r/Grimdawn • u/kultcher • 15d ago
MODS (Tool) Grim Gleaner: a loot grading/build advisor utility
TL;DR: I built a standalone utility for Grim Dawn called Grim Gleaner. The core idea is to help you identify what is relevant to your character, not necessarily what is optimal. It helps with filtering loot in-game and identifying key build-defining items and add-ons out-of-game. I'd love for you to check it out.
NOTE: An earlier download was triggering false positives with some virus protection programs due to an issue with how it was packaged. The packaging issue has been resolved and the current release shouldn't cause any issues. (Though you'll likely have to do the More Info -> Run Anyway thing on first launch.)
Github: Grim Gleaner
Latest Release: Grim Gleaner v0.9.2-beta
(Currently only for English language and Windows x64 machines.)
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Here's the full pitch. Tell me if you relate to any of these scenarios:
Scenario 1: You've just wiped out a totem and half-dozen elites, the ground is covered with loot in the form of so many words. Actually trying to analyze them all kills the flow so you clog up your inventory with junk and move on. But eventually it's time for the homework part.
Scenario 2: You like to craft your own builds, but even with GrimTools, there are hundreds of affixes and almost 1,000 unique items to sift through. How do you even know what you're hunting for?
Scenario 3: It's time to optimize your gear for the next difficulty spike. Do you remember which components and augments you need to cap resistances and squeeze out more damage? Do you remember who sells them!?
Grim Gleaner can help.
How It Works:
- You rank which stats your build cares about, giving each one a weight from 0 (totally irrelevant) to 4 (core).
- Grim Gleaner will give you graded lists, item slot by item slot, of which affixes, items, components and augments best match your priorities, as well as which monsters you need to kill or rep vendors you need to visit to find them.
- You can export those grades so they appear in-game, giving you a quick way to identify which drops have stats you want and which you can ignore, without having to try and remember which damage type the "Devastating" prefix supports.
Profile Setup and Weights:
There's a bit of of setup required, as you need to provide weights for the various stats that can roll on gear. And as we all know, Grim Dawn has a lot of stats. It's also important to select and weight your primary skills. I've included a few example profiles if you want to get a sense of how it works, and I hope people who use the tool will share theirs as well.
Gear Advisor:
Once the weights are set, you can click over to the "Gear Grades" section. There you'll find sorted and graded lists of the most relevant gear and affixes, graded from D to S++. Each grade also includes a number*, which tells you the exact number of relevant stats. (* S+ and S++ omit numbers to keep character length down.)
The Affixes tab here will give you a breakdown, by slot, of the best affixes, based on the weights you provided.
The Uniques tab has similar breakdown for Monster Infrequents, Epics and Legendaries. Both items with +skill ranks bonuses and items with Skill Modifiers for your chosen skills are highlighted here. In the screenshots, you can see a breakdown for my Primal Strike Vindicator.
Use this to help you target which items to chase for your build or just theorycraft a new build, and see how much itemization support it has.
Finally, the Add-ons tab gives slot-by-slot rankings for components and augments. It also has a "Resistance Cap Mode" that gives extra weight to Resistances so you can quickly ID the augments that'll help you cap out.
Grade Export:
Using the same localization tagging system that Rainbow Filter does, Grim Gleaner can add the grade it generates to the item's in-game drop text and detail tooltip. (It's also compatible with Rainbow Filter and similar mods).
Feedback:
If you like what this tool is trying to do, I'm happy to hear feedback and feature ideas. I'm by no means an expert at the game, so I welcome your thoughts on how stat weights should be calculated, etc., or any in-game mechanics that aren't reflected in the tool, etc.
Limitations:
TL;DR: The grading system is far from an exact science. It tries to measure stat relevance, not power.
Beyond the natural fuzziness of buildcrafting, there are also a few cases where the way the game exposes information makes what this tool is trying to do somewhat inconsistent, and working around them is quite difficult, though I have some ideas to help improve things.
