Debugging

Debugging

Tools for answering "why did it do that?" — in rough order of how quickly they help.

Health Check

Settings → Advanced → Health Check. One screen covering: elevation state, the elevated helper, the installation record, the window engine's last tick and how long it took, the controller backend, RTSS availability, and the input idle clock.

Start here. It catches most misconfiguration without reading a single log line.

Live log

Settings → Advanced → Open Live Log, or the Control Panel. Newest first, with copy and clear.

Diagnostic bundle

Settings → Advanced → Export Diagnostic ZIP. Produces a timestamped archive on your desktop containing the health report, sanitised settings, a log tail, and system state — display scale, HDR, screen geometry, the active input backend, the XInput slot, and whether RawInput is registered.

Paths are sanitised before anything is written, so your user folder is not in it.

Quick Menu → Game Detection

Live candidate list and scores. The fastest answer to "why did it focus that?" — see Focus & scoring.

Hotkeys

Key	Does
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R	Reload settings — test a change without restarting
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G	Run Game Foreground Assist once — test detection on demand
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I	Re-arm controller input — see Input recovery
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+P	Control Panel
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E	Emergency restore

Logging levels

Settings → Logging:

• Basic — ordinary operation. Leave this on.
• Diagnostic — the full candidate table every evaluation, including rejects and the reason each was rejected. Verbose; turn it on to answer a question, then off.
• Controller diagnostics — every slot compared against the backend, plus the foreground process. This is what reveals a virtualised pad forwarding only some buttons.
• RawInput probe — logs raw HID reports. Needed when teaching a controller.

Logs rotate, so leaving basic logging on will not fill the disk.

A workable loop

1. Turn on the narrowest logging that covers your question.
2. Reproduce it once.
3. Read the log for the reason — exclusions, cooldowns, paused focus, or the winning score.
4. Change one setting, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R, test.
5. Turn the logging back off.

Safe Mode

SteamShell.exe /safe starts non-elevated, keeps Explorer available, and does not start the elevated helper. Use it when a setting has made the normal path unusable — Settings opens automatically so you can undo it.