Guildrun Targeting Preview

See how the fight is going to start, while you are still placing your heroes. A mod for the Guildrun Demo on Steam.

Hover a unit to see where it ends up standing and who it ends up fighting. Hold a hero and the whole board answers for the hex under your cursor, so you see the result before you drop it.

The mod does not change the fight. It only shows what was already going to happen.

Important

A run played with the mod on cannot submit a score and does not move your Red Rift win streak in either direction. A button in the main menu switches the mod on and off at any time, without closing the game and without deleting anything. Details.

Download

• With MelonLoader if you have never installed a mod for this game. It contains everything.
• Mod only if you already have MelonLoader.

Every version is on the releases page. If your browser or your antivirus refuses the file, here is the fix.

Install

1. In Steam : right click Guildrun Demo > Manage > Browse local files.
2. Drag the content of the zip into that folder. If Windows asks to replace files, say yes.
3. Launch the game normally.

The first launch with the full zip takes a minute or two and needs internet : a black console window opens while MelonLoader sets itself up. Every launch after it is instant. The preview works from your very first placement.

On Linux or a Steam Deck there is one extra step.

Update

The mod tells you when a new version is out. A message in the main menu names it, says which version you are on, and offers to open the download for you. Accepting opens the mod-only zip and your game folder, so the file has somewhere to go the moment it arrives. Each version is offered once ; decline it and it is not mentioned again for that version.

To do that, the mod asks GitHub once per launch what the newest version is. That is the only time it touches the internet, it asks nothing else and it sends nothing about you. Set CheckForUpdates to false in the settings file and it never contacts anything.

Nothing to uninstall. An update is the same drag as the install. Take the mod only zip, drop its Mods folder into the game folder, and say yes when Windows asks to replace the file. If the game is open, restart it : the new file is only read when the game starts.

The mod is a single file replaced in place, so nothing from the old version is left behind, and your settings, your shortcuts and your progress are kept : the zip carries no settings file. You already have MelonLoader and this update does not change it. If you are not sure you still have it, take the full zip instead, which is just as safe over an existing install.

Remove it

Delete version.dll from the game folder. MelonLoader stops loading and the game is exactly as it was before.

To remove only this mod and keep your other ones, delete Mods\GuildrunTargetingMod.dll instead. To clear every trace, also delete the MelonLoader, Mods, Plugins and UserData folders.

To play for the leaderboards, switching the mod off in the main menu is enough.

What it shows

Hover a unit and you get the unit you point at, the one it fights once the board settles, and every unit fighting it there. Each with its final position, its movement line and its attack arrows.

The opening preview shows the same picture for the whole board at once. Names and health bars are hidden while it is on.

Three buttons, three shortcuts.P for the preview, T for see-through units, G for the ability areas. Each has a tooltip giving its name, its shortcut and what it does, and each remembers how you left it.

Parts that care where a hero stands are marked. Items, relics, rank modifiers and specializations that only pay from the front row, from the back row, next to an ally or alone in a row. When the hero is standing where one of these pays, the hex under them lights up. When it does not pay, the hex is dimmed with a red line across it, and the item in that hero's row or the relic in the bar gets a red animated border and a line too.

Open a Hero card and the ability or rank modifier that is switched off is marked, and only that one : if the same modifier sits on two Heroes and only one is out of position, only that Hero's copy is marked.

A wasted Rift Seal is marked. In a Red Rift run, if winning this fight would charge nothing and moving the Seal would fix that, the Seal's icon gets a red animated border and a line across it. It stays quiet when moving it would not help.

Attacks that hit several units show every unit they hit. Most attacks in this game hit exactly one thing, and those get the one arrow they have always had. The ones that do not get an arrow each : Funke's fireball catches every enemy in his range, Ming's burst everything beside him, and the Dragons' ordinary attacks strike every Hero standing next to the one they are aimed at. Those extra lines fan out from the Hero being struck, because that is where the splash comes from, and moving that neighbour one hex is usually the whole answer.

