EQBuddy — EverQuest Legends Session Tracker

An always-on-top Windows widget that reads your EverQuest Legends /log file live and shows what's happened this play session: kills, DPS, loot, money, XP, skill-ups, faction changes, deaths, and zones visited. Click any section to drill into details.

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.

Screenshots

The default card — one glanceable line per category	Mini mode — starred stats plus pinned watch-rule chips; alert banners pop even here
Full drill-down: damage per skill/spell/pet, recent fights with per-fight DPS, damage and DPS by stance	Watch rules (loot, kills, skill-ups…) with per-hour rates, per-creature farming stats, merchant sales
Every session lands in a local, searchable history — notes, tags, compare, export	Background see-through — watch the game right through the widget
Spawn timers — kill a named (or its placeholder) and the respawn countdown starts from the log; every duration editable	Options — themes, watch rules with worked examples, spawn tracking, per-rule sounds and colors
Breakout windows (new, beta) — floating bar charts for your damage, your healing, and your pet's damage, each switchable between the current fight and the session	Target drops (new, beta) — while you fight, the Loot card shows what the creature can drop, with your own counts and drop % this session
Send feedback (new) opens a pre-written GitHub Discussion for your review — and alert banners can now wear a per-rule color	The minimized pill with the new 🐾 pet-dps chip — starring 🐾 also opens the pet breakout

For players (install guide)

Windows security note. Windows Defender or SmartScreen may warn about EQBuddySetup.exe — occasionally even flagging it as a threat. That's a false positive, and a predictable one: EQBuddy is a free community tool signed with a self-signed certificate rather than a paid publisher certificate, so Windows has no "reputation" history for it, and single-file installers from unknown publishers are exactly what Defender's heuristics are tuned to distrust. You don't have to take our word for 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.

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.

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.
• Breakout windows (new in 1.32, beta): 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 (automatic, optional):

• Because logging is always on, EQBuddy 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.
• 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 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.
• 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: ⏳ 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 🔔 is on) for one minute before tidying themselves away — click sooner to dismiss.
• Double-click a chicklet (or right-click → Spawn timers…) 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.

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.

Target drops & item info (target drops new in 1.32, beta):

• While you fight, the 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 card.

Feedback (new in 1.32):

• 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. The new 1.32 features are in beta exactly so this loop can shape them.

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 & 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.
• Global hotkeys (show/hide, click-through, mini mode, camp marker) are kept on this fork but ship unbound, so EQBuddy takes nothing from anything else until you ask it to. Upstream removed them in 1.34 because bound out of the box they registered system-wide and swallowed common shortcuts like Ctrl+Shift+T (reopen browser tab) from every app on the machine; unbound by default, that can't happen. Bind one in ⚙ Options → Global hotkeys (type e.g. Ctrl+Shift+H) and restart to apply. If a combination is already taken, EQBuddy says so in error.log and carries on. Everything they do stays reachable without them: – for mini mode, the right-click menu for click-through and camp markers.
• ⚙ Options → Overlay cards: 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) 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.

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 🐾 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	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%)
Loot	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
Money	Coin earned (p/g/s/c)	Corpse coin vs merchant-sale income, items sold with prices, biggest drop, money per hour
Progress	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
Faction	Factions touched	Net standing change per faction; a standing at the cap shows maxed (or +120 · maxed) instead of silently freezing
Travels & Deaths	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 — cross-platform Avalonia app (.NET 10), created and maintained by Don Thompson (thanks, Don!) — including the X11 global-hotkey and click-through implementations. It may trail the WPF app by a few releases; a linux-x64 build is attached to GitHub releases. Build: dotnet build src/EQBuddy.Avalonia/EQBuddy.Avalonia.csproj -c Release.
• src/EQBuddy.Core — shared parser, watcher, settings, update, and session-stat logic. Both UI projects 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 the csproj, publishes, signs both exes (self-signed cert; create once with scripts\new-cert.ps1), compiles the installer with the matching version stamp, and stages the artifacts locally. Pass -Tag vX.Y.Z to also publish a GitHub release. Bump <Version> in both csproj files first — the in-app updater compares it against the version stamped into the setup exe.
• 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.

Log folder auto-detected at C:\Users\Public\Daybreak Game Company\Installed Games\EverQuest Legends\Logs (eqlog_<Character>_<server>.txt).

License

MIT — see LICENSE. 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.

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.