Achievement Watcher — Fixed Edition

A fork of Darktakayanagi's Achievement Watcher (itself a fork of xan105's original) that fixes the two issues which make achievements silently stop working with the current Goldberg / gbe_fork Steam emulator — so that a normal user who just installs it doesn't run into them.

🇵🇱 Po polsku: to wersja Achievement Watcher z naprawionymi błędami przez które osiągnięcia z nowego Goldberga (gbe_fork, folder GSE Saves) nie pokazują się ani w grze, ani w trackerze. Po instalacji wystarczy raz wkleić darmowy klucz Steam API i odpalić dołączone narzędzie goldberg-ach-fix na grze. Szczegóły niżej i w FIXES.md.

---

What was broken, and what this fork fixes

There are two separate failures. The first lives in Achievement Watcher and is fixed here in source; the second lives in the game's emulator files and is fixed by the bundled tool. See FIXES.md for the full write-up.

Fix 1 — Games stuck on a permanent blacklist (fixed in source)

Upstream Achievement Watcher adds an appid to its blacklist (cfg/exclusion.db) the first time a game's schema fails to load — including for purely transient reasons: no Steam Web API key set yet, a network hiccup, a rate-limit, the schema CDN being momentarily down. Once blacklisted, the game is silently skipped on every future scan, even after you fix the key or network. It never comes back, with no message explaining why.

This is the single most confusing failure for new users: they set everything up correctly, but a game they opened before configuring the API key is now invisible forever.

Fixed: a failed load no longer blacklists the game — it's simply retried on the next scan. Genuinely unwanted appids are still handled by the built-in bogus-list, the server list, and the manual "blacklist" action in the UI. (app/parser/achievements.js)

Fix 2 — New Goldberg/gbe_fork games show up empty or without icons (bundled tool)

The current Goldberg fork, gbe_fork, needs a steam_settings/achievements.json inside the game that defines the achievements using their real Steam API names (e.g. ACH_TOGETHER_AGAIN) plus local icons. Many repacks ship this file missing, empty, or with made-up names (e.g. the_whole_sick_crew) and no icons.

When that happens, the game calls SetAchievement("ACH_TOGETHER_AGAIN"), the emulator doesn't recognise the name, and the unlock is silently dropped — so nothing pops in-game and nothing is written to your save for any tracker to read.

Achievement Watcher itself can't fix this, because the broken data is on the game side. The bundled tools/goldberg-ach-fix repairs it: it fetches the real schema from Steam and writes a correct achievements.json (proper names + downloaded icons + recovered descriptions) into the game.

Note: Achievement Watcher already parses gbe_fork's earned / earned_time save format correctly — that part was never broken. The problem is upstream of it, in the emulator's own schema file.

Fix 3 — games with hidden achievements crash out of the list (fixed in source)

GetMissingData() in app/parser/steam.js tried to enrich blank descriptions (which the Steam schema legitimately leaves empty for hidden achievements) via a "steamhunters" lookup, then called .map() on the response without checking it. For obscure titles that lookup returns nothing, so .map of undefined threw and aborted the game's load — it vanished from the list despite a valid schema and save. Now the supplemental response is guarded. (Hit this on ZERO PARADES: 42/55 achievements have blank descriptions.) See FIXES.md.

Quick start (so you don't hit these problems)

1. Install this build (see Building below) or the upstream app.
2. Add a free Steam Web API key: get one at https://steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey, then paste it in Settings → Steam → API key. Do this before opening emulated games so they resolve on the first try. (With Fix 1, opening one early is no longer fatal — it'll resolve once the key is set and the game is rescanned.)
3. For each emulated game, repair its schema once so in-game pop-ups and icons work:

   cd tools/goldberg-ach-fix
   node bin/achfix.js fix --game "C:\Games\<Your Game>" --key <YOUR_KEY>

   This also un-blacklists the game in Achievement Watcher and restarts it.
4. Launch the game and unlock something — it now pops in-game and appears in the tracker.

Already have games wrongly blacklisted?

If you ran the upstream app before, some games may already be stuck. Either:

• run goldberg-ach-fix fix on the game (it un-blacklists that appid), or
• Settings → Advanced → Reset blacklist in the app, or
• delete %APPDATA%\Achievement Watcher\cfg\exclusion.db.

Bundled tool: goldberg-ach-fix

A small zero-dependency Node 18+ CLI. Full docs in tools/goldberg-ach-fix/README.md.

achfix fix   --game <path> [--appid <id>] [--key <steamWebApiKey>]   # repair a game's schema + icons
achfix watch                                                          # desktop toast on every unlock
achfix list  --game <path>                                            # show unlock progress

Building

This is an Electron app. From a clone:

cd app        && npm install
cd ../watchdog && npm install
cd ../app     && npm run build   # electron-builder -> installer in dist/

To run without packaging: cd app && npm install && npm start.

The heavy build artifacts, the NW/Electron runtime, the prebuilt installers and the docs/screenshots from upstream are not vendored in this repo (they're fetched/produced by the build). Only the source is tracked.

Credits & license

This is a community fork. All credit for Achievement Watcher goes to:

• Xan105 — original author.
• Darktakayanagi — the fork this builds on (v2.0+).

Achievement Watcher is licensed under LGPL-3.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE.md, both preserved unchanged. The fixes in this fork are released under the same license. The bundled tools/goldberg-ach-fix is independently licensed under MIT (see its own LICENSE file).

Not affiliated with Valve, Goldberg, or gbe_fork. Use only with games you own.