RingWatch

A fast, beautiful terminal UI that reads your Elden Ring save file and shows, at a glance, what you still have left to do — which bosses to fell, which items (weapons, armor, spells, talismans, ashes of war, spirit ashes) you have yet to collect, and which NPC questlines you've finished (with a walkthrough for each) — across the base game and Shadow of the Erdtree. It watches your save and updates live as you play.

Pure Go, Linux-first. Built with Bubble Tea v2 and Lip Gloss v2.

Inspired by RysanekDavid/The-Tarnished-Chronicle. RingWatch is an independent Go reimagining focused on a fast Linux TUI for boss, item, and questline tracking — no external tools, no OBS/overlay.

Features

• Reads your real save — parses the ER0000.sl2 BND4 container directly (no external tools, no Wine). Elden Ring PC saves are not encrypted.
• All 208 bosses with a health bar, grouped by region in progression order, split into Early / Mid / Late game and the DLC.
• 1,800+ items — every weapon, shield, armor piece, sorcery, incantation, talisman, ash of war and spirit ash (base + DLC), read straight from your inventory. The Items tab regroups on the fly: by location, by category, by weapon type, or by primary stat, with a per-kind filter. Item data is generated from the game's own regulation.bin (see below).
• Golden Seeds & Sacred Tears — collected in a Flask Upgrades category. They're consumed on use, so they can't be found in your inventory; instead each individual pickup is tracked by the world event flag it sets (the same mechanism as boss defeats), and rolls into the Location grouping by region like everything else.
• Every NPC questline — the Quests tab breaks each quest down by quest-giver on the left and an ordered walkthrough on the right: each step with concrete what to do / where to go instructions, missable-step warnings, and clickable wiki links. Completion is read from the save — a quest is marked done only when a high-confidence signal (its end-reward flag, or ownership of its unique end-reward gear) is present, so a quest is never falsely reported complete. (Intermediate "step N of M" position is deliberately not claimed — Elden Ring's mid-quest flags are too noisy to read reliably; see How it works.) 43 questlines spanning the base game and Shadow of the Erdtree (Ranni, Millicent, the Volcano Manor assassins, Fia, the Frenzied Flame, Leda's band, Count Ymir, and more); quests without a reliable completion signal render as reference guides (◇).
• Live updates — watches the save file and shows a toast the moment a boss falls; no need to restart.
• Multiple characters — pick any of your save slots.
• Search any boss by name across every region.
• Clickable boss links — each boss links to its Fextralife wiki page via OSC 8 terminal hyperlinks (click, or press enter to open in your browser).
• Auto-detects your save across all Steam libraries (parses libraryfolders.vdf, supports non-default libraries and Flatpak Steam).

Install

Requires Go 1.26+.

go build -o ringwatch ./cmd/ringwatch
# or install to $GOBIN:
go install github.com/Cidan/RingWatch/cmd/ringwatch@latest

Usage

ringwatch                      # auto-detect the save, track the first character, watch live
ringwatch --slot 2             # track save slot index 2
ringwatch --save /path/ER0000.sl2   # use a specific save file (.sl2 or .co2)
ringwatch --no-watch           # don't watch for changes

Keys

Key	Action
1 / 2 / 3	Switch between the Bosses, Items, and Quests views
↑/↓ or k/j	Move selection
tab / ← →	Switch between the left (groups / quest-givers) and right (entries / steps) panes
g	(Items) Cycle grouping: Location → Category → Weapon Type → Primary Stat
f	(Items) Cycle the category filter (All / Weapons / Armor / Sorceries / …)
/	Search by name across the current view (Quests: search quest-givers)
enter / o	Open the selected entry's wiki page (Quests: the step's location or the questline)
c	Choose a different character
d	Toggle DLC content
esc	Clear the active search
q / ctrl+c	Quit

How it works

Elden Ring PC saves are plaintext BND4 containers (the only integrity check is a per-section MD5 — there is no AES encryption, contrary to popular belief). RingWatch:

1. Reads the profile summaries (user_data_10) for the character list (name, level, playtime, occupied slots).
2. Walks each character slot to locate its event-flags blob, whose offset is variable (several preceding fields are data-dependent).
3. Maps each boss's event-flag id to a bit in that blob using the block→group table from ClayAmore/ER-Save-Lib.

