// the take
An offline build calculator and passive tree planner for Path of Exile, letting players simulate DPS, defenses, and gear before spending in-game currency on them. It's for PoE players optimizing builds, not for developers looking for a general library — the Lua codebase is entirely domain-specific to one game's mechanics.
The test suite is genuinely extensive for a hobby-scale project — dozens of spec files under spec/System covering calc accuracy (impale, ailments, crit, triggers), item parsing, and trade query generation, run via busted with a dedicated test.yml workflow. The docs/ folder actually documents the hard parts (calcOffence.md, modSyntax.md) instead of leaving the calculation engine as a black box, which matters a lot given how much implicit game knowledge is baked into the mod parsing. Auto-update via Update.exe means the community can ship balance-patch fixes within hours of a game update, which is the actual reason this tool stayed relevant for a decade.
The repo vendors its entire runtime — SimpleGraphic.dll, dozens of other DLLs, a custom .exe, and per-glyph .tga font bitmaps — directly in git instead of as a release artifact or submodule, which bloats clone size and couples the source tree to a Windows-only closed-source rendering layer most contributors can't rebuild. There's no language server or type annotations for the Lua, and with a monolithic src/Classes/ directory mixing UI controls (ButtonControl, CheckBoxControl) with core calc logic in one flat namespace, onboarding a contributor means reading a lot of code before anything clicks. The whole project is a moving target by design — it tracks Path of Exile's mod syntax and skill data release-to-release, so any fork or reuse attempt inherits an ongoing maintenance burden tied to a game you don't control the patch notes for.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →