EQBuddy — Your Personalized Guide to Norrath

EQBuddy Evolved is the next major direction: a finished, personal companion for EverQuest Legends — not another feature-count race. Current public downloads remain the 1.x line until the v2 channel opens. Evolved is not a download yet.

Identity & vision	PRODUCT.md · EQBuddy-Evolved.md
1.x stays up	LEGACY-V1.md · issue #275
Supported	Windows Evolved desktop + EQBuddy Mobile hosted by Windows
Preserved	Linux/macOS (and Windows) 1.x final builds — downloadable and usable. We are not removing them.
Licensing	Evolved is proprietary (permission required — LICENSE-EVOLVED.md). 1.x stays MIT.

An always-on-top widget that reads your EverQuest Legends /log file live and turns it into everything worth knowing about your session: kills and DPS, a fight timeline that draws every swing on one canvas with smooth, honest DPS curves, loot with personal drop rates, money, XP, spawn timers that learn from your kills (and know the difference between an open-world camp and a raid instance), mez countdowns, buff timers that learn your character's real durations, raid-target tracking with D0–D4 difficulty badges, a slow alert with the cure attached, a Gear Locker that compares every wearable you own per slot and flags arithmetic dump candidates, a built-in catalog of 11,000+ items (stats, quests, recipes, drop zones — instant and offline, refreshed weekly from the community wiki), a quest tracker that flags what you're ready to turn in, and alerts you write yourself (substring or regex, per-rule sounds and colors, a spoken voice — or just click a recent log line and it becomes a rule). Click any card to drill into details; every session lands in a local searchable history with level and AA progress charts. A tray icon keeps EQBuddy one click away even when the widget hides itself with the game.

New: EQBuddy Mobile puts any of it on the phone or tablet already sitting beside your keyboard — scan a code once and that device becomes a second screen, showing whichever windows it chooses. LAN-only, off until you turn it on, nothing to install on the device.

EQBuddy is a beta, improving weekly — and most features on this page started as a player's suggestion. Rough edges, wild ideas, wrong numbers: say so in Discussions and watch what happens.

Log-only, by principle. Zero telemetry, always contribution. EQBuddy never reads game memory, never phones home, and never measures other players — it knows only what your own log says. When knowledge moves between players, it moves because a player chose to move it: zone spawn archives export as paste-safe strings you hand to a friend, imports show you every change before anything applies, and contributions to EQBuddy itself go through a public review on GitHub — streamlined collaboration from within the community, never a quiet upload. Windows is the supported desktop for EQBuddy Evolved. Linux and macOS 1.x builds remain downloadable — Linux was built and maintained by Don Thompson; macOS click-through, spoken alerts, and Wine-prefix log detection were contributed by quasarj — and we are not taking those builds down. See LEGACY-V1.md for the support matrix.

Download: grab EQBuddySetup.exe from the latest release. EQBuddy checks for new releases itself (at startup, every 6 hours, and via right-click → "Check for updates") and shows a banner when one is available. Click it and EQBuddy downloads the signed installer from the release, checks it against the published SHA-256, installs, and restarts — no browser trip. If the hash isn't published it won't download anything and points you at the release page instead.

Legacy Linux/macOS

EQBuddy Evolved (v2) is Windows-only. The Linux and macOS 1.x builds are not being taken down. They stay downloadable and they keep working — we simply stop adding to them. LEGACY-V1.md is the full support matrix and the promise in detail; the short version:

Surface	Status
Windows desktop (Evolved / v2)	Supported product line
EQBuddy Mobile hosted by Windows	Supported second screen
Linux desktop 1.x	Preserved legacy — final build stays downloadable and usable
macOS desktop 1.x	Preserved legacy — final build stays downloadable and usable
Windows desktop 1.x	Preserved until the Evolved channel opens; current public downloads are still 1.x

Final 1.x downloads, from the final cross-platform release v1.99.18 — that tag is the final legacy tag and these links stay on it:

• Linux x64 — EQBuddy-linux-x64.tar.gz
• macOS Apple Silicon — EQBuddy-osx-arm64.zip
• macOS Intel — EQBuddy-osx-x64.zip

The macOS bundles are unsigned: first launch needs right-click → Open, or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine EQBuddy.app. A Linux or macOS copy is never offered a Windows v2 installer — once a 2.x release is public it shows a one-time notice and points at the final v1 release instead. Everything already on your disk stays yours, and the published 1.x tree is MIT: continuing it independently is welcome. Progress: issue #275.

