Starlight WIP
Starlight is an automatic documentation builder for Stellaris. The idea is to point it at a game setup or modded playset and get something closer to a real technical guide than a pile of scattered game files.
Stellaris modding has a lot of hidden structure. Technologies unlock other technologies. Events chain into other events. Localisation text references scripted effects, triggers, and data that live somewhere else. Starlight tries to pull those threads together and present the game data in a way that is actually useful when you are trying to understand why something appears, where it comes from, or what depends on it.
Guide Generation
The core of Starlight is the guide index. It reads the resolved game data, builds relationships between systems, and turns that into a navigable view of technologies, events, archaeology chains, routes, and other content groups.
The work that made the project feel real was moving expensive derivations out of the render path. Instead of recalculating chains, graph rows, distributions, and counts every time the UI redraws, Starlight builds a cached presentation layer after the guide is generated. The UI can then focus on showing the guide instead of rebuilding it.
Making It Feel Usable
Large modded playsets can produce a lot of data, so the app has to behave well under load. Heavy graph views are virtualized so the interface only renders the visible rows, and the overview stays intentionally lighter instead of mounting every expensive panel at once.
Starlight also caches thumbnails for resolved game art. Stellaris assets are not always cheap to decode repeatedly, especially while scrolling through a large list, so the app converts them into reusable cached previews keyed by the source file and metadata.
The other important part was normal desktop ergonomics. I did not want an app that only looked right when maximized. The layout now treats normal window sizes as the default case: flexible panels, wrapping content, smaller chrome, and fewer hard-coded widths.
Why It Exists
Starlight is the kind of tool I want when a game has more information than any one person can keep in their head. It is not trying to replace a wiki by hand-writing articles. It is trying to make the game explain itself from the data it already ships.