Features Guild Butler Capture
A small desktop app for Windows and macOS logs every item you pick up. Pair it with your server once and the raid’s loot session builds the report, the deposit board and the estimate on its own — from what everyone’s app saw, not from memory.
01 · Why it exists
The gross a settle starts from used to be whatever someone remembered. Now it is what the party’s capture apps saw, priced, set against the chest log.
Every loot argument has the same shape: who picked up what, whether it reached the chest, and what it was worth. Guild Butler Capture answers the first question the only way that cannot be argued with — by writing every pickup down the moment it happens, on the member’s own machine, from the game’s own traffic.
The bot answers the other two. A pasted chest log marks what each member handed in; the killboard excuses what they died holding; and on Pro every pickup carries a live market estimate, so the settle window opens with the raid’s gross already filled in. The report is public, the page behind it is shareable, and the officer still decides.
02 · How it works
Six stops. The member does two of them, once.
Install it and press Start capture member
Windows or macOS. The app reads the game’s traffic as it goes past and writes every pickup to a plain text log on your machine. No account, no terminal, no sudo — on macOS it asks for capture permission once and fixes it itself.
Pair it with your Discord member
/capture pair — or 🖥️ Connect capture app in /menu → Me — gives you a one-time code. Type it into the app’s Pair with Discord and from then on your pickups upload on their own. No files to drag around.
Play the raid bot
Every pickup lands in your own inbox on the bot as it happens. When an officer opens, refreshes or closes the raid’s loot session, it sweeps in everything its roster captured during the raid’s window — including what was captured before anyone opened the session.
The officer presses 📦 Loot officer
On the raid console. Several members’ files merge and back each other up; a pickup seen by only one file is marked ⚠︎. 🔄 Refresh pulls in new uploads — and the .txt a member drops into the officer thread still works as it always did.
Paste the chest log officer
Copy the guild chest log in game — every page of it, 100 rows at a time, in any order — and drop it in. The bot answers 🏦 Chest log: +112 new rows (holding 112). A page you already added answers 🏦 Chest log: nothing new.
Press 🧾 Close & post report officer
The 📦 Loot report posts publicly — pickups, items, looters by their linked Discord, outside looters set apart, a silver estimate on Pro — with the deposit board of who still owes the chest. The settle window opens with the gross already filled in; you can always type over it.
03 · The app
An Electron window over a packet-capture engine. Everything it does is stated here, and all of it is public code.
It reads the game’s own network traffic as it goes past. It never types, clicks, moves or modifies anything in Albion — it has no way to.
The app drives a separate capture engine — our fork of ao-loot-logger, the part that actually reads packets. Both are GPL-3.0 and public, because “you can check” is the only honest answer to an app that reads a network interface on your machine.
Written to a plain text log on your machine the moment it happens, yours to open at any time.
No account, no Discord, no guild: this half works entirely on its own. Linking it to a server is optional, and the log stays on your disk either way — the bot only ever receives the lines you paired it to send.
Start capture, Stop, and a status line that says what it is doing. On macOS it fixes capture permission in one prompt; on Windows it fetches the Npcap driver for you.
When nothing arrives for a quiet minute and a half, the window shows one line — *Nothing after a few minutes?* — that opens the three usual causes over the card, and nothing on the screen moves when it does. Npcap is fetched from its makers, its signature checked, and its installer launched for you.
The Windows app updates itself and checks hourly. The macOS build is signed, for Apple Silicon.
From the public releases: Windows auto-update since v0.4.0, an hourly check since v0.4.1, a signed macOS build since v0.5.0, and the redesigned app — six languages, themes, auto-start — since v0.6.0. The download page always serves the latest release and states its version and size.
GPL-3.0. The app and the capture engine are both public on GitHub.
Installers are served from guild-butler.com/download rather than from GitHub, so downloading one tells nobody but us. Npcap is never bundled — its free licence covers neither redistribution nor a silent install — so the app fetches it from its own makers.
The 📅 daily events board and the siphoned-energy reading both come off the game’s own traffic, through the app.
Nothing publishes Albion’s bonus rotation over HTTP — it only exists inside the game — so the board is fed by whoever runs the app. One member on Europe keeps every server bound to Europe current. The guild’s siphoned-energy total is read the same way, so the daily breakdown builds itself.
04 · Pairing
Pairing ties a computer to your Discord account on that server. Nothing about it needs an officer.
Only you can see this
Your pairing code: H7K2M9PX
Open Guild Butler Capture, click Pair with Discord, and type this code. It works once and expires in 10 minutes.
No Pair with Discord button? Update the app — you need v0.3.0 or newer. Don’t have it at all? Get it from the download page your officers shared.
/capture pair gives you a one-time code; the same
button lives at 🖥️ Connect capture app in
/menu → Me. Type it into the app’s
Pair with Discord. Both the reply and the dashboard name the build
you need — v0.3.0 or newer — instead of handing you a code for a
button that does not exist.
/capture devices shows what is connected, by number.
/capture revoke disconnects a machine you no longer use;
it cannot upload anything else until you pair it again. Five computers per member.
Only you can see this
Computers connected to your account1. Desktop — connected · last upload 2 minutes ago · 1,087 lines2. Laptop — disconnected · last upload 12 days ago · 240 lines
05 · The loot session
One button opens a session on the raid. Uploads sweep in on their own; a dropped file still works.
When an officer opens, refreshes or closes 📦 Loot, the raid sweeps in everything its members captured during it — including what they captured before anyone opened the session. Each member’s capture counts as one independent source however many times it is refreshed, and a member on two overlapping raids has each pickup land on exactly one of them.
Several files back each other up. A pickup seen by only one file is marked
⚠︎ in the report; a looter with no linked Discord shows
🔗 and a nudge to run /ign set, so the
report names people, not characters. Outside looters — pugs, allies, whoever else was
there — are set apart under 🚪 Outside looters.
🔄 Refresh pulls in new uploads. 🧾 Close & post report posts the card publicly and freezes the session: a file dropped afterwards gets a reply saying it was not recorded, and reopening notes that the closed session keeps its earlier evidence. If a member’s lines did not attach, the empty report says why — no start time on the raid, lines outside the raid’s window, or an uploader who is not on the roster — instead of showing “0 pickups” against an app that says “1,087 lines sent”.
📦 Loot🔄 Refresh🧾 Close & post report/capture pair/capture devices/capture revoke 06 · The deposit board
Paste the guild chest log and nobody has to ask who still owes what.
A red ❌ is loot that never reached the chest. ➖ is a stack partly handed in — with how much is still owed. ⚰️ is what the killboard saw you die holding: those items are excused, a partly-lost stack shows what you actually still owe, and the close ping skips you entirely when deaths cover everything.
Silver-bag pickups, tomes and untradables do not count anywhere in the report, and vendor Trash never clutters it. The chest-log comparison matches items across game-client languages — a Russian chest export credits English-logged loot — because it joins on the item itself, not its translated name.
On close, the tagged members get one ping: the chest log is in — check your ❌ lines on the deposit board above. One ping, once.
🏦 @Torvald @Mirae — the chest log is in: check your ❌ lines on the deposit board above.
07 · Valuation
The report always counts. On Pro, with the killboard bound, it also prices — and says how sure it is.
On Pro and Banner servers with the killboard server binding set, the loot report shows an estimated silver total from live market data, a 💎 line flags any ~1m+ pickup the moment its file lands, and the settle window opens with the gross field already filled in with the raid’s estimate — you can always type over it.
The estimate does not trust a lone listing. A city price more than three times the Black Market’s standing buy order is capped to that order, everywhere the figure appears — the report, the session page, the settle prefill, the 💎 alerts — and the report says how many prices it capped. The line under the total states how many pickups were priced at all, and the footer says what the number is: a market estimate, not a settlement. The officer decides the gross.
