Ship Detection - FastTrek Docs

Arguably the most important part of FastTrek’s setup, Ship Detection matches up the position of your docks in the game so that FastTrek can correctly identify which ships you have available to use and what status they are currently in.

Ship detection needs to be run whenever:

• You first set up FastTrek
• You change the size of your game window
• You unlock new ship docks in the game
• You open side chat (which effectively changes the width of the playable area)

How to run Ship Detection

If you have never run Ship Detection before, the Setup Wizard will automatically open Ship Detection for you. Otherwise, you can open Ship Detection at any time from the main FastTrek window by clicking Ships/Docks on the ‘Start’ tab.

Ensure all ships are crewed (have at least a captain), then on the ship detection screen, use the Auto-detect Ships button to start the detection process.

FastTrek will now press the ship number keys (1, 2, 3, etc.) to select each dock in turn, noting which ships are present. This might take a couple of seconds per ship, please be patient.

For best results

Manually set your game to the System screen (Stock: F3 / Mod: H) before starting Ship Detection, ideally ensuring that the bottom edge of the screen is nice and dark. You are aiming for maximum contrast between the selected ship dock and the background.

So things to avoid:

• Flare from the station shield
• Bright elements such as stars, mining nodes, text
• Bright and flaring systems, such as Transogen, Icy Asteroid systems, singularities, etc.

Troubleshooting

Ship Detection fails to find any ships

If Ship Detection fails to find any ships at all, please check that the setup wizard passes.

It gets stuck in the ship management screen

Make sure that all your ships are crewed (have at least a captain assigned). Uncrewed ships will open the ship management screen, which Ship Detection cannot handle.

Some ships are not detected

Ensure that the game window remains visible even behind FastTrek and try running ship detection again. If you have enough space on your monitor or have a second monitor, try moving the game (or FastTrek) so that it is fully visible.

Ships show as ‘Unknown’ or incorrect status

Once detection completes, it may take a few seconds for ship status to update on the Ship Detection window. If ships are listed, but remain as ‘Unknown’ or with incorrect status, please restart FastTrek, then check each individual ship tab to see if the ship status updates correctly there. If not, please use the ‘Screenshot’ button on the Ship Detection screen to take a screenshot and get in touch for further assistance, sending both the screenshot and FastTrek’s log file.

Side Chat

If you frequently use side chat in the game, this effectively reduces the width of the playable area, which in turn changes the positioning of the docks.

To avoid having to re-run Ship Detection every time you open side chat, you can enable the following option in FastTrek’s settings:

Settings > Advanced > Auto-adapt docks to game window width

When enabled, FastTrek will attempt to automatically adjust the dock positions based on the current game window width. This should work for most ship configurations, but if you encounter erratic behaviour or incorrect ship status recognition, unfortunately this option may not be suitable for your setup and you will need to re-run Ship Detection after changing the game window width.