Features

Guides and the engine#

Navigation#

• A 3D waypoint arrow points at the current goal, shifting from the accent to jade as you arrive, with distance and ETA. Distances read in yards, the game's unit, or in metres (Options, Arrow & routes).
• The travel planner uses known flight paths, boats, zeppelins and your Hearthstone when they are faster. Each leg has its own caption on the arrow ("Fly to Crossroads", "Take the boat to Menethil Harbor", "Hearth to Razor Hill").
• Trail dots on the world map and the minimap crawl along the route between its waypoints (Map options can turn them off).
• Zone crossings.Walks between zones go through the real tunnels, passes, bridges and gates (an Era map addon's zone connections), one waypoint at a time ("Go to Ashenvale"): from Sun Rock Retreat to Astranaar through the Talondeep Path, not over the ridge.
• /polestar way <x> <y> [label] points the arrow anywhere on the current map.
• Go anywhere.Shift-click the world map or the minimap and the arrow takes you there, routed like any goal; Alt-click works over map icons. Click the spot again to let it go.
• Nearby services./polestar near repair (trainer, a profession, class, weapon, reagents, vendor, innkeeper, bank, auction, flight, stable) points the arrow at the quickest one to reach; the map's tracking menu and the guide window's Nearby services button list them, the button with a page of the weapons a weapon master can teach you. Once you get there, the arrow is back on the guide.
• OpenMap.On OpenMap (opens in a new tab)'s seamless world map the trail dots carry on across zone borders and show on the whole-world view too. OpenMap's menu has a "Polestar trail dots" switch.
• Other addons' waypoints (Options, Integrations, TomTom). Without TomTom, "Let other addons set waypoints" (off by default) lets addons that set TomTom waypoints point Polestar's arrow and makes /way work; addons that expect TomTom's own settings may not work with it on. With TomTom, the arrow can follow TomTom's. Addon authors: Polestar.Nav.API (docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, "Nav API").

Pathing by Shortest Path Forever#

The arrow walks real paths: round cliffs, water and walls, through the town gate and down into the mine, not over the edge. That is the work of Shortest Path Forever (opens in a new tab) by Cillian Berragan (cillian.dev (opens in a new tab)), who baked walking maps of the continents from the game client and wrote a router that finds a route over them a couple of milliseconds at a time, so the game never stutters. It is beautiful work, and he generously said yes when we asked to use it. Polestar's travel planner still picks the flights, boats and Hearthstone; the router that started from his walks every leg between them. It keeps to roads where they are not much longer, round steep slopes, and out of the other faction's towns; when a walk must enter one (a quest inside Southshore for a Horde character), the arrow says "Hostile town: Southshore" once as the walk starts, and the walk's journey step reads the same when the route has more steps. Route style (Options, Guide, Arrow & routes) picks how it walks: Fastest takes the shortest way over hills and across fields, Balanced (the default) keeps to roads that aren't much longer and goes round hills, and Roads stays on roads even when they're longer. Every style keeps out of the other faction's towns.

The router ships with Polestar as the Polestar_Nav folder. Polestar's walking router started from Shortest Path Forever v1.16.0 by Cillian Berragan, with thanks; Polestar maintains it since 2026-10-16. It runs on Polestar's own walking maps of Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor and Zephras Isle, made from the game's geometry in a format grown from his by a port of his map baker (GPL-3.0-or-later; what came from where is in addon/Polestar_Nav/CREDITS.md (opens in a new tab)). Walk real paths (Options, Arrow & routes) turns it off. If you like it, try his addon: Shortest Path Forever on CurseForge (opens in a new tab) plans whole journeys with flights, boats, zeppelins, portals and live departure times.

Shortest Path Forever: an option. With it installed, Polestar still guides by default. Hand guiding to Shortest Path Forever (Options, Integrations) hands it the route instead: each goal goes to Shortest Path Forever, whose arrow, route and journey take you there, and Polestar's own arrow, route lines, journey steps, travel button, transport alerts, map clicks and /way step aside, so the two never guide at once (Polestar's walking maps are not even loaded). The guide window and the map pins stay. A kill or collect area is handed over as an area, so it holds you there until the goal is done; if you clear or replace the journey, Polestar leaves it be until the guide moves on. With the option off, a journey you start in Shortest Path Forever itself still wins: Polestar steps aside the same way while it runs, and guides again when it ends. If Shortest Path Forever finds no way to a goal, or turns its journeys off, Polestar's own arrow guides you there instead.

Quests and the map#

• Quest markersgivers, objectives and turn-ins on the world map and the minimap, with tooltip lines on the mobs and items a quest needs and quest levels in the log. Nameplate icons mark the mobs you still need, beside the health bar of EllesmereUI and other replacement nameplates too.
• Rare and treasure spawns, dungeon entrances, flight masters, docks and inns can mark the map too. Every map icon is off by default and turns on under Map in the options; the arrow's target, its route and the regions the guide step's mobs and objects spawn in (shaded on the world map and the minimap) always show.
• A world map without fog of war, with coordinates and zone level ranges.