Screenshots

The widget at a glance — one line per card: Combat, Healing, Kills & Drops, Gear & Loot, Watch, Buffs, Progress and Motes. Click any card to expand it. (The Quests card is now the Quest Tracker window and the World card is now the World window — both are on the widget's right-click menu, as Quests… and World…, and both are rooms in the new EQBuddy window. Neither surface changed; only the widget's copy of the launcher is gone, and unlike a fold a card that leaves this way has no row in ⚙ Options → Cards & windows at all — the menu and this list are where it is written down instead. Before that, the 1.98/1.99 organizing pass folded the old Money, Faction and Raids cards into Progress, Gear into Gear & Loot, Drops by creature into Kills & Drops, Sky Quest and Epics into Quests, and Travels & Deaths — together with the Zone map, Travel route and Spawn timers windows — into World. A folded card does not come back as its own card: ⚙ Options → Cards & windows lists the cards above and names on each one what folded into it — "Gear is a tab in here now" — so a card you cannot find tells you where it went, the merged card keeps the slot its parts had, and any of those surfaces pops out of its card header into its own window. Motes is the one that came back as a card in its own right, in 1.99.)	Full drill-down — damage per skill with crit and miss rates inline, hit ranges on hover, last-fight breakdowns, and both session DPS models labeled: in-combat and wall-clock
Fight timeline — the whole pull on one canvas: a lane per skill, solid bars for hits (taller = harder, bright = critical), hollow outlines for misses and resists with the log's own words on hover, dotted markers where you swapped stance or invocation, and a smoothed DPS-over-time graph whose curves mathematically can't exaggerate — colors are colorblind-validated, and damage you took wears blue so red always means trouble	Buff timers & raid targets — buffs count down with honest est labels until a natural fade teaches your character's real duration; the Progress window's Raids tab remembers every raid target your log saw die, now with D0–D4 difficulty badges for the highest tier a witnessed kill proves
Gear Locker is now the Inventory tab of the Gear & Loot card — every wearable you own, grouped by slot and compared against the rest of your bags: an item beaten on every stat by something else you hold gets flagged ⬇ outclassed, a dump candidate by arithmetic, not taste. Stats come from the built-in 11,000+-item catalog, instantly — never "BiS", it ranks your bags	It gets out of your way — hide the widget when the game loses focus, or whenever the game isn't running at all; a tray icon stays put so EQBuddy is always one click from coming back
Drops by Creature — your personal drop rates per mob, with ✦ marking drops the community wiki doesn't know yet and ✦ Copy for wiki building a paste-ready contribution	Quest Tracker — 1,172 wiki quests as a scannable list beside a detail pane; loot something a quest wants and its row flips to ready with a green rule down its edge, sorted by how close the quest is to where you're standing
The Sky Quest card is now the Plane of Sky tab of the Quest Tracker (right-click the widget → Quests…) — all 222 turn-in items, filtered by a class chip strip rather than a card per class; loot auto-checks your class's boxes, a Ready to turn in block leads with what you can hand in right now, and a reward's own checkbox marks the quest turned in	Spawn timers are now the Camps tab of the World window (right-click → World…) — kill a named (or its placeholder) and a countdown chip appears; timers tighten themselves from your own kills, every duration editable
Session history & progress charts — every session in a local, searchable database (notes, tags, compare, export), and per-character level and AA charts: every ding at its exact time, a staircase not a slope	Archive review — replay any saved log read-only; a multi-session file asks which evening you meant. Drops and wiki export work on the past
Mini mode — a one-line pill of your starred stats plus live watch-rule chips; alerts still pop	Breakout windows — floating bar charts for your damage, healing, and pet, per fight or per session
Options, now in tabs — Look · Alerts & chips · Watch rules · Cards & windows · Behavior. The alerts tab shown: the 🐌 slow alert (with its spoken voice and raid-only mode) and the buff-timer display controls	See-through mode — the panel fades, the text stays sharp; with click-through on, the game gets every click
The Zone map is now the Map tab of the World window (right-click → World…) — classic map packs with your /loc marker, a comet-tail breadcrumb trail, and spawn-point circles learned from your own kills; every running spawn timer shows in the side panel and as a camp pin with its countdown. This capture predates the World fold: the map is what you still get, its window chrome is not.	The Travel route is now the Path tab of the World window — hop-by-hop directions from where you stand to any zone, from the same graph that sorts quests by distance. This capture predates the World fold: the route is what you still get, its window chrome is not.
Spawn-point circles, up close (on the World window's Map tab) — named spawns wear the theme accent with their name beside them (a running timer's camp pin takes over with a countdown, like Bloodgurgler here); trash camps sit dim; circles pulse when a respawn is due within ten seconds. All learned from your own kills near your own /locs — this is real Crushbone data. This capture predates the World fold: the circles are what you still get, their window chrome is not.	Share zone knowledge (the door is on the World window's Map tab) — a zone's spawn points and timers as one paste-safe string; imports preview every change first, and a timer far off the zone's known clock arrives flagged. This capture predates the World fold: the panel is what you still get, its window chrome is not.
Cursor ring — a click-through halo that rides your pointer, for everyone who's ever lost the tiny cursor mid-fight	Send feedback opens a pre-written GitHub Discussion for your review — most of the features on this page started as one
EQBuddy Mobile on a tablet — the zone map with your spawn-point circles, camp pins, and the Named list beside it: every running timer, its countdown, and where its camp came from (📍 your own /loc at kill, ~ the wiki, or "no camp yet"). Tap a spawn point to confirm or remove it — the PC's map updates as you do	…and on a phone — the same page, laid out for one hand. Each device picks which windows it shows and in what order, so the tablet propped beside you and the phone in your pocket show different things. This is real Splitpaw data over a home Wi-Fi

For players (install guide)

Windows security note. EQBuddy is now signed with a publicly trusted certificate (Azure Artifact Signing). The publisher reads "FlossworksCross-Stitch" — that's David's small business, which funds the certificate personally, and yes, he also cross-stitches. The "unknown publisher" prompt is gone.

SmartScreen may still warn for a while yet. Reputation is built per publisher and it accrues over downloads and time, so a brand-new certificate starts at zero no matter how legitimate it is; single-file installers are also exactly what Defender's heuristics are tuned to distrust. Expect the warnings to fade over the coming releases rather than vanish overnight. You don't have to take our word for any of it:

• The full source code is public in this repository — what you see is what gets built.
• Every release publishes a SHA-256 hash (EQBuddySetup.exe.sha256) beside the installer. Verify your download in PowerShell with Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 EQBuddySetup.exe and compare — a match means you have exactly the published file. (EQBuddy's own auto-updater refuses any download that fails this same check.)
• Prefer no installer at all? Use EQBuddy-portable.zip from the same release — unzip and run.

If Defender quarantines the file, restore it and add an exclusion only after the hash check passes.

Quality, concretely. Every push runs 2,914 automated tests on the parser, stats and shared logic, plus a 44-scenario end-to-end suite that launches the real EQBuddy.exe and asserts what it actually draws — and a release doesn't ship until it has passed CI and been played against a real session by the maintainer. CI workflows are pinned to exact commit SHAs and run with read-only permissions by default. What the app touches on disk and on the network — all of it — is written down in SECURITY.md.

How to check the signature yourself. Right-click EQBuddySetup.exe → Properties → Digital Signatures. It should name FlossworksCross-Stitch and chain to a Microsoft certificate authority. If it doesn't, you did not get the file we published — don't run it.