Three more things it draws :

• The ground an ability covers, as a dashed outline anchored on the unit. Enemies get one too, so you can see what to move out of. This one has its own button, G, so you can put the outlines away without giving up anything else the board is showing you.
• A unit that jumps. A Lizard is thrown to your back line the instant the fight starts, before it walks anywhere. That jump is a fainter, thinner line, the hex it lands on is marked in grey, and its normal movement line carries on from there.
• The swap, when you hold a hero over one of your own. On a hex where dropping would change nothing, it shows the board unchanged.

Everything is drawn as of the moment the board stops moving. A hero picks a target when the fight starts, then picks again every time it crosses a hex, so the enemy it opens on is often not the one it ends up fighting.

Everything disappears when the fight begins. Everything the mod shows is in English.

Scores and leaderboards

While the mod is switched on, your scores do not go to the Steam leaderboards. Not the Endless score, and not the Red Rift win streak.

A run played with the mod on cannot submit a score and does not move your Red Rift win streak in either direction.

On a Red Rift run played with the mod on, a win does not advance the streak and a loss or abandon does not reset it.

The button is in the main menu. It says whether the mod is on, and pressing it asks you to confirm. Nothing to close, nothing to delete.

You still see the leaderboards. Your standing is never lowered, and your runs, your unlocks and your progress are saved the way they always were.

If a game update stops the mod holding submission back, the mod switches itself off, and says so in the log and on the menu button.

How it works

The mod does not reimplement the targeting rules. It reads the board, builds it into a battle configuration, hands it to the game's own simulation, runs a few hundred ticks in a throwaway frame and reads the result. The prediction is exact, including tie breaks and random choices, and a balance patch updates the preview on its own.

It compares its prediction against the live battle every fight. The check is invisible and never withholds anything on its own : a fresh install and a new game version both run normally from the first placement. Two disagreements in a row take the preview away, and one fight that agrees brings it back.

Apart from holding back leaderboard submission, it changes nothing : not the fight, not the game state, not your save. Its simulation lives in its own frame and is thrown away.

If one part fails at runtime it turns itself off, logs why, and the rest keeps working.

Data and privacy

The mod collects nothing and sends nothing. There is no network code in it : no telemetry, no analytics, no update check.

It writes three files, all inside MelonLoader's UserData folder :

File	When	What is in it
MelonPreferences.cfg	always	Your settings, in the file MelonLoader already keeps for every mod. It also records which game build the mod last checked itself against, and which run was played with the mod on.
GuildrunTargetingMod/parity_log.jsonl	always	One line per battle from the self check above.
GuildrunTargetingMod/ui_census.json	only with DevLog on, off by default	What the mod found in the game's interface, so a bug report can say where the mod was looking.

They hold game state and nothing else, and you can delete them.

The full zip also contains MelonLoader, unmodified. MelonLoader reaches the internet on first launch to fetch its own dependencies, which is the minute the install section mentions. The mod only zip does not contain it.

Settings

Every toggle, shortcut and default

MelonLoader writes UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg beside the game on the first run, and the mod names that exact path in the log the first time it starts.

[!IMPORTANT] Edit the file with the game closed. MelonLoader rewrites the whole file from what it is holding in memory, both when the game exits and whenever a setting changes in game, so an edit made while the game is open is overwritten instead of read. Close the game, edit, then launch.

Under [GuildrunTargetingMod] :

Setting	Default	What it does
Enabled	true	Turns the whole mod on or off. The main menu button writes this one too.
DragLivePreview	true	Computes the hex under a held hero. false hides the visuals while dragging.
ArrowsFromGhosts	true	Attack arrows start at the predicted positions instead of the current ones. No in-game button; set it here.
MidlineArrowheads	false	Adds a direction chevron in the middle of each line. No in-game button : set it here.
TransparentUnits	true	Fades the units for the whole placement so you can see the board through them.
AbilityAreas	true	Draws the ground each ability covers, for enemies as well as heroes. The in-game button writes this one too, so the file and the button can never disagree.
PreviewStartsOn	false	Starts each battle with the opening preview already on. The preview button writes this one too, so the file and the button can never disagree.
PreviewKey	P	Key that toggles the opening preview.
TransparencyKey	T	Key that toggles see-through units.
AbilityAreasKey	G	Key that toggles the ability areas.
TickBudgetMs	2.0	Most simulation time allowed per frame during placement. Less is used when your machine has no time to spare.
DragTickBudgetMs	6.0	Most simulation time allowed per frame while dragging. Less is used when your machine has no time to spare.
MarkLapSeconds	3.6	Seconds for one lap of the lights on a marked item's border. 0 keeps the border and stops the motion.
CheckForUpdates	true	Asks GitHub once per launch whether a newer version of the mod exists, and offers it in the main menu. false stops the mod contacting the internet at all.
MeasureDrawCost	false	Diagnostic. Briefly blinks the board overlay on and off to measure what drawing it costs your machine. Leave off for normal play.
DevLog	false	Verbose logs, plus a dump of the resolved UI.

