The Horadric Cube

"A box. A small box. The Horadrim built it to fit a sword inside, and a hammer, and the staff that broke the Three. The Cube does not contain. It transforms."

The Horadric Cube is the local companion to The Horadrim — the Diablo 4 personal codex hosted at horadrim.zmuuzn.nl. It runs in your system tray during play, listens for a single hotkey, captures the configured tooltip region, OCRs it locally, parses the result into a structured payload, and posts the payload to the Horadrim's reliquary gate.

The codex grows without ceremony. You hover an item, you press the key, the vault remembers.

The Horadrim's Oath

The Horadrim reads. It does not touch.

• No game memory access.
• No process injection.
• No network interception.
• No client modification.
• Only the configured tooltip region is captured. The PNG is deleted after OCR.
• Only parsed JSON crosses the wire — never raw screenshots.

The Cube models its capture pattern on Diablo4Companion — a publicly tolerated precedent — and inherits its safe-harbor by design proximity. The shield is the pattern, not the obscurity.

If you intend to stream while running the Cube, the disclosure is "screen OCR only, no memory access, same pattern as publicly tolerated tools." Document that to your audience explicitly.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                         The Horadric Cube                           │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Tauri v2 (Rust core)                                               │
│    ├── tray.rs ........... system tray icon, four states            │
│    ├── hotkey.rs ......... global Ctrl+Shift+H, emits event         │
│    ├── capture.rs ........ region screenshot via xcap, conditioning │
│    ├── sidecar.rs ........ Tesseract subprocess, stdout → text      │
│    └── auth.rs ........... OS keychain via the keyring crate        │
│                                                                      │
│  Vue 3 + TypeScript + UnoCSS (tray window UI)                       │
│    ├── App.vue ........... shell with status / history / settings   │
│    ├── composables/ ...... useCube — single reactive store          │
│    ├── services/ ......... parser, api, storage, auth, cube bridge  │
│    └── pages/ ............ StatusPanel, HistoryPanel, Settings,     │
│                            About                                    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Pipeline

hotkey fires (Ctrl+Shift+H)
    │
    ├─→ Rust capture_and_ocr(region)
    │     ├─→ xcap → cropped PNG (cached, deleted on next launch)
    │     └─→ Tesseract sidecar → raw OCR text
    │
    ├─→ TS parser → IngestPayload (item | aspect)
    │     └─→ catalog match: aspect_name → aspect_id
    │
    └─→ POST horadrim.zmuuzn.nl/api/ingest/tooltip
          ├─→ on success: tray flashes green, queue drains
          └─→ on failure: tray flashes red, payload queued for retry

Tech Stack

• Tauri v2 (Rust core, Vue UI in webview)
• Vue 3 + TypeScript 5 + UnoCSS (Vault palette mirroring The Horadrim)
• xcap for screen region capture
• Tesseract as a bundled Windows sidecar binary (not a Rust crate, not WASM)
• keyring for OS-level secure token storage
• tauri-plugin-store for settings, catalog cache, offline queue
• tauri-plugin-http for outbound HTTPS to the Horadrim backend

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+ and npm 10+
• Rust (rustup, latest stable)
• Windows-specific build prerequisites for Tauri — see https://tauri.app/start/prerequisites
• Tesseract sidecar binary + eng.traineddata placed in src-tauri/sidecars/ (see that directory's README for sourcing)

Development

# install JS deps
npm install

# pull Rust deps + run dev with hot reload (Rust required)
npm run tauri dev

# build a Windows installer (.msi + .nsis)
npm run tauri build

First-launch checklist

1. Drop the Tesseract sidecar into src-tauri/sidecars/ (filename: tesseract-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe) plus eng.traineddata. Without these, captures will fail with a clear sidecar error in the History tab.
2. Run tauri dev — the Cube launches hidden in the tray. Click the tray icon to surface the settings window.
3. Authenticate — click "Open browser flow" in Settings → The vault. The Horadrim's /auth/redirect?cube=1 opens in your default browser. After completing the Gatekeeper OAuth, paste the resulting bearer/exchange code back into the Cube and seal it.
4. Pick your region preset — the default is ultrawide 3440×1440. If your display is different, switch in Settings → Capture region.
5. Hover an item in Diablo 4 and press Ctrl+Shift+H. The tray icon flashes amber → green; the Codex tab shows the parsed payload.

Phase 2 status

This is Phase 2 of The Horadrim — see the parent experiment log at zmuuzn/documents/experiment-logs/00047-the-horadrim.md. The Phase 1 backend is live at horadrim.zmuuzn.nl; Phase 3 (the Aspect Alchemy engine and the web codex) is downstream of this Cube being functional.

v0 limitations:

• The OAuth flow opens the browser but does not auto-complete back into the Cube. The investor pastes the token into Settings. v0.2 closes this loop with a deep-link handler or a local HTTP listener.
• Region presets are starting estimates. Pixel-perfect regions ship in v0.2 with an in-app drag-to-define tool.
• The parser is a v0 heuristic. Real captures will surface holes; iterate src/services/parser.ts against samples in the History tab's "raw OCR" toggle.
• Tray icon is the default Tauri icon for all four states; the tooltip text carries the situational signal. Distinct icon variants (idle / capturing / success / error) ship in v0.2.
• No paragon board capture. Single tooltip only — that's the locked v0 scope.

Lab journal

CLAUDE.md in this directory is the experiment-specific lab journal — read it before picking up the scalpel.

License

Internal — The Horadric Cube is part of the Zmuuzn laboratory and not yet licensed for redistribution.