reducing manual work during league starts
A Path of Exile league start is a race. The first hours set up your whole economy, and every minute alt tabbed to a wiki is a minute lost. Most gaming helpers solve this by reading game memory or injecting into the process, which is exactly how accounts get banned.
designing within Path of Exile’s automation rules
The whole system reads exactly one thing: Client.txt, the plain text
log the game writes and the developer explicitly allows reading. No
memory access, no injection, no simulated input. Everything the tool
knows, it infers from log lines. The interesting design problem is how
much you can build inside that constraint.
system architecture and data flow
A PyQt6 guide card floats over the game, watches the log, and auto advances through a full campaign route as you zone: every quest, skill point, trial, and logout warp trick, authored at full guided density in a JSON route format. Global hotkeys cover the weird cases: step back, skip ahead, hide, or toggle click through so the card never eats a click meant for the game. All of it runs locally, without reading game memory or automating input.
decoding Path of Building data
Path of Building codes, the community standard for sharing builds, are base64 wrapped zlib compressed XML. A decoder turns any code into an act by act leveling sheet: gem links to buy, passive tree checkpoints, printable markdown. The same plan feeds gem reminders into the overlay, so the card knows which skills your build wants at each step.
Next experiments: an AI build advisor that compares patch notes against a build, and a meta ranker over live ladder data from poe.ninja.