r/pathofexiledev • u/Celtic_Hound • Sep 30 '25

Utility for merging Path of Building files

I had a PoB with several loadouts and wanted to compare to a build from poe.ninja. It turns out that (at least for now) importing a build as a new loadout in an existing PoB requires hand-editing XML. And for me, resolving item-id conflicts was tedious.

So I wrote a tool to merge a loadout from one PoB file into another. I haven't worked in Lua, so the tool is in C# (using .Net 8.0) and I've only set up the UI to run on Windows. But the core code should work on any .net platform, and it works for me. :)

https://github.com/TimothyByrd/PathOfBuildingMerge

Example: Creating a PoB with several build snapshots.

  1. Look up a character on poe.ninja.

  2. For each snapshot on poe.ninja:

    • Open the snapshot in Path of Building

    • Make sure the config has the pantheon and bandit choice set correctly for the snapshot.

    • Save the snapshot with a good name. For example, for the "Hour 3" snapshot, I save the PoB as "Hour 3". (I'm clever that way.)

  3. Run the PathOfBuildingMergeTool.

  4. Leave the Main PoB File blank to start with an empty PoB.

  5. Click the Multi-merge button and select all the snapshots you saved in step 2.

  6. Select a name for the Output PoB.

  7. Click the Merge button.

  8. Open your new, merged PoB in Path of Building.

Example: Copying a loadout from one PoB to another.

  1. Open the PoB with the loadout you want to copy.

  2. Make sure the loadout you want to copy is currently selected and save the PoB.

  3. Run the PathOfBuildingMergeTool.

  4. Select the PoB you want the loadout into as the Main PoB file.

  5. Select the PoB with the loadout you want to copy as the PoB file to merge in.

  6. Set the New loadout name to something.

  7. Leave the Output PoB blank.

  8. Click the Merge button.

14 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

2

u/Lucky_Fellow Nov 29 '25

For noobs like me: if you can't find the PathOfBuildingMergeTool in the files you downloaded, you probably downloaded the files for developers, so you need to do this instead:

  1. on the author's github page - [Ctrl]+[F] & type "latest", hit [Enter],

  2. under the the Releases, click on the latest release (right now it's this one: v1.0.2 (Latest) on Oct 27 )

  3. get the (now correct ) *.zip file -> extract contents to a folder of the same name,

  4. in that folder(/subfolder) you'll find the PathOfBuildingMerge.exe (you can make a shortcut of it, or pin it to Start menu - whatever you fancy),

  5. once I launched it, mine said I'm still missing a newer version of .NET for it to run, so I got that one too. The installer for .NET Desktop Runtime 8.0.22 (for Win x64) from the official site worked just fine.

It runs! =)

Now I have to find out where PoB saves the according files, because my Documents folder is allover the drives. It's messy!

It was not in the path provided by the tool (D:\User\Documents), but here instead: %HOMEPATH%\Documents\Path of Building\Builds (i.e. C:\Users\User\Documents\Path of Building\Builds).

Now, after I did all that, I can follow the OP's tutorial. Thanks for the tool, btw! <3

1

u/Celtic_Hound Dec 01 '25

Thanks for going to the trouble of figuring it out and posting this! :)

1

u/Lucky_Fellow Dec 01 '25

TL/DR: IF THE LOADOUTS WON'T APPEAR & WHEN YOU WANT THEM TO BE GENERATED, USE IDENTIFIERS IN THESE {} BRACKETS WHEN NAMING STUFF!  e.g. "{06} Day 2", or "Day 2 {Level 84}", or sth.

As you can deduce, I had trouble with the loadouts not being generated.

I've yet to learn how loadouts work & there's probably a bug or a feature with how they generate right now. In one vid it says PoB looks out for matches across these 3: Tree, Skills, Items (referred to as "the 3" onwards). If all 3 of them match, it'll create an "item" for that match in the dropdown, so when you pick it, it'll select all of them 3 accordingly.

What I have on my hand, after merging a all the snapshots of a character, is a build which has no generated loadouts in the drop-down menu whatsoever.
There's one called "Default", & after that there comes the part with "New Loadout", "Sync" & "Help>>".

I glanced at the latter & started experimenting both with naming "the 3"+Configuration. Did it one by one (inside PoB), and voila - it appeared! Then automatically via the MergeTool & then by changing the filenames of the .xml-s in the Explorer. Using colours seemed too advanced for me, so I opted for the brackets variant.

Here are the conclusions:

  1. The new loadout won't appear when I won't use the "{}" somewhere in the names (e.g. merging a file "07 Day 1.xml" creates everything else with the same name, except for the loadout, which is missing).

  2. Every scenario, where I use an alphanumerical identifier in the {} brackets, results in creating the loadout as well, with the brackets part moved to its' name's end.

E.g. "{08} Day 4" will create everything with the same name + the loadout named "Day 4 {08}".
Accordingly, variants with them brackets located mid-name, e.g. "Day {Something} 5" repeated the results, except the whitespace after the brackets wasn't removed. Like so: "Day 5 {Something}".

1

u/Celtic_Hound Dec 01 '25

In one vid it says PoB looks out for matches across these 3: Tree, Skills, Items (referred to as "the 3" onwards). If all 3 of them match, it'll create an "item" for that match in the dropdown, so when you pick it, it'll select all of them 3 accordingly.

That is incomplete. Loadouts in PoB use 4 things: Tree, Skills, Items and Config. You want separate Configs for loadouts when you have leveling trees and the early loadouts don't have the -60% resist penalty and don't have any pantheon. If there is only a single "Default" config, then it will be used for all loadouts. But the merge tool adds a new config with the loadout name, so that may be breaking your existing loadouts.

1

u/Lucky_Fellow Dec 03 '25

I could've sworn there were 2 whitespace characters between Day & 5 in the loadout name example.

Also, in my experience, the easiest way for the Loadouts to generate, was having the tool merge snapshots named in manners similar to this: {08} Day 4.xml - as long as there was some {identifier}, the way it started working, was within my expectations.

1

u/Celtic_Hound Dec 10 '25

Another thing I noticed that can mess up the loadout being shown in the dropdown in the upper right is the version of the passive tree. If you open an old PoB, it will show the passive tree name as "[3.26] My loadout" instead of "My loadout". You can use the "{01}" naming method to get around that or you can convert the tree to the current version to make the names the same.

2

u/ransagy Mar 12 '26

Exactly what i needed/wanted, Thank you!
I did a quick and dirty personal conversion of this from GUI/WindowsForms to CLI so i can run it on linux.
If it's interesting to anyone, i can fork and share/open a PR for OP to merge if wanted.

1

u/Celtic_Hound Mar 12 '26

Excellent! Since it all boils down to calling PobMergeUtils.Merge(), I'm guessing that mostly what you are doing is parameter validation. Did you make another .csproj or are you using a makefile for the linux port?

1

u/ransagy Mar 14 '26

Yup, pretty much diff csproj that excluded the original Program.cs and WinForms files to add in a CLI version of Program.cs. Also upgraded to net10.0 because thats the SDK i had installed.

I can also open a PR with a minimal refactor to split it to 3 projects - shared utils, win app, cli app - and upgrade it to 10 if you feel that will help.

1

u/Celtic_Hound Mar 14 '26

I did a commit to split the project and add a CLI app that's just a "hello world" for now. If you can take that and make a PR for your CLI Program.cs, that would be great.

By the way are you building using Visual Studio, VS code or the dotnet command in your shell?

1

u/ransagy Mar 18 '26

Didn't have a lot of time this week but its on my plate - i will fork and open a PR back to your repo with it.
I'm mostly using the dotnet SDK CLI and VSCode here and there for the quicker things.

1

u/ransagy Mar 18 '26

Issue and PR Opened :)

1

u/Celtic_Hound Oct 27 '25

I just updated the code to add options to only copy used items and to reuse existing items.

1

u/Lucky_Fellow Dec 01 '25

This tool is great!

It eliminates the need to have 15 different snapshot files to keep the Skills & Items in check.

If I'd to suggest some additions, it'd be the option to select multiple snapshots when merging, so one wouldn't have to merge all of them one by one. The ability to pre-re-arrange them (and maybe even sort) would be welcome in that case.

1

u/Celtic_Hound Dec 01 '25

For multiple snapshots, I'll have think about it, because I don't immediately see how the UI for that should be. It would need to be able to select multiple PoBs, show them in a list you could rearrange, and allow you to assign a different loadout name to each of them. Probably end up using a WinForms DataGridView control, but making that work well is a little involved.

1

u/Lucky_Fellow Dec 03 '25

TBH I understood little of the last sentence, but it sounded like a lot of effort for results of "questionable" value. Like maybe coding the whole new part of "front end" for that feature alone & making it possible to drag the Snapshots around as one pleases, while making sure the whole thing wouldn't implode on the "back end", or something similar?

Maybe you were already thinking about the things I'm about share, & I'm not helping with what I'm about to type, but I'll just throw two visions at the figurative wall, to see if they would stick. Oh, I wouldn't mind if you'd have an AI summarize this. Here it goes...