1. Run EQBuddySetup.exe and click through the installer (no admin needed).
2. Launch EQBuddy from the Start Menu or desktop shortcut. A quick tutorial walks you through the key features — its first page asks whether EQBuddy may auto-empty finished-session logs (say no if you upload logs elsewhere; nothing is touched until you answer). Reopen it any time: right-click → Quick tutorial…
3. Start EverQuest Legends and log into your character.
4. Play! The widget updates live. Click a section (Combat, Kills, Loot, …) to expand details.
   • EQBuddy turns the game's logging on permanently (it sets Log=1 in eqclient.ini whenever the game isn't running), so you normally never need to type /log.
   • The dot in EQBuddy's corner turns green when it's receiving data. If it's red with a yellow banner during play, type /log in the game's chat as a one-time fix.

Playing on a Mac through CrossOver/Wine? The Windows build runs in a bottle, but a fullscreen game will paint over the widget — a Wine-on-macOS quirk, not an EQBuddy bug. An opt-in setup fixes it so the widget floats over the fullscreen game (and clicking it doesn't disturb the game or pop the Mac menu bar): see docs/CrossOver-macOS-overlay.md. It does nothing on Windows or unless you turn it on. (A native Mac 1.x .app still ships on current releases — see LEGACY-V1.md for how that line is preserved.)

Mini dashboard:

• Click the ★ star next to any section header to include that stat in the mini dashboard.
• Click – in the title bar to minimize: only your starred stats remain, in a tiny always-on-top pill (e.g. 💀 12 ⚔ 34 dps). Great while actually fighting.
• Double-click the pill (or click ⤢) to expand back to the full view.
• Floating windows (⚙ Options → Cards & windows; the heading read "Breakout windows" until 2.0.0): while minimized, the ⚔ dps, ✚ hps, and 🐾 pet stars each open a small floating bar chart — your damage, your healing, and your pet's damage by ability — switchable between the current fight and the whole session. Drag them anywhere (positions are remembered); ✕ hides one until you next minimize. The 🐾 pet star sits at the top of the Combat card beside the dps star and also adds a pet-dps chip to the pill.

Updates (automatic):

• EQBuddy checks for new releases at startup and every 6 hours, and a green banner appears when one is available — click it to open the download page.
• Right-click the widget → Check for updates to check on demand.
• After an update, a one-time "What's new" popup shows the notable changes — including every version you skipped.
• Nothing is sent anywhere: the check is a read-only request to the GitHub Releases API.
• Optional, for guilds and LAN setups: point UpdateFolder in %AppData%\EQBuddy\settings.json at a shared folder holding EQBuddySetup.exe, and EQBuddy will install from there silently and restart itself instead of sending you to GitHub. The published EQBuddySetup.exe.sha256 is verified before anything runs.

Log cleanup, splitting, and archive review:

• Nothing is thrown away. Since 1.84.0, "Keep a timestamped copy before emptying" is on by default, so every finished session is saved to Logs\archive\ as eqlog_<name>_<server>_<STAMP>.txt. EQBuddy never deletes anything in that folder — it's yours to keep or clear on your own schedule. Each archive announces itself with a banner and a line in error.log, so you can tell it happened without going to look.
• Because logging is always on, EQBuddy then empties any character log that has been quiet for 60+ minutes (a finished play session), so files never grow across sessions. Cleanup runs at EQBuddy startup and every 10 minutes — but never while the game is open. Don't want it emptied at all? Untick "Clean up finished session logs" in ⚙ Options.
• The ↻ Reset button splits on demand: everything so far moves to the archive and a fresh log starts immediately, mid-play — ideal for "one file per raid". It asks before it does that, and its tooltip names the file operation, because a button labelled "reset stats" shouldn't quietly touch a file on disk (#159, Frankthetankk). With archiving turned off, ↻ leaves your log alone entirely and only clears the numbers.
• Review any archived log: right-click → Review an archived log… replays a saved file read-only. The title bar turns amber while you're in the past; one click returns to live. Drops by Creature and ✦ Copy for wiki work against the reviewed session, and a file holding several sessions asks which one you meant.
• If you keep your logs — because you also run GINA or GamParse, or upload to another parser — turn off "Auto-empty finished-session logs" in ⚙ Options; EQBuddy then never touches your log files (they'll grow forever, so clean them up yourself occasionally). Cleanup also stands down automatically whenever the game, GINA, or GamParse is running, so those tools' log positions are never yanked out from under them.

Watch rules & alerts — see the full Watch List guide with screenshots and a use-case cookbook for every rule kind:

• ⚙ Options → Watch rules: add simple match texts (e.g. mote) — the 🎯 Tracked card shows every matching item name, quantities, and per-hour rates (wall-clock and active-play). 📌 pins a chip to the mini dashboard, and it is the whole switch for that; 🔔 and the sound box fire a focus-safe banner and/or sound the moment a matching item drops. A rule has a short name and a match text — if you only fill in the name, it doubles as the match text, so typing just Ghoul on a Kill rule works. The alert banner is a floating tile you position anywhere (open Options and drag it); during play it's click-through and never steals focus, so it can sit right over the action.
• Every rule gets its own sound — and its own color. The sound box on each rule offers seven built-ins (Ding, Notify, Chimes, Chord, Tada, Exclamation, Alarm), your own .wav/.mp3 via Custom…, Default to follow the shared choice, or Off. Give your charm-break rule one sound and your rare-drop rule another and you'll know what happened without looking away from the game. Picking a sound plays it straight away. The ● color dot beside the 🔔 cycles a seven-color palette for the banner — mez purple, heals green, enemy red — so alerts read at a glance even with the sound down. When several alerts fire in the same moment, one sound plays (complete, no cut-offs), and an alert about one creature never silences the same alert about a different creature seconds later.
• Watch any text in the log. Most rule kinds match things EQBuddy understands (loot, kills, skill-ups, deaths, milestones, spells wearing off). The Log text kind matches the raw line instead, so you can alert on anything at all — a raid-assist script calling a Complete Heal chain, a server's custom emotes, your guild's own chat conventions. Nothing EQBuddy has to recognise in advance. Empty match text matches nothing (a match-everything text rule would alert on every line in the log), and lines are only kept while a text rule is enabled and watching for them.
• Delay an alert to turn it into a cue. Each rule has a delay box, up to 30 minutes (seconds by default, m for minutes). Match the call in a complete-heal chain and sound 2.5 s later to say "cast now"; sound 25 s after your mez to say "recast it"; or put 8m on a Kill rule and you have a camp timer for the placeholder you just killed. Only the alert waits — counts update immediately. Want both an immediate and a delayed alert? Make two rules with the same match text and different sounds: a quiet "heard it" now, a loud "do it now" later. Short cues are dropped if you die (a reminder to cast is noise once you're dead); timers over a minute survive it, because dying doesn't change when a mob pops.
• Regex when you want it. The .* toggle beside any Match box treats it as a full .NET regular expression — CH (-->|on) Tank catches both spellings of a raid call in one rule. Case-insensitive like the plain mode; an invalid pattern matches nothing and explains itself in the box's tooltip; a runaway pattern is cut off at 100 ms so log tailing never stalls.
• Spoken alerts (contributed by dandrews2930). The S toggle reads the alert aloud — "Spirit of the Puma faded off you" — with duplicate lines suppressed so a chain of fades doesn't chant at you. A rule can ding, speak, both, or neither. Speaks with the Windows voice, and on macOS too (that side contributed by quasarj); on Linux the toggle says so honestly instead of pretending.
• Share rules as text. The ⤴ on any rule copies it as a compact EQB1 string sized for guild chat; the import box turns one back into a rule — with a preview of exactly what it does before you accept, rebuilt field by field so a share string can never do anything the editor couldn't.
• Stats show recent-window rates ("Last 15m") alongside session averages — pick 5, 15, or 30 minutes in Options — plus per-active-hour rates that ignore downtime.

