v1.15.1 - buff-slot stacking gate

Download

EQLCompanion.exe — one file, ~59 MB, nothing to install. A .sha256 is published beside it.

Windows will warn you that it does not recognise the publisher: the file is unsigned (code-signing certificates cost hundreds a year, and this is a free hobby project). Click More info → Run anyway. INSTALL.md walks through it, and shows how to verify the download yourself.

Upgrading from 1.15.0? Replace the .exe; your data folder beside it is untouched.

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The advisor now knows about buff slots. EverQuest buffs occupy effect
slots, and two spells in the same slot do not add — the second overwrites
the first. So a loadout holding both Center and Bravery (both ac-slot-1)
had quietly spent a gem on nothing, and the existing supersession check
could not see it: it reasons from effect ids and magnitudes, and slot
occupancy is not in that data.

• _gate_stacking keeps the strongest spell per slot — curated lines run
  weakest to strongest, and the strongest is what you end up with whatever
  order you cast in. It runs across must_have + should_have together (they
  are one slot fill) and before the promote step, so a freed gem refills
  from the alternatives; the promote loop skips anything that would recreate
  the clash.
• Prebuffs get the same gate. Long-duration buffs are the worst place to
  stack two of a slot, because the second cast silently throws away the
  first one's mana and remaining duration.
• Data is rari/eqlfinest's hand-curated spell lines (CC0, from the same
  author as the routing data already used here), vendored as
  backend/spell_lines.json — 112 lines over 344 spells. Coverage is
  partial against the client's ~66,000 spell records, so a spell that is not
  in the table is never dropped: absence of data is not evidence that two
  buffs are compatible.

"Nothing is happening" now says which nothing. The app reads the game's
own eqclient.ini to tell apart two states that look identical from the
outside — logging was never switched on (you need to type /log on) versus
logging is on but nothing has happened yet (just play). If the game is
running and its Log= setting is off, the hint is promoted to a banner
rather than sitting in the quiet advisory line, because in that state
nothing you do is being recorded at all. It fires even when an old log file
exists, which is the case that used to be silently misleading.

This is a read-only check, deliberately. Other companions set Log=1
themselves so the step disappears; this one will not write to a game file it
was not asked to write to.

Also

• The MCP setup instructions pointed at a different project that happens to
  share the name everquest-legends-mcp. It has no tags and no eqlbuilds
  data, so following them left every spell/AA unlock level falling back to
  the wiki. Now points at ArtSabintsev's, the one actually in use.
• Recorded that the loot-filter action codes are only half confirmed: 4=sell
  is provable from the log and 3=merge is agreed, but a dedicated editor for
  those files documents 1 and 2 the other way round. Only a display label is
  affected, and it is flagged rather than guessed at.
• Repo now has a description and topics, and releases are built by CI on a
  clean runner rather than a laptop.