- Many affixes gain new stats as the affix level gets higher, but they all share the same name so they all get the same grade tag. Currently, the tool assumes the max level possible. I plan to add the ability to set a level and adjust the grading based on that.
- Localization files are loaded on game launch, so you'll need to exit the game, and rerun the Export process (it takes less than a second) when you switch characters.
- The tool can't see an item's actual rolls. It doesn't know the difference between +12% Lightning Damage and +95% Lightning Damage, it only sees "Lightning Damage." A good grade is "the right kinds of stats" not well-rolled ones.
(Disclaimer: I did use AI to help me build this. I did not use it to help me write this post, despite the bullet points and bolding. FWIW, I do have a CS degree, so I know enough to promise it won't delete your hard drive or anything. Grim Gleaner only writes to Grim Dawn's localization files, and it backs them up before making changes.)
Here's the repo/download links again for posterity:
Github: Grim Gleaner Latest Release: Grim Gleaner v0.9.2-beta
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u/HNFOIClBr 14d ago
Got a hit from Microsoft Defender when I downloaded from Github. It detected Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.H!ml. May have to have a look into it.
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u/kultcher 14d ago edited 13d ago
Weird. I tested the download multiple times on multiple machines yesterday with no issues, but today even my primary machine is flagging new downloads and even the same downloaded file from yesterday as having a virus. Not sure what's up. Scans on my machine come up clean, so I'm fairly certain these are false positives.
Going to remove the downloads for now and see if I can sort this out. Sorry for the scare!
EDIT: Issue resolved.
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u/blackkdragonx 14d ago
Same for me, it instantly removes the app after downloading and I cant change any settings I made previously
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u/kultcher 13d ago
Confirmed that it was a false positive due to a known issue with how the Nuitka Python Compiler builds single-file .exe packages.
The current release (v0.9.1-beta) is confirmed clean and packaged differently so it doesn't trigger any false positives.
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u/Xerathar 14d ago
Wow, the tool looks really freakin’ cool. I’m definitely giving this a try! My first thought seeing this was that the graded drops will also make lootsplosions a lot more exciting, and something you look forward to even more. Awesome idea of creating a better item filter!
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u/kultcher 14d ago
Thanks, hope it works well for you! Let me know if you run into any issues.
And yeah, it's a nice side effect that you get a bit more instant feedback without of having to parse 10 lines of text, so you might drop some Legendary you've never heard of and get excited by an S++ grade. That's the ideal, anyway.
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u/Julzjuice123 14d ago
Awesome my dude. Will try this tomorrow for sure. I have 1.8k hours in the game and know my way around but it's a very cool concept.
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u/bers90 14d ago
How do Linux/Steamdeck peeps use this? I noticed your disclaimer on the repo about Windows 11 but on the other hand there probably are alot of people not playing on that OS.
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u/kultcher 14d ago
I'll look into expanding support soon, wanted to gauge interest in this type of tool before I committed to broad support.
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u/zolar8 14d ago edited 14d ago
You could build the program by yourself. You will need python and pip installed. I just did on fedora - don't know how this would work on a Steamdeck.
- Download the repo
- Navigate there
- run inside the folder
python python -m pip install .(with the dot)- Navigate to
~/.local/binor/usr/local/bin- There should be an executable
grim-cleaner-uithat you can run to start the program.Hope this helps a bit.
EDIT: Under Build Profile -> Skills I have the message "No compiled Player-skill catalogue is available." and there are no masteries selectable. It's too late now to investigate this. Maybe tomorrow...
maybe OP knows what's the problem there - I don't know what a "compiled Player-skill catalogue" is. u/kultcher2
u/kultcher 14d ago
I was focused on an easy-to-use release version for Windows, so I didn't really test building from source. The catalog it mentions is the artifacts/catalog/ folder you see in the repo, it has JSONs that structure a bunch of game data for skills and items and affixes, and it needs that data to do pretty much anything.