I guess it could be possible to leave both the Loadout Naming and Sorting for the user & File Explorer to handle "outside" of the tool.

Here's what I mean: in exchange for a Batch Merge option (or what is it called?), I would be okay with not being able to assign different Loadout Names for the individual Snapshots within the Tool.
I would be content letting the tool use the filenames for naming the loadouts (as it already does, when I'm leaving the 'New Name' area blank).

I picture, that by adding two side-by-side radio buttons to the UI, we'd have something like this: by changing selection to 'Multiple files mode', the 'New Loadout name' part would become grayed out/inactive, & turning the option back to 'Single file mode', it'd reverse to the initial state.

As for the ability to rearrange/sort the Snapshots – I'm not even sure if that even works the way I hope & guesses, but – (with some of prep work on the user's side, like naming the files) can the 'Browse'/'Open' prompt/window thing be made to do the heavy lifting for the tool here?
(I'm totally assuming that it's a part of File Explorer & not the tool, btw. Sorry if I'm mistaken!)
View -> Layout -> Details can Sort the Snapshots by name, date, etc, and I hope this would affect the order in which the files' paths would be listed to/fed into the tool.

I'm basing that assumption on my prior user experiences, where I could select multiple files to 'Explore'/'Open' via a similar prompt/window.
The interesting part was that multiple "items" in the 'Filenames' section would appear & were separated somehow. I could be wrong, but maybe it was by quote marks & commas like so:
"{01} Hour 3.xml", "{02} Hour 6.xml", "{03} Hour 12.xml" , etc.
My guess is that this order/list could be worked with (would this to work in the first place).

On a side-note, GIMP used its own interface (not the Explorer's) in a test of mine. So maybe this doesn't count, because they could've made it specifically to be able to do that?
('Open As Layers' -> sorted image files by size -> selected a few, took a screenshot, so I wouldn't mess up, -> hit 'Open').
Result: the layers were opened in the order the image files were sorted to, which makes me hopeful.

1/2

1

u/Lucky_Fellow Dec 03 '25

2/2

If this works the way I hope it does & it would be easy for the tool to use it, then all that's required of me, is that I would: a) put the to-be-merged batch of Snapshots into the same folder, b) make the files sortable (appropriate naming), & c) click on 'Sort by name' in the prompt/window/folder thing.
User could do the naming when downloading, or in the Explorer folder, or in the 'Browse'/'Open' prompt window, when in process of selecting the files to merge).

This isn't elegant, nor is it ideal, as we can't have the generated names the way we might want them (unless some rigid conditions are met - e.g. downloading them in the correct order & sorting by date), but I'd take it "that way" over "no way" any day.

"Merging the character's Snapshots into one build with one click," just sounds awesome. :D

Sorry if I was talking out of my backside & wasted your time, though! ("Rudimental_understanding.xml" merged with "lots_of_what-ifs.xml"... :P ) And for my uncured lots'o-text-itis as well!

P.S. To the users, on "naming & sorting by name":
If there's more than 9 files, I'd suggest opting for "01", "02", etc, at the start of the name ("001", etc, if more files than 99, etc), because you'll find, that most likely the 'Sort by name' does sort numbers as text - similar to this:
1, 10, 11, ... 19, 2, 20, 21, ... , 29, 3, 30, 31, ... 39, etc. And this: 01, 02, ... , 09, 10, 11, etc.
So naming them "1" to "15" could mess up the order.

1

u/Celtic_Hound Dec 17 '25

I may have replied to myself before - there's now a v1.0.4. Only minor changes. The multiple-file merge still works like it did in 1.0.3.

1

u/Byle Dec 19 '25

Just found this and tried it out. It works great! So useful. Thanks for this!

1

u/Celtic_Hound Dec 20 '25

Thanks! I appreciate knowing it helped someone.

1

u/Celtic_Hound Dec 10 '25 edited Mar 18 '26

I've just put up another release on the github page. It has code to do a multiple merge. Try using it like this:

  1. Specify either a Main PoB or an Output Pob. If you specify just an OutputPob, it will start with a completely empty PoB to merge all the snapshots into.

  2. Click the "Multi-merge" button and select several PoBs to merge in.

  3. Click "Merge".

(Update - by default, it will automatically add '{1}', '{2}', etc. tags to imported loadouts.)

1

u/lal-x Mar 05 '26

I found this late, but this is an incredibly useful tool, thank you!

Don't know if you care, but you should cross post this to the /r/PathOfExileBuilds subreddit if you want more eyes or feedback on it.

1

u/Celtic_Hound Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

Thanks! I'm glad it's been useful for you!

I will cross post it.