Browser Client

Put a second screen beside your PC with nothing to install — your phone, tablet, or the spare laptop shows the same character you’re already playing.

What it’s for

You’re hunting at your desk and the good text is scrolling past the window you can’t see. Or you want to keep an eye on thoughts and your spell timers while your hands are busy elsewhere in the house. VellumFE ships a small web server inside the client: turn it on, open a browser on any device on your network, and you get a touch-first view of the same session — same character, same streams, same links to click.

Two shapes, both first-class:

• A second screen for a running session (sidecar). Your TUI or GUI keeps running on the PC; the browser joins that same character. This is the shape this page leads with.
• The whole client in the browser. Run VellumFE with no local UI at all and the browser is the only screen — Headless mode below.

If you want the client living on your phone rather than served from your PC, the Android and iOS apps do that job instead. Neither route is the lesser one — the app plays from anywhere, the browser sits beside your PC.

Set it up

Common setups

A phone beside the keyboard while you hunt

1. Launch your hunter in the desktop GUI with Web dashboard enabled on 8040 and Bind address 0.0.0.0.
2. Run .webinfo and scan the browser QR.
3. On the phone, tap the thoughts stream chip so the story pane filters to thoughts only.
4. Swipe in from the right edge to open the status drawer and leave it on the Targets section.

→ You now watch thoughts and your target list on the phone while the desktop window stays on room text and combat. Tapping a creature in the drawer opens its attack/look/target menu and the command fires from your PC session.

Several characters, one dashboard

Launch two or three characters with web enabled. Unpinned instances treat the configured port as a base and walk upward to the next free one, so no two fight over 8040.

1. Open http://192.168.1.50:8040/ — the bare root, not /play.
2. The dashboard lists one card per running session, health-checked and auto-refreshing.
3. Tap a card to play that character.

→ Switching characters is one tap, and a character you shut down drops off the list on its own. If you want one character to keep a fixed address you can bookmark straight to /play, set pinned = true in that character’s profile config — it then binds exactly that port or disables web for the session with a loud warning, never a silent neighbor port.

Playing from the browser

• Read the game live, with streams as filter chips carrying unread badges. Long-press a chip to reorder them; the order follows your character across devices.
• Send commands exactly as you would at the PC, dot-commands included. With a keyboard attached, Up/Down browse history; the ↻ button resends the last command and long-pressing it opens a history sheet. The newest matching history entry appears dim after the cursor — press Tab to accept it.
• Tap links, nouns, and exits. A direct link fires immediately; a plain noun opens the server’s context menu in a bottom sheet. A mini compass floats over the text pane with live exits; hold it about half a second to lift and drag it somewhere else, and the spot is remembered per device.
• Side drawers. Swipe from the left edge for the macro tray; from the right for the status drawer — Targets, Players, Room, the injury doll, hands, and active effects with live countdowns.
• Map. A map button appears in the top bar once map data exists (.mapdb download). Tap a room to walk there with native .go2, drag to pan, pinch to zoom. See Map and Travel.
• Reconnect gracefully. The session resumes where you left off with a “missed output” marker for long gaps, and several devices can be connected at once.

Settings on the phone

The gear ⚙ opens the settings sheet. What you can author from here:

• Appearance — theme presets, show/hide toggles for every piece of chrome, opacity sliders, and the Aa button for story text from 6 to 24 px. Theme, text size, and chip order roam with your character; chrome toggles and opacities stay per-device.
• Client settings (saved on host) — the full desktop settings registry over the wire, editable at character or global scope, written to the hosting machine’s config exactly as if you had edited it there.
• Highlight rules (this profile) / (global) — add and edit rules with color pickers, a sound dropdown, and a live preview.
• Colors (this profile) / (global) — stream preset and prompt colors.
• Streams (saved on host), Touch wheel (long-press ring), Controller (gamepad), Speech, and SSH launcher (cold-start Lich).
• Advanced — raw TOML editors for highlights and colors with import/export, the practical way to move a desktop config onto the phone.

✅ The phone’s highlight editor does redirects and squelch. Older documentation said it could not. The rule form has a Squelch checkbox and a redirect Off / redirect only / redirect + copy selector with a target field, so a phone-authored rule can send matching lines to another window or hide them outright.

What the phone genuinely cannot author: layout and panel placement, window resizing, game keybinds, and macro hidden_when conditions. Those stay on the desktop. Everything else on the list above is editable from the phone.

Headless mode

vellum-fe --frontend headless

This runs the core and the web server with no local UI at all. It prints the ready /play URL (token included) at startup and the browser does the rest. Give it credentials (--direct --account … --character …) to auto-connect, or give it nothing and it waits at the login screen.

The login screen is the same overlay the phone apps show. In a desktop browser it has three tabs:

• play.net (default) — play.net account, password, character, a game selector covering every GemStone IV and DragonRealms world, and Remember this login. Submit is Connect.
• Lich — host, port, label (optional), and Remember this connection (ticked by default). It attaches to a Lich session already running elsewhere; launch that Lich with --detachable-client. The tab also holds a custom launch command (optional) textarea: with one set, connecting probes the port first, SSHes to the host and runs the command if Lich is down, then attaches once the port opens. Configure the SSH side in ⚙ → SSH launcher (cold-start Lich).
• Remote — points this browser at a different machine’s VellumFE web server using its host, port, and pairing token.

⚠️ A phone shows two tabs, not three. In the Android and iOS apps the in-page Remote tab is hidden on purpose and a native Characters picker replaces it — reached from the person icon on the login screen. The picker exists so the app can scan pairing QR codes with the camera and seal saved servers into the Keychain or Keystore. Same capability, better home.

Headless sessions look after themselves: drops reconnect with backoff and typing resets it; repeated drops with no input from you stop the reconnect loop so an abandoned session winds down instead of relogging all night; a hung login is retried by a watchdog; and quit returns to the login screen.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ bind = "127.0.0.1" is this PC only. The most common failure is a phone that cannot reach the URL at all. .webinfo tells you when this is the cause, printing: bind = “127.0.0.1” is this PC only. Set [web] bind = “0.0.0.0” so phones on your LAN can connect.

⚠️ Security: keep the port on a network you trust. Pairing keeps strangers out, but the traffic is plain HTTP. For play away from home use Tailscale or WireGuard — never forward this port to the open internet. .webinfo repeats this line every time you run it.

• .webinfo refuses when there’s nothing to pair. “Web server is disabled” means the [web] block is off and you never passed --web-port. “Web server is not running (bind failed or still starting)” means the port was taken or the server is a beat behind — run it again.
• The pairing page shows two QR codes. The browser one carries an http://…/#token=… URL for any browser. The VellumFE app one carries a vellum://remote?… link only the Android or iOS app understands. Scanning the app QR into a plain browser does nothing.
• A sidecar has no login screen. The desktop session owns the connection, so the browser gets no account fields and no login music toggle. That screen appears only in headless mode and in the phone apps.
• After editing macros.toml on the PC, run .reloadmacros — connected phones update instantly rather than on next connect.
• The wake button in the top bar keeps the phone’s screen on. Tap the title line to toggle between room name and character name.

See also

• Android app — the client living on your phone.
• iOS app — the same, on iPhone.
• The Launcher — where the Web dashboard fold lives.
• Map and Travel (.go2) — what the phone’s map button drives.
• Skins (GUI Graphics) — the injury doll art the status drawer renders when the host session has a skin active.

[web]
enabled = true
port = 8040
bind = "0.0.0.0"
pinned = false