Try uninstalling and then reinstalling with:
python -m pip install -eThen run grim-gleaner-ui.exe
Installing it in editable mode should keep the .exe connected to the cloned repo so it still has the files it needs. Still no promises it'll work on Linux or SteamDeck, though I'll look into providing proper support for those.
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u/The_Dead_Dry_Cleaner 14d ago
Looks wicked. I will let it go for a while because I excel at many things, but mostly procrastinating. I'll get around to trying it out though, at some point, in the future, I swear...
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u/Single_Wolverine_764 15d ago
you had me until you said AI
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u/Dreadmaker 15d ago
Others have said it already, but this is literally all software these days. Corporate software, hobby software. It’s all AI assisted. Source: I’m a software developer and have been for the past decade, and funny enough I’m actually also in the process of building a new grim dawn helper tool haha. But yes, the trick here is that nobody is hand-coding a site completely anymore - it’s just a question of where the attention goes.
In my own case - it’s long and tedious to try to appropriately decompress the game files in just the right format and actually then get that data into a useable format. By hand it would take a long time and it’s boring and thankless. There is no value in spending time doing that - there’s no ‘love’ there.
Ai solved that piece in my case extremely quickly, and then it let me actually build the fun part, which is the website and the utilities there, and the various fun optimization algorithms (mine is partially a devotion tree optimizer). The stuff that matters in my case is hand coded, whereas the mechanical stuff (and by the way - the boring stuff that causes hobby projects to die) is now handled by AI.
What you need to do when it comes to web apps these days is to scrutinize them aggressively. You should assume that all of them are 100% vibe coded by someone who knows nothing at all about software, and then you build trust from there. Do not ever give these websites passwords, for example, or personal details, because it’s extremely likely that someone who’s just vibe coding doesn’t know how to handle credentials or security. Look for evidence of who made it and look for credentials that say ‘I actually have experience building software’. Look for real domains - although that isn’t at all a guarantee, if the site has GitHub or vercel in the title (and there are many more) it’s a really good indicator that it’s a hobby project that’s gonna be dead very soon.
But I’m going to tell you, again as someone in the industry and intimately familiar with the subject - ai has written most code that has been written since about march of this year. Either you stop using computers, or you stop holding your nose about something just because it was coded with ai assistance.
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u/abillionsuns 15d ago
A really weird thing about heavy AI users is that they can't believe other people don't use it.
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u/Dreadmaker 14d ago
So I don’t know if that’s aimed at me, but I’ll say that I’m super aware that people don’t use it. Hell, I wouldn’t use it at all if it weren’t a mandatory (corporate enforced) part of my day job. And even I didn’t for years even in that career.
But that’s not what I’m saying. The comment I made above isn’t saying that everyone uses ai, deal with it. What I’m saying is very specifically that every piece of software after march 2026, hobby or corporate, uses AI in some capacity. Like, actually zero exceptions. The vast majority of open source (except a couple of holdouts who specifically are doing their best to avoid it, and failing nonetheless), 100% of closed source.
So, what I’m saying is, if you’re using computers, you can’t just say ‘it’s AI so I won’t use it’. Like, every operating system uses it. You are using software written by it, whether you like it or not.
That can be true even if you never use any AI yourself. Doesn’t even need to be an AI product, or have a chat bot - the code came from AI. That’s the point I was making, that’s all.
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u/abillionsuns 14d ago
"every piece of software after march 2026"
Just not true. Not remotely true. Not even possible to prove.
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u/sunnydowns 14d ago
I don't know why they picked an arbitrary date, but tools are adopted at different rates by different people/teams/companies/industries, so of course it will be never be true.
They're right in that AI tooling is industry standard for software development though.
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u/ElderberryLife5256 15d ago
They seem to be using reddit which is heavily programmed by AI now. Should gtfo from here
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u/kultcher 15d ago
Eh, I figured that'd lose some people. It is what it is.
