Better Trove Tools

A desktop companion for Trove players, collectors, and modders.

Live game utilities, build planning, mod management, archive tooling, and game‑file‑powered codexes — all in a single, fast, local‑first app.

Download · Releases · Report a bug

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Table of contents

• Overview
• Feature highlights
• Home dashboard
• Gems & builds
• Calculators
• Codexes
• Mod manager
• Modder tools
• Game file engine
• App & quality of life
• Built for speed
• Requirements
• Getting started
• Hosted web mode
• Localization
• Tech stack
• License

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Overview

Better Trove Tools is a local‑first desktop application: it runs on your own machine, reads your installed Trove game files directly, and only reaches out to the internet for the things that genuinely need it (community content, news, mod downloads, and update checks). Every external request is logged and visible to you in‑app for full transparency.

The interface renders inside the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime instead of bundling a full browser engine, keeping the download small while staying automatically security‑patched by Windows.

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Feature highlights

Area	What you get
🏠 Home dashboard	Live rotations, merchant tracking, community feeds, official news, and an interactive yearly calendar
💎 Gems & builds	Gem build planner, Star Chart builder, gem evaluator, and a full gem simulator
🧮 Calculators	Power Rank, Mastery, Magic Find, and Light — with Star Chart integration
📖 Codexes (beta)	Allies, mounts, dragons, mementos, recipes, items, fish, and badges built straight from game files
🧩 Mod manager	Install, enable, update, and resolve conflicts across every Trove install, plus a built‑in Trovesaurus browser
🛠️ Modder tools	Build / extract / edit .tmod packages, browse archives, diff patches, and deploy test overrides
⚙️ Quality of life	Multi‑language UI, theming, command palette, and a background job queue

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Home dashboard

• Live rotation tracking for daily and weekly bonuses.
• Merchant tracking for Luxion, Corruxion, and Fluxion, plus biome‑based merchant schedules.
• Community content carousels for YouTube, Twitch, and BiliBili.
• Official Trove news feed with category filtering and collapse controls.
• Trovesaurus event calendar integration.
• Interactive yearly rotation calendar with timeline filters, time‑mode switching, and quick jumps.
• Server time & timezone tools — a live Trove server clock, side‑by‑side world clocks, and a converter that produces ready‑to‑paste Discord timestamps.
• Customizable layout — reorder dashboard sections, collapse what you don't use, and pin your most‑used tools to the Quick Tools tray (auto or manual).

Gems & builds

• Gem Builds planner for class‑focused optimization.
• Star Chart builder with a pan/zoom node map, saved templates, and shareable build codes.
• Gem Evaluator for reviewing gem quality and upgrade decisions.
• Gem Simulator for leveling, augmenting, sparking, and flaring experiments.

Calculators

• Power Rank calculator.
• Mastery calculator (Trove and Geode).
• Magic Find calculator with Star Chart integration.
• Light calculator.

Codexes

Built dynamically from your installed Trove game files and cache‑backed for fast reopening. (Beta)

• Ally Codex — category, stats, abilities, mastery, geode mastery, designer, blueprint, and decoded ally power rank.
• Mount Codex — category, movement stats, mastery, designer, and blueprint data.
• Dragon Codex — dragon‑category mounts.
• Memento Codex — category, mastery, and source context (biome, boss, or creature origin when available).
• Recipe Codex — decoded outputs, ingredient counts, category grouping, and output prefab metadata from prefabs/recipes.
• Item, Fish, and Badge codexes — searchable, filterable catalogs decoded from game data.

Mod manager

• Manage installed mods per Trove installation (Live, PTS, and custom installs).
• Enable, disable, update, and delete mods.
• Conflict detection for overlapping active mods.
• Rename local mod files to match their internal titles.
• Search, filter, and quick‑jump through results.
• Built‑in onboarding tips and shortcut hints.
• Trovesaurus browser with direct install and update support.
• Preview images and open Trovesaurus mod or author pages from inside the app.
• btt:// deep link support for one‑click installs from the web.