Seven more entries appear in the same section and are written by the mod, not by you : TestedBuildGuid, ParityFailureVersion and ParityMismatchStreak remember whether the preview has agreed with the game. ModdedRunId and LeaderboardNoticeShown remember which run was played with the mod on and whether the notice was shown. SettingsMigration records how far this file has been brought forward by an update, so each of those changes happens once and never argues with a value you set afterwards. LastUpdateNoticeVersion records the newest version already offered in the main menu, which is what makes each one offered once. Do not edit them by hand.

The see-through units and the ability areas also have in-game toggles, next to the preview toggle. All three are remembered between battles and between sessions : each one writes its own line above when you press it, so you set a button the way you like it once and it stays that way. A fresh install still opens its first battle on the ordinary board, with the preview off and the areas on. The shortcuts work during placement only. A key name is anything the Unity Input System knows (P, F1, Numpad1, Backquote). If a name is not recognised, that one shortcut falls back to its default and the log says so.

Linux and Steam Deck

One extra launch option

The game only ships a Windows build, so it runs through Proton and you take the same zip as everyone else. There is one extra step. In Steam, right click Guildrun Demo > Properties > General > Launch options, and put this in :

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="version=n,b" %command%

Without it, Wine ignores the file the loader arrives through and the mod never starts. I have not tested this myself, so if it gives you trouble please say so.

There is no macOS route today, because there is no macOS build of the game to run.

If your browser or your antivirus blocks the download

What to do

Some browsers block the full zip, and some antivirus flags it. What they object to is version.dll, which is MelonLoader and not this mod. MelonLoader works by taking the name of a Windows system file so the game loads it, and malware does the same thing, so a scanner cannot tell the two apart by shape alone. Any mod that ships MelonLoader with it runs into this.

If it happens to you, take MelonLoader from its own page and the small zip from here :

1. Download MelonLoader.x64.zip straight from LavaGang, who make it. That link hands you the right file directly. If you go to their releases page instead, take x64 and not x86 : Guildrun is a 64 bit game, so the x86 one cannot load into it at all, and the Linux, macOS and installer files are not for this either.
2. Drag its content into the game folder, exactly like step 2 of the install.
3. Then take the mod only zip and drag its content in as well.

You end up with the same folder either way. The version.dll in the full zip is byte for byte the one LavaGang publishes.

Compatibility and building from source

Versions, and how to build the zips yourself

Built for the Guildrun Demo (Unity 6000.0.64f1, IL2CPP) with MelonLoader 0.7.3, which the full release zip contains unmodified. A game update does not switch the mod off. Everything it reads from the game is looked up by name at startup and written to the log, so if something it depends on has moved, the boot log names it and only the part that needed it goes quiet. Balance patches need no mod update.

To build you need the .NET SDK, and a Guildrun Demo already launched once with MelonLoader, so that MelonLoader/Il2CppAssemblies exists.

dotnet build src/GuildrunTargetingMod.csproj -c Release

The game path defaults to the usual Steam folder. To use another one, pass it instead of editing the project file :

dotnet build src/GuildrunTargetingMod.csproj -c Release -p:GameDir="D:\Games\Guildrun Demo"

To build the two release zips (downloads and verifies MelonLoader, checks the typography of every source and documentation file, builds, writes the version into the readmes, checks the archives) :

pwsh -File packaging/package.ps1

Implementation notes, the runtime bindings and the in-game acceptance pass are in docs/INTERNALS.md.

Credits and licence

This mod is released under the MIT License.

It runs on MelonLoader by LavaGang, under Apache 2.0. The full release zip contains MelonLoader unmodified, with its own license and notice files. Guildrun is made by Leyline, and this mod is not affiliated with them.