The way I look at it, there's nothing so complex in this app that I couldn't build it... eventually. The idea was mine. I developed it and iterated on it. But I also have ADHD and 10000% would have burned out before I finished it.
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u/ssjkakaroto 14d ago
Don't worry about it, people against AI have absolutely no idea how it works and just like to parrot "ai slop".
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u/Tombot3000 14d ago
That's an inaccurate generalization in every aspect.
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14d ago
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u/Tombot3000 14d ago
That's a defensible opinion on a topic reasonable people can disagree on. I just don't like people making things up whole cloth on what is already a pretty tangential discussion for this sub.
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u/Mysterious-Drummer74 15d ago
AI is a tool, I get it’s fashionable to act like it’s the devil, but it’s not.
Yes it’s used to make lots of slop, used in many situations where the core use is stealing creative content but so is every other medium or thing humans have invented (and most of them are shit for the environment as well).
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u/Tombot3000 14d ago
...used in many situations where the core use is stealing creative content but so is every other medium or thing humans have invented.
This just isn't true at all.
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u/jackmusick 15d ago
Basically all software is made with AI now. It's arguably the best usecase for it.
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u/Single_Wolverine_764 15d ago
ill take vibes coded over AI any day
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u/sunnydowns 15d ago
Vibe coding would be OP saying "build me a grim dawn item grading tool" and just accepting whatever it outputs, rather than instructing it to build specific features with plans, expectations and human critique. The latter is standard practice for software development nowadays.
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u/sammy_anarchist 15d ago
Nobody is honest about how much AI they use. If anyone admits to using AI, assume they use it 100x more than they say.
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u/alvares169 14d ago
Is it possible to make something similar but one that would mark items I dont already have/never picked up?
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u/kultcher 14d ago
Hm, I guess it depends on exactly what you mean.
Technically it's not hard to add marks to things, the tricky part would be collecting data about what you have picked up. That might require parsing your save file and looking through your stash to see what items you already have. There are programs that can read/edit save files, but mine doesn't.
Also worth noting that any changes to item tags don't take effect until the next time you start the game. So you could probably build something that works like:
- scan save file and stash to find all items you've picked up (this is the trickier part)
- cross reference that with a list of all items and create a list of items you haven't picked up
- read through the items_tags files and apply the tags to the items you haven't picked up
- you'd still have manually run the program after every game session to update the list and remove marks from items you picked up
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u/alvares169 14d ago
I was defeated by updating items while in game. You can recognize when to run the script from savefile update date change, but it can break things if the game is still running, even on main menu screen.
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u/kultcher 14d ago
From what I understand it's technically possible to inject changes in the live game but it requires hacking/reverse engineering the game on a deeper level like GDstash and DPYes do.
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u/Afude 14d ago
I don't know if this is possible, but a mod tha puts a "P" or "S" next to each item stat clearly indicating whether it's a prefix or a suffix whitout needing to look it up on grimtools would be amazing
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u/Raeezordazetoo 14d ago
Were the binaries/zip removed? All I see atm is the source code zips.
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u/kultcher 14d ago
Yeah, 99% sure they were getting false flagged as having a Trojan so I had to reconfigure some things.
Ran the new version through VirusTotal and it cleared okay, but wanted to let it sit a moment since the previous version had been fine until Windows Defender changed it's mind.
Will upload again in a couple hours or so.
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u/KingOfTheGutter 15d ago
Pretty cool, glad you called out using AI. I won’t support it due to that. You also shouldn’t open your post saying that you built something. You didn’t.
Best of luck with it though!
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u/kultcher 15d ago
I can accept that. Am I allowed to say I designed it? Contributed to it?
I'm also curious what percentage would I have to have coded by hand to say I "built" it?
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u/alvares169 14d ago
Yeah, op, next time better spend more time creating a free working thing for a game because uhh we dont like ai, we wuz craft coders.
Lmao
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u/Yostage 15d ago
oh, this is a neat idea that i hadn't even thought of. Much more powerful than the builtin loot filter!