Modder tools

• Build .tmod packages from loose files, with preview image and .cfg support.
• Extract existing .tmod files for editing.
• Edit existing .tmod files in memory and recompile them with title‑based file naming.
• Project manager with persistent mod workspaces and active version workspaces for iteration.
• Auto‑structure & override‑detection tools for packaging files correctly.
• One‑click "Test in Game" override deployment and cleanup.
• File Explorer for browsing Trove archives and extracted content, with fast parallel mass extraction.
• Update Tracker for patch‑to‑patch archive diffing, baseline caching, and targeted extraction of only what changed.
• Blueprint Editor (experimental preview) — open .qb and Trove .blueprint packages, inspect voxel assets in 3D, and export back to Qubicle Binary format.
• Third‑party software directory for common Trove modding tools.

Game file engine

• Reads Trove .tfi index and .tfa archive files directly.
• Uses cache‑backed runtime parsing instead of relying only on bundled static data, so codexes and tooling stay current with your installed build.
• Includes decoding work for allies, mounts, mementos, mastery groups, geode mastery, localized names, descriptions, and related metadata.
• Archive reads, hashing, and extraction are processed in parallel across CPU cores for fast tree loads, baseline builds, and bulk extraction.

App & quality of life

• Multi‑language interface support (9 languages).
• Accent color and app font customization.
• Custom Trove directory management for Live, PTS, and custom installs.
• Command palette / Quick Open (Ctrl/Cmd + K) to jump to any tool or action instantly.
• Background job queue for long‑running operations like extraction and scanning.
• Home page content toggles for a calmer dashboard.
• Local‑first design with an external request tracker for full transparency.
• Built‑in update checking through GitHub releases, with one‑click in‑app self‑update.

Built for speed

Better Trove Tools is engineered to feel instant:

• Lazy‑loaded views — only the code for the screen you open is fetched, keeping startup snappy.
• Parallel archive processing — .tfa decompression, hashing, and extraction fan out across CPU cores.
• Cache‑aware everywhere — game‑install detection, codex datasets, and archive trees are cached and only rebuilt when the underlying files actually change.
• Idle‑friendly — background timers pause when the window isn't visible.

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Requirements

The desktop app renders its interface in the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime instead of bundling a browser, keeping the download small and the engine automatically security‑patched.

• Windows 11 — WebView2 is preinstalled; nothing to do.
• Windows 10 and earlier — usually delivered through Windows Update, but if the app reports the runtime as missing, install the free Evergreen WebView2 Runtime from Microsoft:
  • Download page: https://developer.microsoft.com/microsoft-edge/webview2/
  • Direct Evergreen Bootstrapper: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=2124703

WebView2 is a standalone component, so it stays installed even if Microsoft Edge itself is removed.

Linux renders through pywebview's system backend instead — WebKit2GTK (recommended) or Qt WebEngine. See Run on Linux below. Windows remains the primary, fully‑featured target; Linux runs the same UI and tools, with Windows‑only bits (self‑update, the registry‑based auto‑detect) gracefully disabled.

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Getting started

Install the app

1. Download the latest installer from the website or the GitHub Releases page.
2. Run the .msi installer.
3. Launch Better Trove Tools — it will auto‑detect your Trove installations (Glyph and Steam) and check for updates.

The app keeps itself up to date: when a newer release is available it offers a one‑click in‑app update that downloads the installer, applies it, and relaunches automatically.

Run from source

pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py

Install on Linux

Better Trove Tools is pure Python on Linux — no native library to compile, and no webview backend required. If no GTK/Qt backend is installed, the app simply opens in your default browser (full functionality — it's the same local server either way). The quickest path:

# Download BetterTroveTools-<version>-linux.tar.gz from the Releases page
tar xzf BetterTroveTools-*-linux.tar.gz
cd BetterTroveTools
./install-linux.sh    # venv + deps + a menu launcher & icon

Launch Better Trove Tools from your application menu afterwards (./install-linux.sh --uninstall removes the launcher). Or, to run without a menu entry, just ./run.sh.

Important

📦 Install Python Tk — required for file pickers

The Modder Tools' file pickers and Settings → Browse for folder open native folder/file dialogs through Python's tkinter module. On most Linux distros this is a separate system package that the pip install can't pull in.

Without it, the app still boots — but those buttons silently do nothing.

Install once for your distro:

Distro	Command
Debian / Ubuntu / Mint	sudo apt install python3-tk
Fedora / RHEL	sudo dnf install python3-tkinter
Arch / Manjaro	sudo pacman -S tk

./run.sh re‑checks at every launch and warns if Tk is missing.