Spawn timers (on by default):

• Kill a named — or its known placeholder — and a small countdown chicklet appears: a stopwatch, the name, and the time left — Asaka LRei 3:12`. Chicklets stack, drag anywhere as one, keep counting every timer you have running in any zone, survive an app restart, and flip to a DUE badge at zero (with a sound, if that named's bell is on) for one minute before tidying themselves away — click sooner to dismiss.
• Double-click a chicklet — it opens the World window's Camps tab (right-click → World… gets you there too) — for the full zone list, which follows you zone to zone (pick another zone from the dropdown to plan ahead; Follow snaps back when you actually zone). Every respawn time is editable in place, ▶ starts a timer by hand for camps you arrived at late ("died 5m ago"), and + adds named the catalog doesn't know. Turn tracking off with Track spawns in the menu or ⚙ Options.
• Timers tighten themselves as you play: re-kill a named sooner than its timer claimed possible and EQBuddy adopts the observed gap (your own typed values are never touched). The shipped catalog seeds the numbers; your kills correct them.
• EQ Legends' difficulty tiers ("Befallen 4 (Refined)") resolve to their base zone's named list automatically.
• Ships with 840+ named across 118 classic zones, seeded from the EQ Legends community wiki with classic-EQ references filling gaps. These are community numbers, not game data: every duration is editable in place (22 = minutes, 90s, 12h, 3d, 6:40), your edits persist through updates, and you can add named the catalog doesn't know. Named with no documented timer fall back to their zone's default cycle.
• When a countdown hits zero the row and its chicklet flip to due, with an optional sound (per-named 🔔 toggle; sound off by default — the chicklet is the visual). A timer that expired while EQBuddy was closed shows as due without re-alerting at startup.

Mez timers (crowd control you can trust):

• Land a mez and a crescent-marked chip counts down until the target wakes (a slow wears a debuff arrow, a spawn timer the stopwatch — one mark per kind, so a stack of mixed chips reads at a glance) — numbered separately for same-named mobs ("orc pawn (2)"), warning tint in the final seconds, draggable as a stack. The log never states mez durations, so EQBuddy learns them from your own fades: the gap between landing and a clean wear-off becomes that spell's clock, and rank upgrades re-teach it on the next honest observation.
• Breaks are read from the game's own mouth first: the "X has been awakened by Y." line drops exactly one chip, and a same-named add that resisted your AE mez is known to be awake — so its flailing never eats the chip of the sibling you actually mezzed (built from a player's 2,800-line Plane of Hate log, discussion #122).
• The built-in "CC broke" rule alerts the moment a mez, charm, root, or stun on your target ends early — with the mob's name, so you know who's loose.

Encounters, mob farming, and stances:

• Combat shows your recent fights (creature, duration, per-fight DPS) and, when your class uses stances, a By stance breakdown of damage, combat time, and DPS with the current stance named in the summary.
• Kills shows per-creature farming: average fight length, coin, and XP per creature, plus each creature's observed drops with your personal drop % (the History window shows the full x/y kill counts behind each rate — these are your rates, not the game's).
• Watch rules aren't just loot anymore: a rule can watch Loot, Kills (creature name), Skill-ups, Deaths, Milestones (levels/AA), or SpellFade — your spells wearing off — either one named spell or a whole class (Any CC, Charm, Mez, Root, Lull, Stun, HoT), which needs no match text and keeps working as you level into new spells. The class filters know every crowd-control spell in the game — 174 from a full eqlwiki sweep (the game has 87 stun spells alone) — so enchanter stuns like Color Flux count the same as a classic Root. HoTs are recognised from their own tick lines, so the filter covers heals EQBuddy has never seen before. Buff fades count too: EQBuddy knows the wear-off flavor lines ("Your speed returns to normal." is your haste dropping) and fires your fade rules even though the log never names the spell. A charm-break alert is on out of the box. Same counters, chips, and alerts for every kind.
• History window: Ctrl-click two sessions to compare their rates side-by-side, and Import log… parses any old eqlog file into your session history.

