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.

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

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.

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:

• ⚙ 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. 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.
• 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. 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.

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.

Hotkeys (global, defaults; edit in %AppData%\EQBuddy\settings.json):

• Ctrl+Shift+H show/hide the widget · Ctrl+Shift+T click-through (game clicks pass through the widget; border turns amber) · Ctrl+Shift+M mini mode · Ctrl+Shift+K drop a camp marker (also in the right-click menu; markers appear under Travels & Deaths).
• ⚙ 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.

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.
• 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.

• 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).

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 crowd-control spell seed list is adapted from Spyxy's DPS Meter by khadesh (MIT) — thanks for making it open source.