Startup screens
Before any dashboard opens, Kodachi asks you to accept the terms, then offers a launcher. The simple picker gets you into a dashboard in one click; the advanced screen shows system readiness and every startup option first. Quick Launch also remembers a startup preference: Simple shows the dashboard cards, Advanced opens the fuller setup screen, and Direct opens the dashboard you used last without asking (if the previous start never finished, Kodachi shows the picker instead). Picking a dashboard connects no VPN and starts no Tor routing. While the launcher is on screen, Kodachi signs you in (automatic sign-in is on by default) and runs the startup privacy actions you have switched on: out of the box a random hostname and DNSCrypt, once after each boot (a random MAC and a random or synced timezone also run once per boot if you add them), while Restore MAC, Detorrify and Prepare Tor, if switched on, run at every start. Settings under Dashboard, Startup lists them all, and so does the Launch Settings tab of Advanced setup. On a plan that does not include Advanced setup, the Advanced launch button opens the upgrade screen instead. On the Free plan some cards carry a PREMIUM badge and an Unlock button instead of Open: Unlock opens the upgrade screen, where Continue with Free opens Lite Classic instead. Which dashboards your plan opens is shown live on the support page.
What is real on this page: every picture is the Kodachi dashboard itself, rendered by its own interface code, and every highlighted box is that control's real measured position, except SOC's twelve panel regions, which are declared by hand because its map is a single canvas with nothing inside it to measure. Explanations come from the dashboard's own tooltips, labels and help text. The Live replica is that screen’s real markup and stylesheet with every script removed, so it looks identical and cannot do anything. What is not: nothing on this page runs a command, and no dashboard logic is included. The readings are not a real machine. Every screen was rendered against the project’s own test harness with no backend behind it, so the score, addresses, interfaces and process names are sample values chosen to make each panel show what it looks like when it has data. Where this manual supplied an address it used a reserved documentation range, but some sample rows carry well-known public addresses of their own, so read no address here as this machine’s. Of the 347 explanations on this page, 313 are the dashboard’s own tooltip, label or help text, 34 carried no tooltip of their own and were supplied by this manual (0 lifted from the dashboard’s own settings index and service registries, 34 written here), and 0 name the control and its screen because the dashboard gives that control no description of its own.
347 walkthrough steps covering 201 distinct controls across 10 screens of Startup screens. A control that appears on several screens, the refresh trio and the tab strip for example, is explained on each of them, which is why the two numbers differ. Keyboard: ← → step, space play or pause, k open or close the Know this card.
The 14 Know this cards on this page compare controls that look alike and are not. They open on 76 of the 347 steps. Every comparison in them is anchored to a sentence the dashboard itself ships, in its command catalog, its action catalog, its mode descriptions or its AutoShield catalog, and the build refuses to publish a card whose quoted sentence is no longer present in that source. Nothing here is a benchmark this project has run. One limit worth stating: the dashboard offers its tunnels in a dropdown and a filter row rather than as separate buttons, so of the fourteen protocols only WireGuard has controls of its own on these pages. The rest are named inside those two list controls, which is where their cards open.