Maps & travel:

• Zone map (the Map tab of the World window: right-click → World…): drop a classic map pack into the game's maps folder and EQBuddy draws your zone — following you as you zone, wheel to zoom, drag to pan. The Map tab's Get maps… button takes you straight to Brewall's EverQuest Maps (unzip the pack into maps, next to Logs); any classic-format pack works. Type /loc in game and your position appears as a marker, honestly labeled with how old it is: EQBuddy reads only the log, so the marker moves when you ask it to, not by magic. Make a /loc hotbutton and tap it as you travel — each one adds to a comet-tail breadcrumb trail of your last minute of movement, each crumb fading continuously from the moment it lands, so the map shows where you just came from without ever cluttering into a route history.
• Spawn-point circles: every kill that lands near a fresh /loc becomes a spawn-point observation, and the map draws each point as a circle — named spawns in your theme's accent, ordinary camps dim — clustered, refined, and saved to a per-zone archive that only gets better the more you play. Hover a circle for the mobs seen there (with kill counts), the last kill, and the projected respawn from the zone's own clock; a circle pulses when a respawn is due within ten seconds. Multi-spawn named (Crushbone royal guards, we see you) show every point they've actually died at. Wrong dot? Right-click a circle to remove it — the removal sticks across restarts, and new kills near the spot honestly re-learn it. Right dot? Right-click to confirm the location — it stops drifting toward new kills, holds where you attested it (marked with a small center dot), and the confirmation travels when you share the zone. Whole zone gone stale? Right-click empty map space → Reset wipes the zone's archive (with an are-you-sure showing the count) and it learns fresh from your next kills.
• Share zone knowledge (World window → Map tab, bottom of the named panel): export a zone's spawn points and timers — learned ones and ones you typed alike — as one paste-safe EQBZ string for a friend, or import theirs — with a full preview first: every new point and timer change is listed, and a timer that strays far from the zone's established clock arrives flagged and applies only if you explicitly say so. Want everyone to benefit? Submit to EQBuddy opens a prefilled GitHub Discussion with your string — you post it under your own account, it's reviewed in the open, and good data ships in a future release with credit. Nothing is ever sent by the app itself.
• The forager's trick makes /loc near-automatic without addons: create an in-game social with /loc on line 1 and /doability 1 (Forage, Sense Heading, Kick — whatever you already spam) on line 2, and put it on that skill's hotbar key. Every press drops a breadcrumb while doing exactly what the key did before — the same move foragers used for twenty years. Better still, bind that hotbar slot to a movement key you tap a lot — the turn/strafe keys (A and D) are the sweet spot, because every course adjustment drops a crumb and the trail draws your route hands-free. (W works too, but held keys don't repeat — it only fires when you start moving, so a long straightaway leaves no crumbs.) Either way it's a plain game social — the game runs it, EQBuddy just reads the log, and doesn't mind however many /locs you produce.
• Named camps, pinned: every running spawn timer in your zone appears in the map's side panel with its countdown — and a 📍 pin on the map itself once EQBuddy knows the camp: your own /loc near the kill teaches it (type /loc during the fight and the next kill pins it), with the wiki's location field as fallback. Spawn timers, camp positions, and your own route on one screen — ShowEQ's greatest hits, rebuilt from nothing but your log and public wiki pages.
• Travel route (the Path tab of the World window): pick any zone and get hop-by-hop directions from where you're standing — walking connections from client-mined atlas data plus the wiki's boat and port adjacencies.

Quests (tracker, Sky checklist, ledger):

• Quest Tracker (right-click the widget → Quests…, or bind a hotkey to it): 1,100+ quests from the community wiki, filterable by class, era, and zone — sorted by how many zones away each quest giver is from where you're standing. Type anything in the search box and the whole catalog answers — quest names, turn-in items ("what needs Bone Chips?"), rewards ("what gives a Ghoulbane?"), quest givers, zones — with progress and a 📌 to track any result. A quest ledger counts what you loot (minus what the log sees leave — sales, merges, destroys), so a quest flips to ✓ ready the moment you hold everything it needs; hand-ins aren't in the log, so click ✓ when you turn in. Click a quest name for the full wiki walkthrough.
• Plane of Sky checklist: all 222 Sky turn-in items (contributed by dandrews2930). It used to be its own overlay card with a tab per class; it is now the Plane of Sky tab of the Quest Tracker, filtered by a class chip strip. Loot auto-checks boxes for the classes you play, a Ready to turn in block leads with what you can hand in right now, and each reward line is its own "I turned this in" checkbox — completed quests dim their items and stay done across restarts.
• The accuracy contract. Quest data mirrors eqlwiki.com — EQBuddy is exactly as accurate as the wiki is, no more and no less. We hold up our half: every quest's turn-in items are verified item-for-item against the live wiki (the audit script ships in scripts/harvests/, last full run found 917/917 clean), and sanity gates run on every weekly catalog refresh so a bad harvest can't merge. When something still looks wrong, the ⚑ on any quest card opens a prefilled report — and if the wiki page is what's wrong, editing the page fixes every EQBuddy install on the next weekly refresh. The road runs both ways: your own play feeds the wiki through ✦ Copy for wiki (drops the wiki doesn't know, marked in red) and /consider level observations.

Target drops, item info & giving back to the wiki:

• While you fight, the Loot tab of the Gear & Loot card shows what the creature can drop — wiki knowledge from eqlwiki merged with your own session: items you've seen drop lead the list with 2 this session · 67% (your kill count is right in the header, so the percentage is honest), wiki-only drops follow with their rarity. Hover any item for its stat block; click for the full Item info popup — stats, vendor value, who drops it, who sells it, what quests want it. Everything is cached for a week and labelled LIVE / CACHED / STALE so you always know how fresh it is. Toggle the block off in ⚙ Options if you prefer a lean Loot tab.
• Drops by Creature (the Drops tab of the Kills & Drops card — it moved there from Gear & Loot on 2026-08-21, because Gear & Loot is about your bags and Drops is about the mob) is the review table behind it all: every creature you've killed with your observed drop rates, exportable as text or CSV. An amber ✦ marks drops the wiki doesn't know yet, and ✦ Copy for wiki builds a paste-ready contribution in the wiki's own house style — per-creature edit links, an observed stat block (zone at kill time, money range, faction hits, /consider level range), and rarity labels only when your kill count can honestly carry them. Nothing publishes automatically: you review and save on the wiki. The same loop runs the other way — EQBuddy's quest and spell knowledge refreshes itself from wiki changes weekly, so community edits reach the app without anyone re-typing them.

Feedback:

• Right-click → Send feedback… — pick Feature request or Bug report, type your note, and EQBuddy opens a pre-written GitHub Discussion in your browser for you to review and post under your own account. Nothing is ever sent by the app itself; the only context appended is the app version and Windows build. This loop is how most of the features on this page got built — often the same day they were asked for.