Optional — a standalone app window (instead of a browser tab). Install a webview backend, either Qt (self‑contained, ~150 MB) or the lighter native GTK:

# Qt: works in the existing venv as-is
.venv-linux/bin/pip install pyqt6 pyqt6-webengine qtpy

# or GTK (lighter, native) — needs a venv that can see system `gi`:
sudo apt install python3-gi gir1.2-webkit2-4.1   # Fedora: python3-gobject webkit2gtk4.1 | Arch: python-gobject webkit2gtk
python3 -m venv --system-site-packages .venv-linux && ./run.sh

The app auto‑detects a backend and uses an app window when one is present. Force the browser (Linux/macOS only) with BTT_BROWSER=1 ./run.sh. On Windows the app always uses its WebView2 window — there is no browser fallback.

What works on Linux: the full UI, calculators, gems/builds, Star Chart, home dashboard, Trovesaurus browsing, and — when a Trove install is present (e.g. via Steam/Proton, which is auto‑detected) — the codexes and mod management, since those only read the game files.

What's Windows‑only: the in‑app self‑updater and "Test in Game" (which runs the Windows game .exe). If no Trove installation is detected, install‑dependent tools are skipped gracefully and the app prompts you to add a directory in Settings → Directories (point it at any valid Trove folder manually).

NixOS (flake)

A flake lives in this repo — so the package definition comes from the same place as the app, with no third‑party repository to trust. Add it as an input and pull the package into your system config:

{
  inputs = {
    # ...
    better-trove-tools.url = "github:AallynReed/BetterTroveTools";
  };
}

{ inputs, pkgs, ... }:
{
  environment.systemPackages = [
    inputs.better-trove-tools.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
  ];
}

Or try it without installing:

nix run github:AallynReed/BetterTroveTools

Currently packaged for x86_64-linux. The flake also builds the four Python deps that aren't in nixpkgs yet (eel, bottle-websocket, gevent-websocket, binary-reader). Original Nix packaging by @Redhawk18.

Cutting a release (maintainers)

Releases are built automatically by .github/workflows/compiler.yml when a GitHub Release is created:

1. Bump APP_VERSION in metadata.json and commit.
2. Create the release — tag and release name should match the version (the asset filenames use the release name), e.g. with the GitHub CLI:

   gh release create 2026.06.01 --title 2026.06.01 --notes "What changed..."

   (Or use the Releases page → Draft a new release.)
3. The workflow then attaches two assets to that release:
   • BetterTroveTools-<version>-win64.msi — Windows installer (built via compile.py).
   • BetterTroveTools-<version>-linux.tar.gz — Linux run‑from‑source bundle (git archive); users extract it and run ./install-linux.sh.

The Windows job needs a COMPILER repository secret (a token with contents: write) to upload assets.

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Hosted web mode

A browser‑hosted compatibility server is included for the tools that don't require local file‑system access:

pip install -r web-requirements.txt
uvicorn web_server:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8087

For local development, python web_server.py also starts uvicorn using the BTT_WEB_HOST and BTT_WEB_PORT environment variables. The server hosts web/ and exposes the non‑file‑system backend functions through /api/eel/<function_name>. User settings and saved web‑mode state live in browser storage; desktop‑only tools such as Mod Manager, Modder Tools, and Codexes are hidden in this mode.

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Localization

The interface is available in 9 languages:

🇺🇸 English · 🇧🇷 Português (Brasil) · 🇪🇸 Español · 🇫🇷 Français · 🇩🇪 Deutsch · 🇷🇺 Русский · 🇯🇵 日本語 · 🇰🇷 한국어 · 🇨🇳 简体中文

Translations are loaded from web/assets/locale/ and the active language can be switched at any time from the sidebar.

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Tech stack

Layer	Technology
Language	Python
Desktop shell	pywebview on the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime
Python ↔ JS bridge	Eel
Web server	Bottle + gevent (desktop) · uvicorn (hosted web mode)
Frontend	Vue 3, vanilla JS, modular CSS
Async I/O	aiofiles, aiohttp
Game data	Custom .tfi / .tfa archive parser, binary-reader, vdf (Steam library detection)
Packaging	cx‑Freeze

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License

Released under the MIT License. © 2026‑Present Aallyn Reed.

Better Trove Tools is a community project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Trion Worlds, Gamigo, or the official Trove team. Trove and related assets are property of their respective owners.