Countdowns

Roundtime as a shrinking bar in the corner of your eye — so you know when you can swing again without counting in your head.

What it’s for

Roundtime is the metronome of every fight, and the game gives it to you as a number buried in the prompt. Counting it yourself means either firing commands early and eating the “…but you are still recovering” line, or waiting too long and losing the exchange.

A countdown window turns that into something you don’t have to read: a number plus a row of blocks that empties as the seconds burn down. Peripheral vision handles it. When the blocks are gone, you go.

The same widget covers cast time, stun, and anything else with a deadline — a Lich script can push its own timer for a cooldown, a buff about to lapse, or a hunt window closing, and it draws in exactly the same way.

Set it up

Common setups

A combat corner that never moves

Timers that appear and disappear make your layout twitch, and a bar that jumps into existence is harder to notice than one that was always there.

1. From the Windows catalog, tick roundtime and casttime, and set both zones to Footer.
2. Right-click each and tick Stay visible at rest.
3. Leave the default colors — red for RT, deep sky blue for CT.

→ Both windows sit in the footer permanently, reading RT: 0 and Cast: 0 with empty bars at rest. When you swing, the red one fills and drains without a single element shifting position.

A stun timer that works from the game’s own text

Stun has no timer feed of its own. VellumFE ships regex patterns that read the game’s stun messages and drive a countdown from them, which is already wired up before you touch anything.

1. Tick stuntime in the Windows catalog. It arrives titled Stun in yellow, bound to the stuntime feed.
2. Get stunned. The shipped [event_patterns] rules match You are stunned for 3 rounds, multiply the captured rounds by five to get seconds, and push that into the timer. A matching rule on You recover from being stunned. clears it early.

→ A three-round stun fills the Stun window to fifteen seconds and drains it, and recovering before it expires blanks the window immediately rather than letting it run down.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ A countdown with no Timer id and a non-matching name renders as nothing. The window is there, the border draws, and the inside stays empty forever because no feed reaches it. This is the single most common “my timer is broken” report, and it is why creating one from ➕ Custom window… opens its config straight away.

⚠️ Timer ids are case-sensitive. roundtime works; Roundtime matches nothing.

A timer window matches on its Timer id or its window name. Both are checked, which makes .addwindow roundtime countdown … work with nothing else configured. It also means a window you name after a feed picks that feed up whether you meant it to or not — worth knowing before you name a custom timer casttime.

Timers hide at zero unless you tell them not to. Default behavior is to vanish when they expire, which keeps a busy layout quiet. Stay visible at rest keeps the label and a 0 on screen with an empty bar, so the window never appears or disappears. Pick whichever bothers you less; the setting is per window, so RT can stay put while a rarely-used timer hides.

The block count is bounded by window width, not by the timer. A sixty-second timer in a twenty-column window shows the number 60 and fills every available cell — the blocks measure “how much is left of what fits,” while the number is always exact. Widen the window if you want finer-grained visual resolution on long timers.

Four things can drive a timer. Native roundtime and casttime from the game; a [event_patterns] rule whose event_type matches (this is how stuntime is fed, and stun/rt/ct are aliased to stuntime/roundtime/casttime); or a script sending <vellumTimer id='...' value='epoch'/>, where value is the absolute epoch second the timer ends and 0 clears it.

Countdown color is split across two settings. Fill color in the widget section colors the number and the blocks. The window’s own background is under Appearance ▸ Frame. The shipped presets set their color as the window’s text color, which is why RT is red and CT is blue out of the box.

See also

• Progress Bars — health, mana, and stamina, the other half of a combat corner
• Mini Vitals — all four vitals compactly, to pair with your timers
• Hotbars — buttons that gray out during roundtime, using the same Roundtime active and Casttime active conditions
• Wire a hotbar for combat — timers and buttons working together
• Highlight Patterns — the pattern system [event_patterns] sits beside
• Creating Layouts — placing, zoning, and saving windows

[[windows]]
name = "roundtime"        # also acts as a fallback feed match
widget_type = "countdown"
id = "roundtime"          # the explicit feed binding
row = 0
col = 0
rows = 3
cols = 20
text_color = "#FF0000"
show_when_zero = true

[event_patterns.stun_rounds]
pattern = '^\s*You are stunned for ([0-9]+) rounds?'
event_type = "stun"
action = "set"
duration = 0                 # 0 = use the captured value
duration_capture = 1         # 1-based regex capture group
duration_multiplier = 5.0    # rounds → seconds
enabled = true

[event_patterns.stun_recovery]
pattern = 'You recover from being stunned\.'
event_type = "stun"
action = "clear"
duration = 0
duration_multiplier = 1.0
enabled = true