Session history (automatic):

• Every meaningful session is saved to a local SQLite database (%AppData%\EQBuddy\history.db) — no uploads, nothing manual. Sessions end and save when you go quiet for 60+ minutes, switch characters, or close EQBuddy; the active session checkpoints every 5 minutes so a crash loses almost nothing.
• ⚙ → Session history… opens the browser: filter by character, search anything (zone, loot, creature names, notes, tags), view the full per-session breakdown, add notes/tags, copy a shareable summary, export JSON, or delete.

Click-through, overlays & window control:

• Right-click → Click-through: game clicks pass straight through the widget (border turns amber). A small 🔒 chip appears beside it — click the chip to interact again. Works on Linux too (X11).
• Grid overlay: a faint click-through grid over your whole desk for lining up game UI elements — stronger lines every fourth square, spacing slider in Options.
• Cursor ring: a click-through halo riding your pointer for everyone who's ever lost the tiny cursor mid-fight. Both toggles live in the right-click menu and survive restarts.
• Two ways to resize: the corner grip scales everything (text included, 80–160%), and dragging the bottom edge makes the widget taller or shorter without touching text size — double-click the edge to go back to fit-the-screen. Ctrl + mouse wheel zooms any other EQBuddy window, remembered per window.
• Global hotkeys were removed in 1.34: they registered system-wide and swallowed common shortcuts like Ctrl+Shift+T (reopen browser tab) from every app on the machine — a player caught it, and the right fix was removal. Everything they did is reachable from the widget itself: – for mini mode, the right-click menu for click-through and camp markers.
• ⚙ Options → Cards & windows → What EQBuddy shows (this heading was "Overlay cards" until 2.0.0; the tab name did not change): reorder cards and hide the ones you don't want — hidden cards keep collecting data.

Custom install locations:

• EQBuddy finds the game via the installer's registry entry, so non-default install paths are usually detected automatically. If yours isn't, right-click the widget → "Choose log folder…" and pick the game's Logs folder (picking the install folder itself also works). "Auto-detect log folder" reverts to automatic detection.

Notes:

• The title bar shows which character EQBuddy is following. It always tracks whoever is actively playing (the log file that's currently growing) and switches automatically within a few seconds when you swap characters.
• The ↻ button clears the session and starts counting from now.
• The widget always stays on top of the game. Drag anywhere on it to move it; its position is remembered.
• ⚙ (or right-click) → Options… has a theme picker (Parchment & Brass, Blue Grey, Turquoise, Redish, Grey, Solarized, Solarized Dark — the theme system was contributed by ahaselden) and sliders for widget size (scales everything, fonts included, 80–160%), background see-through (only the panel fades — text stays sharp so you can watch the game through the widget), and whole-widget opacity. Changes apply live — the theme repaints open windows instantly — and are remembered.
• Loot that the game auto-sells on pickup counts as both loot and merchant income. Selling straight from the advanced loot window is captured too, credited to the item named on the game's "destroyed" line. The log always records which corpse an item came from (even when the advanced loot window hides it), so per-creature drop rates work regardless of how you loot.
• A "session" is a contiguous stretch of play. After 60+ minutes of no log activity, the next activity starts a fresh session automatically.

EQBuddy Mobile (beta)

Your phone or tablet, as a second screen for EQBuddy. Click the 📱 button in the title bar, and EQBuddy shows a QR code; point the device's camera at it and its browser becomes a live view of your session. There is nothing to install on the device, and the pages ship inside EQBuddy.exe, so they update when EQBuddy does.

Eleven screens are available — zone map, spawn timers, mez chips, buffs, combat breakdowns, session stats, loot & watches, XP & AA, and your Epic, Sky and Gear checklists. Each device picks which of them it shows, and in what order (the ⚙ on the device), so a tablet propped beside the keyboard and a phone in your pocket can show completely different things. On a tablet the zone map gets the Named list beside it; tap a spawn point to confirm, un-confirm or remove it, and the PC's own map updates with you. Checklist rows tick from the device too.

Privacy and safety, plainly:

• Off until you turn it on. A fresh install opens no port at all.
• Your network only. EQBuddy serves the pages straight to your device over your LAN. No account, no cloud, no telemetry — nothing leaves your network, and there is no server anywhere for it to leave to.
• You choose what may be sent. Options → Behavior → EQBuddy Mobile has a checkbox per screen; an unticked screen is never even built, let alone transmitted.
• Pairing is revocable. The code travels in the URL fragment, so it never appears in an HTTP request; "New code" instantly locks out every device you have paired.

Things that will bite you, so you know up front:

• Windows Firewall asks to allow EQBuddy the first time you switch it on. If you dismiss that prompt, devices simply can't connect and nothing will say why — switch EQBuddy Mobile off and on again to get the prompt back.
• Guest or public Wi-Fi that isolates devices from one another will block it. So will having the PC and the device on different networks (a 5 GHz guest SSID counts).
• Your screen will sleep. Browsers won't hold a screen awake over plain HTTP, even from a Home Screen launch, so raise your device's screen timeout if you're camping.
• The breadcrumb trail is the last minute of movement, and it only moves when a /loc reaches the log — the Map tab's ⧉ button copies a social that makes that one keypress.

How DPS is measured

Session DPS = your damage ÷ time actually in combat, so downtime never dilutes it.

• Your pet counts — summoned or charmed. EQBuddy learns your pet's name from its "Attacking X Master." chatter and credits its melee and spell damage to you (shown as "Pet (Name)" in the damage breakdown). Pet kills count as your kills. A charm landing ("an asp blinks.") claims the creature provisionally — its damage shows as "Pet? (Name)" until a Master message confirms it, then merges into "Pet (Name)". If a pet ever damages you (charm broke), it stops being credited. A Pet abilities list under the damage breakdown splits that row by what the pet used — melee skills and the spells the log names — so you can see what it is actually doing, per fight and per session. Star the paw at the top of the Combat card and the pet gets its own breakout window while minimized.
• The combat clock opens when you act — hit, miss, pet attack, or getting hit — and stays open while your group keeps fighting, so slow-swinging melee and casters between casts aren't penalized mid-fight.
• Others' fighting only keeps your clock running for ~20 s past your last action: tagging one mob doesn't charge you for the whole group fight, and idle time in a busy zone never counts. The clock closes after 10 quiet seconds.
• The Combat detail view shows total time-in-combat so you can see the denominator.