Only your guild’s own pickups count toward a raid’s value. Enemies looting your corpses still show in the list, tagged, but their loot is not priced into your total — so the page, the Discord report card and the loot ledger agree.
See pricing08 · On the web
The Discord card and the dashboard page are built by one assembler, so they cannot report different numbers.
One tile per item per player, the game’s own icons, coloured by what happened — with a sortable table one click away.
Handed in, Partly handed in, Kept, Deposited only and Lost on death each get their own colour, a legend explains them on screen, and Tier and Type filters cut a big night down. Each tile prints its estimated silver underneath. The page has a real address, so a session can be shared with a link — the report card’s 🔗 lands on it.
Officers see the whole raid; members see their own loot, and their own raids on the Loot tab.
A guild that wants it open to everyone flips /settings → Economy → Show loot ledger to everyone. The page always says which view you are looking at. The all-time loot board — totals per player across every closed session — is officer-only by default and kept for good, unlike the raw lines behind it.
Your own page on the dashboard shows what you have looted and handed in across every server you raid with, and what you still owe each chest.
Free everywhere — including servers on the free plan, which show quantities rather than silver. “Still owed” is written down when the raid closes and no longer expires with the raw lines. The app’s own 📦 View my loot button opens straight on the Loot tab.
Which computers are connected to your account, whether your uploads arrived, and which raid counted them.
A run captured outside any raid window says so instead of silently vanishing — and the page says which of three things is keeping your lines off a raid: waiting for an officer to close that raid’s session, a raid you are not on the roster of, or no raid covering that time at all.
09 · Also from the app
Nothing publishes Albion’s bonus rotation or your guild’s energy total over HTTP. The app is how the bot learns both.
📅 The daily events board. The day’s two production bonuses, the
gathering bonus and whatever activity or seasonal event is running, as one card with a
live countdown on each, in your server’s language, using the game’s own wording. The
rotation is read off a member’s own session and shared over the pairing they already
have — one person on Europe running the app keeps the board current for every server
bound to Europe. A rotation nobody has refreshed for 36 hours carries a “this may be
out of date” warning instead of counting down a stale promise. Officers switch it on in
/settings → 📅 Events; /bonus
answers when a bonus was last seen, and how many of the last 60 days the bot
actually watched.
⚡ Siphoned energy. With members running the app, the bot reads the guild’s siphoned-energy total straight off the game’s traffic — no 📸, no typing — and the daily breakdown builds itself, with a reading every time the number moves. A reading is only accepted for the Albion guild your server is bound to. An officer (or anyone with the log-filler role) who opens the guild’s energy log in game and scrolls it sends those rows straight to the bot; ordinary members’ apps send the guild total only, never rows that move anyone’s balance.
10 · Installing
Windows, and Apple Silicon Macs. The download page leads with your own platform and states the version and size on the button.
1. Run the installer. Windows will warn you — our builds are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows its blue box; the download page walks you through it.
2. Open the app. If it asks for the capture driver, click the button: it fetches Npcap from its makers, checks the signature and launches the installer for you.
3. Press Start capture and play.
1. Open the DMG and drag the app to Applications.
2. Right-click it → Open, then confirm. Our builds are not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS refuses the first launch; it asks once.
3. Press Start capture. The app asks for capture permission and fixes it in one prompt — no Terminal, no sudo.
11 · Honest limits
Stated up front, so nothing here is a surprise after you install it.
12 · Questions
.txt into the raid’s officer thread by hand and the report is built the same way. The app only removes the dragging — and the forgetting./settings → Economy → Show loot ledger to everyone. The page always says which view you are looking at./capture devices shows them by number with their state, last upload and lines sent; /capture revoke disconnects one you no longer use, and it cannot upload anything else until you pair it again./assign the member) and press 🔄 Refresh — or drop the .txt into the thread to attach it anyway.See it running before you install
The community server runs the bot in the open — a live killboard, real boards to press, and humans who answer questions.
Keep reading
Free on every plan, open source, and optional — drop a file by hand or let the app do it.