Gear advice#

• Upgrade indicator on item tooltips: by how much an item is an upgrade for your spec at your level, from stat weights per spec (detected from your talent points) and level band.
• On the game's reward panel every choice that is an upgrade gets a green arrow, the one to take is framed, and a coin marks the one that sells for most. Turn-in goals name the best reward.
• In your bags every item that is an upgrade gets the same green arrow, in the game's bags and in Baganator.

Lookup, Dungeons and Rares#

Lookup, Dungeons and Rares read the Codex, a data pack built on your own machine from addons you have installed (Data and licensing); it is not part of the release. Without it Lookup still searches the guides, and each section says what is missing.

Appearance and UI suites#

Quality of life#

Quest item, target and Hearthstone buttons; XP per hour and time to level; the level the guide wants you to reach, marked on the game's XP bar; selling greys and repairing (optionally from the guild bank first); buying what a step asks you to buy; learning new spells at class trainers; taking the best quest reward and wearing rewards that are upgrades; instant quest text, single-option gossip and faster auto-loot; hiding combat error spam; flight map and death helpers, and releasing at once in battlegrounds; setting your home at the inn the guide names when you talk to its innkeeper (off by default). Requests from other players: accept summons, resurrections and friends' or guildmates' party invitations; decline other party invitations, guild invitations and duels (friends and guild excepted). Hold Shift to skip auto-accept, auto-turn-in, auto-sell, training, binding or the flight helper once, or to answer a request yourself.

With a gamepad#

Polestar plays with a gamepad on Forever (ported from the translated names database, @moust4ki). Open its options from the minimap button (or /polestar gamepad without the game's gamepad interface): their Gamepad page names the buttons (Xbox letters or PlayStation shapes, read off the gamepad by default), and its Key bindings tab binds every Polestar action: next and previous step, browse the guide, show or hide the guide window, the guide menu, the options, report a problem, and the quest item, target and Hearthstone buttons. Nothing is bound until you bind it. Press A on a row, then a button, or hold one button and press another for a combination: Polestar watches its combinations itself, keeps the second button from the game only while you hold the first, and never acts on one in a fight. With the game's gamepad interface on, LB and RB are its targeting buttons and every combination with them is the game's own: the row says so before it binds one. Tap B to cancel, hold B to bind B itself; Y unbinds. The rows take keys of the keyboard too.

The guide window never takes a button away from the game. To browse it with the gamepad, bind Browse the guide with the gamepad: the D-pad picks a line (up from the goals: Skip, the bug, the menu and the tabs), A points the arrow there or uses the quest item on its line (not with the game's gamepad interface, whose own buttons Polestar leaves alone), X shows the line's details, LB / RB look at the previous and next step, Y minimizes the window, and B gives the gamepad back to the game.

Every Polestar window you open (the guide menu with Lookup and Dungeons, the options, the welcome, the route choice, the report and copy windows, the drop-down menus) answers the gamepad while it is open: the D-pad moves the focus (an accent ring), A selects, B closes or goes back, LB / RB change tabs or pages, left / right adjust a slider or a drop-down, Y puts a setting back to its default. A window that opens by itself (the welcome on a new character, the choice of where to level next) takes no button until you press the Browse the guide button, which its bar shows. A bar under the window lists the buttons no button on screen shows; B sits on the window's close button. The gamepad goes back to the game when the window closes or a fight starts, and returns after it. Turn the bar off, or the windows' navigation altogether, on the Gamepad page. Without a gamepad plugged in, none of it shows: everything works with the mouse and keyboard as before.

Recorder#

Polestar_Recorder is an optional companion addon that records your sessions to improve the routes. It is off until you turn it on (/psrec on, or Options > Recorder > Start recording) and writes nothing while off. Recordings replace the Classic Era estimates with Forever facts (quest XP, NPC and object positions, trainers, flight paths and times), feed the Codex what only play shows (rares and treasures, drops and how often they fall, dungeon entrances and bosses), and record report turns them into per-step timings: passes, median and p75 time, XP per hour, time in combat, deaths and travel, then the slowest steps and detours, the steps to fix first.

Slash commands#

/polestar (or /pole) shows or hides the guide window; settings live in /polestar options, grouped by what you came to do: Guide, Appearance, Map, Questing, Discovery, Quality of Life, Integrations (settings for other addons Polestar works with, such as the community quest database, shown while they are installed), Guide packs, Gamepad, Recorder and About, with a search that finds any setting.

With the game's gamepad interface on (Options, Gamepad, Enable Gamepad UI) there are no slash commands: the game blocks gamepad actions after any addon command typed in chat, until the game freezes. Polestar's minimap button (on by default then) and its key bindings open the guide and the settings instead, and Polestar keeps out of the game's own windows.