What it tracks

Section	Summary stat	Click-in details
Combat	Session DPS (+ live fight DPS)	Details!-style damage breakdown per attack/spell/song — every row shows total, hits, average, per-ability DPS (that ability's damage ÷ time in combat — its contribution rate; burst rate in the tooltip), and crit rate; sortable by total/dps/hits/avg with the bar following the sorted column; accuracy, melee avoidance %, biggest hit, time in combat, damage taken per mob — self-inflicted damage (HP-cost casting, falls, drowning) shows as "Yourself" and never counts as being in combat — recent fights with DPS bars, fizzles/resists
Healing	HPS (healing ÷ time in combat)	Healing done and received — including heal-over-time ticks ("healed you over time for…"), which carry real amounts — heals cast per spell with the same breakdown as Combat (total, casts, average, per-spell HPS; sortable by total/hps/casts/avg with matching bars), who healed you, hymn/regen tick counts (the log gives no amounts for those)
Kills & Drops → Kills tab	Your kills incl. pet (+ group kills)	Count per creature type, kills/hour, group-member kill counts; per-creature farming: avg fight length, coin, XP, and observed drops with your personal rate (e.g. ×2 · 22%)
Gear & Loot → Loot tab	Items looted (+ items made)	Every item with counts (hover for stats, click for wiki item info), items created by merging, and (new, beta) live target drops for the creature you're fighting
Progress → Wealth tab	Coin earned (p/g/s/c)	Corpse coin vs merchant-sale income, items sold with prices, biggest drop, money per hour
Progress → Experience tab	XP % gained (+ levels, + AA)	XP ticks, %/hour, AA points gained with AA/hour, estimated time to next level, level-ups with times, skill-ups per skill, and (new, beta) every AA ability you own with its rank and what it does (hover for the wiki effect text) — remembered per character even after log cleanup
Progress → Faction tab	Factions touched	Net standing change per faction; a standing at the cap shows maxed (or +120 · maxed) instead of silently freezing
World → Travels tab	Death count	Each death (what killed you, when), zones visited with times

For developers

• src/EQBuddy — WPF app (.NET 10, net10.0-windows). Build on Windows: dotnet build src/EQBuddy/EQBuddy.csproj -c Release. From non-Windows machines, add -p:EnableWindowsTargeting=true.

• src/EQBuddy.Avalonia — gone from this branch as of 2026-09-04, and preserved rather than lost. It was the 1.x cross-platform Avalonia app (.NET 10), created and maintained by Don Thompson (thanks, Don!) — including the X11 click-through implementation — with macOS click-through, spoken alerts and Wine/CrossOver/Whisky log-folder auto-detection contributed by quasarj (PR #90; thanks!), and a real EQBuddy.app bundle after pmcginn pointed out (discussion #157) that a loose-files tarball gave a new Mac user nothing obviously openable.

  EQBuddy Evolved (v2) is Windows-only, so that project left the v2 mainline. To build, package or patch the cross-platform line, use the legacy-v1 branch or the v1.99.18 tag, where the source, its CI job and its release packaging all still live and still work. The final Linux and macOS builds stay downloadable from that release — see LEGACY-V1.md and the Legacy Linux/macOS section above.

• src/EQBuddy.Core — shared parser, watcher, settings, update, and session-stat logic. The widget and the mobile server both reference this; UI-independent code goes here.

• src/EQBuddy.Core/LogParser.cs — one regex per log-line type; add new patterns here.

• src/EQBuddy.Core/SessionStats.cs — aggregation + DPS fight tracking + session rollover.

• src/EQBuddy.Core/LogWatcher.cs — file tailing (500 ms polls, offset-based, truncation-safe).

• src/EQBuddy.Core/EqConfig.cs — log hygiene: forces Log=1 in eqclient.ini and truncates stale (60+ min quiet) logs; both are skipped while eqgame.exe is running.

• Publish: dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained -p:PublishSingleFile=true -o dist/publish

• Release: scripts\release.ps1 — reads the version from Directory.Build.props (the single source for every project), publishes, signs both exes (Azure Artifact Signing — see scripts\signing.ps1), compiles the installer with the matching version stamp, and copies the artifacts to the update channel. Pass -Tag vX.Y.Z to push, tag, and publish a GitHub release. (The workflow that attached the Linux tarball and the macOS .app bundles was deleted with the platform on 2026-09-04; it runs from a tag's own tree, so every legacy tag keeps its copy and can still be re-published.) Bump <Version> in Directory.Build.props and add a WhatsNew.json entry first — the script refuses to release without one. Add -Prerelease (only meaningful with -Tag) to publish outside releases/latest, which is how a v2 milestone stays invisible to 1.x clients. A 2.x release must also carry a Legacy Linux/macOS section in its notes and in this README; scripts/legacy-notice-guard.ps1 refuses one that does not.

• Knowledge refresh: wiki-derived catalogs (quests, fade messages, zone graph) refresh weekly via .github/workflows/knowledge-refresh.yml, which runs scripts/harvests/refresh.py (incremental, RecentChanges-driven) and opens a review PR with the delta. Curated catalogs (spawn timers, AAs, CC lists) are never auto-written — the PR only flags them.

• Settings live in %AppData%\EQBuddy\settings.json; errors in %AppData%\EQBuddy\error.log.

• Debug: set EQBUDDY_EXPAND=1 to launch with all sections expanded plus a state dump in %AppData%\EQBuddy\debug.txt. Set EQBUDDY_APPDATA=<dir> to run against an isolated profile (settings, history, logs) without touching your real data. More hooks in the same family: EQBUDDY_DROPS=1, EQBUDDY_QUESTS=1, EQBUDDY_OPTIONS=1 open those windows at launch; EQBUDDY_REVIEW=<file> (plus optional EQBUDDY_REVIEW_SESSION=<n>) opens straight into archive review.

