Experience (DragonRealms)

Every skill the game is tracking for you, listed and standing still — so you can see what’s ripe to train without breaking rhythm to ask.

What it’s for

DragonRealms reports your training a skill at a time, and it reports a lot of skills. Asking for the whole picture buries the screen; asking about one skill tells you about one skill.

This window keeps the game’s own running tally on screen: one line per skill it is tracking, each showing the value the game last sent, in the order the game established at login. When a value changes the line changes, and nothing else moves. You read it in a glance and go back to what you were doing.

This is the DragonRealms window. GemStone IV tracks experience as a level, a mind state and a progress bar, and has an entirely different widget for it: see Experience (GemStone IV). The two share a name in the catalog and nothing else.

Set it up

Click Windows in the top toolbar, expand Character, and tick Experience. It arrives 20 rows by 35 columns, titled Experience. (Typed equivalent: .addwindow experience experience 0 0 35 20.)
There is no widget section in this window’s right-click menu — this widget has no settings of its own. Its border, title, colors and font are the standard window settings under Window and Appearance.

📷 screenshot pending

A DragonRealms Experience window listing tracked skills, one Name: value line each, in the game's login order.

→ Expected result: a scrollable list of Skill: value lines in a monospaced face. Before the game sends anything it reads No experience data yet.

Common setups

A tall skills column you can actually read

This widget is a list, and a list wants height far more than it wants width.

Add Experience from the catalog’s Character group.
Send it to the Right Bar and drag it to fill the column top to bottom. The list is long; every extra row is one more skill visible without scrolling.
Keep it around 35 columns. Lines are Skill: value and rarely need more.
In the GUI, drop the text size a step under Appearance ▸ Text to fit more lines.

You’ll see: one column showing the game’s whole tracked-skill tally at once, refreshing itself line by line as values change, with nothing else on screen moving.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ This window is DragonRealms only, and unlike most game gates this one is real. Both pickers hide it from GemStone IV characters. Because VellumFE treats an unset game as GemStone IV, the row is hidden by default too — connecting through Lich without naming a game hides this window even on a DragonRealms character. Set the game, or use the full six-argument .addwindow form, which is not gated. Built on a GemStone IV character it stays permanently empty: that game never sends this feed.

⚠️ The terminal list does not scroll; the GUI list does. The GUI puts the lines in a scroll area, so a long list is fully reachable. The TUI draws them as a plain block and clips at the bottom border — lines past the window height are not shown and no key reaches them. In the terminal, size the window to the list rather than scrolling it.

Empty until the game speaks. Before the first update the GUI reads No experience data yet. and the TUI reads (No experience data). The game establishes which skills exist at login and sends values as they change.

The order is the game’s, not alphabetical. Skills appear in the sequence the game declared at login and hold that position for the session. A skill that changes does not jump to the top — the line updates in place, which is what makes the window readable at a glance.

A skill with no value yet is not listed. Only skills the game has actually sent a value for get a line. The list can therefore grow during a session as more skills report in.

The list is not cleared between characters in one run. Skill names accumulate for the life of the session, so if you have swapped characters without restarting, treat a surprising entry with suspicion and restart to get a clean list.

The window redraws only when a value actually changes. VellumFE compares each incoming value against the one it is showing and does nothing when they match. A window that looks frozen is usually correct.

Right-clicking a line opens the window menu. These lines are plain text, not game objects — there is nothing to click through to.

Experience (GemStone IV) — the other game’s experience widget, sharing the name and nothing else
Perception — the other DragonRealms-only Character window
Progress Bars — including concentration, DragonRealms’ own bar
Encumbrance — a single-purpose Character window offered in both games
Text Windows — how scrolling, stream-fed windows work generally

Config reference (TOML)

Written by the catalog and .addwindow. Hand-editing is for troubleshooting, not the normal path.

[[windows]]
name = "experience"
widget_type = "experience"
title = "Experience"
row = 0
col = 0
rows = 20
cols = 35
min_rows = 5
min_cols = 20
show_border = true
align = "left"

widget_type = "experience". The type string is exactly experience; an unrecognized type does not error, it quietly creates a text window instead.

This widget has exactly one field of its own.

Field	Type	Default	What it does
`align`	string	`"left"`	`left`, `center` (or `centre`), or `right`. Anything else falls back to left. Read only when the window is first built — change it and reload the layout. Neither editor offers it, and the GUI list is always left-aligned regardless.

Everything else is a standard window field: row, col, rows, cols, show_border, border_style, title, locked. There is no [experience] config section — this window has no global settings, and no widget section in the GUI right-click menu.

The shipped layout_template.toml is wrong about this widget. Its commented example lists stream, buffer_size, show_rates and compact_mode. None of those exist. They are silently ignored if you copy them in. align is the only widget field.

Catalog preset

Catalog row	Category	Title	Size	Game
Experience	Character	Experience	20 rows x 35 cols (floor 5 rows, 20 cols)	DragonRealms only

The gate hides the row from GemStone IV characters in both the GUI catalog and the .addwindow picker. An unset game counts as GemStone IV, so the row is hidden by default until the game is set to a DragonRealms instance. The six-argument .addwindow form is not gated and builds the window regardless.

Where the settings live

Setting	Desktop GUI	Terminal (TUI)
Title, title bar, lock	Right-click ▸ Window / Appearance ▸ Title bar	`.editwindow experience`
Border, accent, background	Right-click ▸ Appearance ▸ Frame	`.editwindow experience`
Font, text size	Right-click ▸ Appearance ▸ Text	not offered

Word wrap and content alignment are not offered under Appearance ▸ Text for this widget — the lines are short and fixed-shape.

VellumFE User Guide