Android App

The whole client on your phone — log in, hunt, and script from a bus stop with no PC involved. (in progress)

What it’s for

You want to play GemStone IV without being at your desk. The Android app carries the same Rust core the desktop client runs, so the phone connects to play.net by itself: enter your account, pick a character, and you are in the game. Nothing has to be running at home.

When something is running at home, the app plays that too. It attaches to a Lich session on your PC so a scripted character keeps all its scripts, and it can pair with a VellumFE session already running on your desktop and become a live second screen for it. The app is a full client and a pairing client — not one or the other.

📷 screenshot pending

The Android app mid-hunt: story pane with stream chips, the vitals strip, the floating compass, and the macro rail.

Set it up

There is no Android app on the desktop — but the desktop is where you prepare the two things the phone will reach for.

To let the phone mirror this session: open the connection’s Advanced fold in the VellumFE Launcher, tick Enable on port under Web dashboard, and set Bind address to 0.0.0.0. Launch, then type .webinfo and leave the pairing page open — the phone scans the VellumFE app QR from it.
To let the phone attach to Lich: launch Lich with --detachable-client and note the host and port you gave it.

→ Expected result: a pairing page on screen with two QR codes, and a Lich host and port written down. The phone does the rest.

⚠️ The app shows two login tabs; a desktop browser shows three. The browser’s in-page Remote tab is hidden here on purpose, because the native Characters picker replaces it — the picker can use the camera to scan pairing QR codes and can seal saved servers into the Android Keystore, which a web form cannot. Nothing is lost; it moved.

Common setups

Take your desk session with you

On the PC, launch your character with web enabled on 0.0.0.0 and run .webinfo.
On the phone, open Characters → ⧉ Scan QR to add and scan the VellumFE app QR. The entry names itself after the character, because the link carries the character name.
Tap the new row.

→ Your PC session keeps its own GUI window open and playing; the phone shows the same character live. Lich’s one-client limit does not bite here — the web layer mirrors the session rather than replacing its client.

Add a server by hand when there’s no QR to scan

Characters → ＋ Add manually. The dialog is titled Add character.
Fill in Label (required, e.g. Rysk), Host (e.g. 192.168.1.21), Port (e.g. 8042), and Pairing token (optional). Tap Save.
The row appears with a dot: green and live when the machine answers, grey and offline when it does not.

→ You can tell at a glance whether the PC is up before you tap, without waiting on a failed connection.

Playing

The screen is the browser client — story pane, stream chips, tappable exits and nouns, macro tray, status drawer with the injury doll and character sheet, sounds, and the highlight and color editors. Everything on that page applies here, including the fact that the phone’s highlight editor does handle redirects and squelch.

Battery & lifecycle

The session lives in a foreground service with a quiet status notification (“Playing — session live”, “Reconnecting…”) carrying a Stop button.

The wakelock is held only while a session is active — sitting at the login screen does not drain the battery.
Swiping the app away mid-session keeps playing. Swiping it away at the login screen stops the service.
Repeated drops with no input from you stop the reconnect loop, so a forgotten phone winds down instead of relogging all night.
On first launch it asks once for a battery-optimization exemption so Android does not throttle the connection mid-hunt. Decline it and you can grant it later in system battery settings.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ On Android 8 and 9, update Chrome — not just Android System WebView. Those releases take the rendering engine from Chrome. If the client is blank or stuck on “connecting…”, update Chrome from the Play Store first. On Android 10 and newer, update Android System WebView.

Deleting a saved server is the ✕ on its row, which asks “Delete {name}?” with the note “Removes the saved server (and its pairing token).” Deleting the entry deletes the pairing — you re-scan to come back.
Saved credentials never sit in plaintext. A remembered play.net password is sealed by the Rust core with a device master key, and saved servers live in remote.bin sealed by an Android Keystore key. Neither is readable off the device, and neither uses SharedPreferences.
Scanning the wrong QR does nothing. The pairing page shows two: the browser one (http://…/#token=…) is for a browser, the VellumFE app one (vellum://remote?…) is for this app.
A vellum://lich?host=…&port=… link prefills the Lich tab and stops there. It never auto-connects — you always press Connect yourself.
The phone needs a private path to your PC. Home Wi-Fi, Tailscale, or a VPN. Never the open internet, for either the Lich port or the VellumFE web port.

VellumFE User Guide