Experience (GemStone IV)

Your level, your mind state, and how close you are to the next one — parked on screen so you stop typing exp between every kill.

What it’s for

Mid-hunt you want two numbers: how saturated your mind is, and how much further you have to go. Asking for them costs a command and scrolls away the combat you were reading.

This window keeps both standing. The mind bar fills as your head fills, the experience bar creeps toward your next level, and your level sits above them. It updates itself when the game sends new numbers — you never ask.

This is the GemStone IV window. DragonRealms tracks experience per skill and has an entirely different widget for it: see Experience (DragonRealms). The two share a name in the catalog and nothing else.

Set it up

Common setups

A one-line experience strip above your vitals

The window is at its best flattened into a status strip rather than kept as a box.

1. Add Experience from the catalog’s Character group.
2. Right-click it, open the Experience section, and untick Level. Your level rarely changes; the two bars are what you watch.
3. Under Appearance ▸ Title bar, turn the title bar off, and under Appearance ▸ Frame keep only the left and right border sides.
4. Drag it directly above your vitals window, or send it to the same zone.

You’ll see: two labelled bars, no chrome, sitting flush on your vitals stack — mind saturation and next-level progress readable without a glance away from combat.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ This window is GemStone IV only, and the two ways of adding it disagree about that. Both pickers hide it from DragonRealms characters — it is absent from the GUI Windows catalog and from the bare-.addwindow picker. The full six-argument .addwindow form does not check, so it builds the window on a DR character, where it stays permanently empty. If the game is not set at all, VellumFE assumes GemStone IV and the row appears — which is why it shows up when you connect through Lich without naming a game.

⚠️ The two frontends label the bars differently. The GUI writes Mind: and Next: in front of the game’s text; the TUI paints the game’s text alone. Same numbers, different wording — don’t be thrown reading a screenshot from the other frontend.

The window can appear on its own. GemStone IV sends this data as a dialog, and VellumFE claims that dialog for this widget. If you have no experience window when the game first sends it, one is created and bound for you. It never duplicates: a second send finds the existing window and leaves it alone. Untick it in the catalog and it stays hidden even when the game re-sends.

Empty until the game speaks. Before the first update both frontends print No experience data yet. in dim text. Nothing is broken — the game sends this on login and on change, not on demand.

Two rows only appear when the numbers arrive. Total exp and Ascension exp stay blank until something has sent those figures, even with their boxes ticked. Ticking them on a session that never receives them changes nothing visible.

The height is capped, deliberately. The window floors at 3 rows and ceilings at 7 — one row per field plus borders. Ticking all five fields needs all 7; dragging taller does nothing, because there is nothing more to draw.

Leave Exp bar color empty on purpose if you’re capped. An unset exp color draws the filled portion in your theme background instead of a fill color, which reads correctly for a character with nowhere further to go. Setting a color overrides that.

A blank color field is not an error. Both color boxes accept #rrggbb or a color name; an unparseable value is ignored and the previous color stands.

See also

• Experience (DragonRealms) — the other game’s experience widget, sharing the name and nothing else
• Mini Vitals — health, mana, stamina and spirit in the same compact style
• Progress Bars — standalone bars, including a mindState bar of your own
• Encumbrance — the other single-purpose bar-plus-label window

[[windows]]
name = "gs4_experience"
widget_type = "gs4_experience"
title = "Experience"
row = 0
col = 0
rows = 5
cols = 30
min_rows = 3
max_rows = 7
min_cols = 20
show_border = true
align = "center"
show_level = true
show_mind_bar = true
show_exp_bar = true
show_total_exp = false
show_ascension_exp = false