Log folder auto-detected at C:\Users\Public\Daybreak Game Company\Installed Games\EverQuest Legends\Logs (eqlog_<Character>_<server>.txt), or wherever the installer recorded it in the registry. On macOS the game runs under a Windows compatibility layer, so the same path is searched inside each Wine prefix it can find: $WINEPREFIX, osxEQL, every CrossOver bottle, every Whisky bottle, PlayOnMac, and ~/.wine. When more than one turns up, the install whose character log was written most recently wins — a prefix you have stopped using keeps its (empty) Logs folder forever, and existence alone would let it outrank the one you actually play.

Credits — who built this

EQBuddy is one person's widget that a lot of other people made good. Everyone below either wrote code that shipped or handed over the one fact that turned a guess into a fix. If you're missing from this list, that's a bug — open a discussion and it gets corrected.

Code

• Don Thompson — created and maintained EQBuddy.Avalonia, the entire cross-platform 1.x build, including the X11 click-through implementation, and carried it through release after release of parity work. Linux and macOS exist because Don built them. Evolved is Windows-only, so that project left the mainline on 2026-09-04 — it is not gone: the code, the builds and the releases stay at v1.99.18 and on legacy-v1, permanently (LEGACY-V1.md). Removing a platform is not a judgement on the work that built it, and thousands of lines of Don's remain in EQBuddy.Core and EQBuddy.UI.Shared, where they run on every launch of the Windows app.
• Liminal Warmth — the Wine font work that made text and icons render at all in a prefix (#148, #166), the opt-in macOS/Wine overlay that floats the widget over fullscreen EverQuest (#178), potion buffs in the buff tracker (#171, #179), spawn timers that survive tick gaps and stop learning a cycle from the wrong mob (#181, #201), loot provenance with the all/looted/other filter (#198), the mini-bar double-click gesture (#199), a (Disabled) alert sound (#200), and the breakout restyle with three live-found charm-tracking holes (#213).
• quasarj — macOS support end to end (#90): click-through via NSWindow, spoken alerts through say, and Wine/CrossOver/Whisky log-folder auto-detection. Also /pet leader claiming (#92), window improvements (#103), Avalonia parity (#149), the CrossOver overlay script (#194), and the Buff Sets breakout and editor.
• dandrews2930 — the Plane of Sky checklist (#70) and its scrolling (#78), the buff fade picker and spoken alerts (#71), the EQ Legends Tools gear shopping-list import (#113), Sky turn-in NPCs and state counts (#127), and the Epic checklist (#128).
• ahaselden — the whole colour-theme system (#18) and its Avalonia half (#20), banner tints (#21), auto-download-and-install updates (#23), drag-the-corner resizing (#25), and rune absorption tracking (#54).
• theFlammHammer — socketed exaltations in the gear checklist, grouped and effect-aware (#134).

Reported, tested, argued with, and corrected

Bugs get fixed fastest when someone attaches the log line, the screenshot, or the achievements export. Several entries in the release notes exist because one of these people did exactly that — and more than one of them talked me out of a wrong diagnosis I had already published.

adndmike · AkevoTheBard · Amatyr · anyhow188 · aodgizmo · badly-developed · BenthamAutoIcon · Bigmatt500 · bjstrange · brucealeg · Chaosrah · chrstahl · crydeevisions-arch · DeusSilvam · elderbit · EzraSmith · Fedarov · Fennec-Halas · flclfool · Frankthetankk · gl_tchd · hstahl76 · Imaginary-Narwhal · jeremycranfill · jlcrisp · JoeyAlain · joeymavity · joma65 · Kemble-Kemble · KentCarmine · Kerdude · knaackville · KoboldCoterie · Ladylag · LeBigNasty · n3cr0nk1tt3n · pmcginn · rahvynn · sa-m3talh3ad · sahaq · sbaum23 · skwayb · Snagglefern · Taendar · Techsteps · TheLethean · themadpoet-dotcom · TheMegaSage · TropicMike · tvongaza · twidget76 · twill713 · typical-usual-chaos · Vellum670 · wizen

And the r/EQLegends regulars whose threads shaped features without ever becoming an issue number.

Every player-visible fix names its reporter in What's New, with the discussion number. That is the durable record; this section is the roll call.

License — 1.x MIT; Evolved proprietary

EQBuddy Evolved (v2) is proprietary / All Rights Reserved — see LICENSE-EVOLVED.md. You cannot use, copy, modify, redistribute, or fork Evolved without David Edwards’ prior written permission. This is not an open-source license and is not the MIT model used for already-published 1.x.

Already-published 1.x / LEGACY stays MIT — see LICENSE. Those grants stay; we do not revoke them. The invitation below applies to that published 1.x work only — never to Evolved.

MIT (1.x): use the published 1.x code, port it, build on it, ship your own tool from it — freely, commercially, no permission needed. The license's one condition (and it is a condition, not a request): the copyright notice comes along with any substantial portion of the code you take. In practice, do it the visible way: a "based on EQBuddy" line in your README or about screen, naming what you took.

Ideas — spawn timers that learn from your kills, the /loc breadcrumb trail, the camp-pin map, the log-only principle — can't be licensed, and we wouldn't want to: reimplement anything. But if EQBuddy's designs shaped your tool, say so by name, the same way the credits above name everyone whose work shaped EQBuddy.

Contributions welcome; parser fixes go fastest when the issue or PR includes the raw log lines involved.

Third-party credits are in NOTICE. The original crowd-control spell seed list is adapted from Spyxy's DPS Meter by khadesh (MIT) — thanks for making it open source. Spell, AA, spawn, item, and mob knowledge is harvested from the EQ Legends community wiki — the harvest data and rerunnable scripts live in scripts/harvests/. Zone connections come from the eqltools.com Zone Atlas. The zone maps themselves are drawn from packs you install from the source — the in-app Get maps… button links Brewall's EverQuest Maps, a quarter century of cartography we point at rather than bundle: they're Brewall's to distribute, and the credit is Brewall's to keep.

Two alert behaviors (per-target cooldown scoping and the first-sound-wins gate) were inspired by designs in EQ Legends Companion by Josh Moyers (source) — reimplemented independently, since its license doesn't permit code reuse, but the ideas were his first and they made EQBuddy's alerts better. More broadly, the whole read-the-log-and-nothing-else approach stands on what GamParse and nParse proved across two decades of classic EverQuest.