Active Effects

Watch your buffs, debuffs, cooldowns and active spells sitting on screen with their remaining time — so a lapsing 401 is something you see coming, not something you find out about the hard way.

What it’s for

Every buff you’re running has a clock on it, and the game only tells you about that clock when you ask. Between asks you’re guessing. That’s fine right up until Spirit Warding drops in the middle of a swarm, or you burn a prep re-casting something that had four minutes left.

An active effects window puts the game’s own effect dialog on your screen and keeps it there. Each effect draws as one row: the name on the left, the time on the right, and a bar behind both that fills to show how much of the effect’s life is left. You get the same information the SPELL and SPELLUP checks give you, without spending a command on it mid-fight.

The same data feeds more than the window. The condition vocabulary that drives hotbar buttons, indicator icons, and hand icons reads these exact effect feeds — so a button that dims when a buff lapses and this window are two views of one truth. Wire both and the window tells you what, while the button tells you act now.

Set it up

Effects arrive in four separate dialogs, and one window shows exactly one of them. There is no combined view — three categories on screen means three windows.

.addwindow buffs active_effects 0 0 30 8

Common setups

The three-window caster stack

One category per window means the layout does the sorting for you — you learn where to look rather than reading labels.

1. From the Windows catalog, tick active_spells, buffs, and cooldowns.
2. Set all three rows’ zone control to Right bar, so they stack in reading order.
3. Right-click cooldowns and shrink it — cooldown lists are short, and the space is better spent on the spell list above it.
4. Save with .savelayout hunting (typed — there is no GUI save button).

You’ll see: a right-hand column where your running spells sit on top, buffs beneath them, and cooldowns in a short block at the bottom. Nothing overlaps, and a spell dropping off the top list is a change in a place your eye already knows.

Colored spell families so you read shape, not text

Effect rows can carry per-spell colors, which turns the window into something you parse by color block instead of by reading every line.

1. Type .spellcolors to open the Colors window on its Spell Colors tab.
2. Click Add spell color range and enter spell numbers into Spell IDs, comma-separated — 101, 102, 103, 107, 120 for the Minor Spirit circle.
3. Pick a bar color and a text color, then save.

VellumFE ships eleven of these already: Minor Spirit in Bondi blue, Wizard in dark orange, Bard in hot pink, Sorcerer in dark red, and so on.

You’ll see: your Active Spells window in bands of color, where a missing blue row reads as “my Minor Spirit set has a gap” from across the desk.

⚠️ Spell colors are matched by spell number, not name. The lookup takes the effect’s id as a number, so it only ever colors effects the game identifies numerically. The first matching entry wins, so if a number appears in two color entries, the one higher in the list is the one you get.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ The displayed time does not tick down on the desktop. Both desktop frontends draw the duration string the game sent, and the game only re-sends an effect dialog when something changes. A row can read [02:14] for a while and then jump. The phone is the exception — it converts durations to local deadlines and counts down every second. Treat the desktop number as “last known,” and treat presence rather than the exact figure as the reliable signal.

⚠️ Changing a window’s Category wipes its contents. Old-category effects are meaningless under a new feed, so switching a window from Buffs to Debuffs clears every row immediately. The window looks broken for a moment. It repopulates the next time the game sends that dialog — cast something, or run a SPELL check, and the rows return.

The bar tracks the effect’s own percentage, not the clock. The fill comes from a value the game sends with each effect, so it moves when the game updates the dialog rather than draining smoothly. Read the bar as “roughly how much of this is left,” and the number as the figure.

Effects don’t disappear on their own. Nothing sweeps expired rows — an effect leaves the window only when the game sends a fresh dialog for that category. An effect showing [00:00] has almost certainly lapsed; the window is waiting for the game to say so.

Rows appear in arrival order and are never sorted. A new effect lands at the bottom and holds that spot for as long as it runs, so positions stay stable while you’re hunting. If you want expiry-ordered effects, the phone’s Effects sheet is the one surface that sorts.

The time format differs between the desktop frontends. The terminal brackets it and drops seconds past the hour — [12:34] under an hour, [03:06] for three hours six minutes. The GUI prints the game’s raw string unbracketed, 03:06:54. Same data, two presentations; an effect the terminal shows as [??:??] is one whose duration isn’t a clock value at all, such as an indefinite blessing.

A narrow window sacrifices the name before the time. Squeeze the terminal window far enough and the effect name truncates without an ellipsis; squeeze further and the name vanishes so the time survives. The GUI clips the name the same way but gives it back on hover, showing Spirit Warding I - 03:06:54 as a tooltip.

These feeds are the condition vocabulary. Effect active, Effect inactive, and Effect time remaining conditions each take a category, a name, and a match mode (Exact or Contains), and drive hotbar button states, indicator icons, and hand icons. Effect time remaining additionally compares against a threshold in seconds — which is how you build a button that lights up when a buff has under thirty seconds left. Those conditions compute remaining time live from an absolute expiry, so they are accurate even while the window’s displayed number is stale.

⚠️ Conditions can disagree with the window, and the condition is right. An effect past its expiry still draws in the window until the game clears it, but Effect active already reports it inactive. That’s not a bug in either place — the condition does the arithmetic the renderer doesn’t.

Only the GUI can author conditions. The terminal’s hotbar editor round-trips existing states untouched and shows "{N} state(s) defined - edit in the GUI editor or hotbars.toml". Mobile has no hotbars at all — the phone has macros, a separate system with no conditions.

See also

• Spells — the full spell list, and .spellwatch for spotting what’s missing
• Missing Spells — watched spells that aren’t currently running
• Countdowns — roundtime and cast time, the other clocks on your screen
• Hotbars — buttons whose states read these same effect feeds
• Wire a hotbar for combat — building an Effect time remaining button next to an effects window
• Make your health bar shout when you’re hurt — the same condition vocabulary applied to health
• Indicators — icons driven by the same conditions
• Color Palette — the spell color table behind .spellcolors

[[windows]]
name = "buffs"
widget_type = "active_effects"
category = "Buffs"
row = 0
col = 0
rows = 10
cols = 30
show_border = true
title = "Buffs"

[[spell_colors]]
spells = [101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 112, 115, 117, 120, 140]
color = "#0086b3"        # bar color; `bar_color` is the current name
text_color = "#909090"

[[bars.combat.buttons.states]]
when = { type = "effect_time", category = "Buffs", name = "Spirit Warding I", name_match = "exact", cmp = "<", seconds = 30 }
text_color = "#ff5555"