For items, RingWatch parses each character's inventory (held items + storage box) from the same slot, resolving owned weapons/armor/talismans/spells/ashes via the in-save GaItem table, and matches them against an embedded item dataset generated from the game's regulation.bin (see Regenerating the item dataset).

For quests, completion tracking is deliberately coarse but correct. Each questline carries a single high-confidence completion signal — a "received the end reward" event flag (same id space as boss-defeat flags) or ownership of its unique end-reward gear — and a quest reads as ✓ complete only when that signal is present.

Why not per-step "you are at step N"? Because Elden Ring doesn't expose that reliably. The save signals you can trust are boss kills, item receipts, and unique- item ownership; the intermediate "talk to NPC at X" beats are tracked (if at all) by flags that are generic, location-shared, or cleared as you progress. Earlier attempts to map those to per-step position were validated against a spread of real saves and still mislabeled position more often than not (a world-pickup or a common location flag would mark a quest partway done that you'd never touched). So RingWatch asserts only what it can stand behind — completion — and presents the steps as a walkthrough. Completion signals are likewise validated against real saves (set on a character who finished the quest, absent on one who didn't). Quests with no reliable completion signal — and, for now, all the Shadow of the Erdtree questlines (no save-diffed DLC flag data exists yet) — are shown as reference guides (◇): steps and links, no save-derived state.

Layout

cmd/ringwatch      entry point + flags
cmd/gen-items      regulation.bin → items.generated.json dataset generator (dev tool)
internal/save      BND4 parsing, profiles, event flags, inventory
internal/tracker   boss + item + quest datasets (embedded) + progress / grouping / completion
internal/config    Steam save-path auto-detection
internal/watcher   fsnotify-based live watcher
internal/locations Fextralife links + OSC 8 hyperlinks
internal/ui        Bubble Tea v2 / Lip Gloss v2 TUI

Regenerating the item dataset

internal/tracker/data/items.generated.json is produced from the game's own regulation.bin by a pure-Go generator — no external tools:

go run ./cmd/gen-items                                    # uses the detected game path
go run ./cmd/gen-items -regulation /path/to/regulation.bin

It decrypts regulation.bin (AES-256-CBC), inflates the DCX/ZSTD payload, splits the BND4, and reads the weapon / protector / accessory / goods / magic / gem params using field offsets computed from vendored Paramdex definitions. Item names come from vendored Paramdex name tables; acquisition locations are merged from curated per-kind data plus the MIT Mjolniar Fextralife dataset. Re-run it after a game patch to refresh the items.

Credits & data

• Inspired by The Tarnished Chronicle; boss → event-flag data was assembled from its dataset and cross-checked against Paramdex, ERTools, and other community sources.
• Event-flag location table from ER-Save-Lib.
• Item data generated from the game's regulation.bin using Paramdex definitions/names; binary formats per SoulsFormats.
• Item acquisition locations from the MIT Mjolniar build planner dataset plus curated wiki research.
• Quest step text is sourced from the Elden Ring Fextralife wiki; quest completion signals (end-reward flags / unique-reward items) are drawn from the item-event data in thefifthmatt/SoulsRandomizers and the empirical save-diffs in oisis/EldenRing-SaveForge, then validated against real save files.
• Boss, item, and quest links to the Elden Ring Fextralife wiki.

Roadmap

• Deeper location coverage for the long tail (generic armor pieces, spirit-ash variants).
• Location overrides for any mismatched wiki links.
• DLC questline completion + finer progress. Base-game quests detect completion; the Shadow of the Erdtree questlines currently render as reference guides (◇) because no save-diffed DLC flag dataset exists yet (needs our own DLC save-diff or mined DLC TALK scripts; the branchy Leda-band quests will need per-branch handling). Reliable per-step (not just completion) progress is a longer-term goal pending better flag data.

Not affiliated with FromSoftware or Bandai Namco.