starbound techs that are not already known to the player.
• Unlearn tech: delete the selected tech entirely from the known list.
• Learn tech: add the selected tech in the available list to the known list. The tech will be disabled by default.
• Enable/disable tech: toggle the enabled state of the selected tech in the known list. This will mark whether or not the tech is locked out in the tech GUI in game.
• Learn All Techs: add every available tech to your player and enable them.
• Tech info: shows some basic info about the selected tech
• Equip head, body, legs, suit: the button at the top will equip the selected tech in the slot, the button below will empty the slot out. These buttons will enable/disable depending if the tech is the right type for that slot.
• Edit default movement: this button will open up a JSON editor to update the "movementController" key on the player. This is a set of temporary values saying how your player moves by default. Often these values are overridden by items and techs, but some can last for ages.

Changes to techs will save as soon as you click Close.

Image Browser

This dialog lets you search and view all indexed Starbound images.

• Search: your search query, this matches the filename and folder of the asset.
• Search button: runs the search, this can have a lot of results.
• Results list: results of your search, shown as full paths to the asset
• Preview: a view of the selected image in the result list.
• Image path: this textbox will be filled with the full path to the image assets. This can be copied directly to an item.

When launched from the Tools menu, there will only be a Close button which saves nothing. From the item edit dialog, it will set the selected parameter to the full image asset path.

Mods

This dialog displays a list of Starbound mods detected and indexed by starcheat.

• Mod list: list of all top level mod files/folders indexed, relative to the root Starbound folder.
• Export button: this lets you export a plaintext list of mods installed. It will pop up a dialog to specify the export filename.

Options

Lets you set some options in starcheat itself.

• Starbound folder: sets the configured Starbound folder that starcheat reads from. If you change this, starcheat will force a reindex.
• Starbound Assets: total number of indexed assets. The rebuild button lets you force a reindex if starcheat didn't detect changes correctly.
• Check for updates: set whether or not starcheat checks for new versions on startup.

When you click Close, starcheat will do a refresh of the currently open player.