Effective 5 August 2026. Covers the Loadstar desktop application for Windows.
Loadstar has no backend. There is no Loadstar server, no account, no analytics and no telemetry. We collect nothing about you, because there is nowhere for it to go and nothing built to receive it.
What follows is a specific account of what the app reads, what leaves your machine, and where it goes. All of it is checkable against the source — that is the point of publishing it.
One window, which you choose. Loadstar captures a single window through the Windows Graphics Capture API, the same mechanism OBS uses. It captures a window handle, not your screen and not your desktop, so other applications, notifications and other monitors are not in the image.
Which window is your explicit configuration, never a guess. You point Loadstar at the game process or executable once, and it captures that. This is deliberate: an earlier version matched windows by title, and a search for the game’s name matched a browser tab with a build guide open — one step from sending a browser window to a third party. Targeting has been explicit ever since.
Only after you agree. The first capture is gated behind a consent dialog stating what is captured and where it is sent. Nothing is captured before you accept.
And you see every image before it is sent. Each screenshot appears in the ask window at full size, above the words “this exact image is what gets sent”, with a delete button on it. Nothing leaves until you press Ask, and anything you delete first is never transmitted. This is the control that matters, because it is the one you can verify yourself.
On blacked-out regions. Loadstar can paint masks onto the raw pixels before encoding, so masked areas would never exist in any file or transmission, and it reports how many it applied. For Throne and Liberty it currently applies none, and that is a deliberate reversal: a fixed mask over the bottom-left corner was removed in v0.20.0 because it was blacking out the character sheet’s stat column — the exact numbers the advice is built from. The chat window it was meant to cover is draggable, resizable, and drawn as plain text over the game world with no panel behind it, so no fixed rectangle covers it reliably and there is no shape to detect. If you would rather your chat were not in frame, close or move it before capturing, or delete that screenshot in the ask window.
Never your game files. Loadstar does not read, modify or parse game files, configuration, process memory or network traffic, and does not inject code or send input. That is a hard project constraint enforced by an automated test that fails the build — see anti-cheat-posture.md.
Three destinations. There are no others.
To produce advice, Loadstar sends the captured image and a text payload to the single provider you selected in Settings, authenticated with your own API key:
| Provider | Endpoint |
|---|---|
| Anthropic | api.anthropic.com |
| OpenAI | api.openai.com |
generativelanguage.googleapis.com |
Sent: the screenshot as shown to you in the ask window, text read from it, Loadstar’s own instructions and game knowledge, and the earlier turns of the current session so the assistant does not repeat itself.
Your relationship for that data is with the provider, not with us. How they handle it — retention, human review, whether they train on it — is governed by their privacy policy and the terms of the account your API key belongs to. Read the terms of whichever you pick; they differ.
Loadstar fetches your target build and its reference catalogues from questlog.gg’s public API. That request carries the build identifier you pasted and a User-Agent identifying Loadstar. No account, no key, and nothing about your character beyond which public build you asked for. questlog.gg is an unaffiliated third party with its own privacy policy.
Two plain HTTPS GETs of public files, carrying nothing but a User-Agent naming Loadstar and its version. No account, no key, nothing about you or your character.
GitHub will see the request, and therefore your IP address, as it would for any download. Turn the update check off with “Tell me when a new version is out” in Settings; the boss schedule falls back to a copy bundled inside the app when it cannot be fetched.
Nothing is ever installed without you agreeing. Loadstar cannot install silently even in principle: the installer needs administrator permission, so Windows asks you every time. What is downloaded is checked against a digest published with the release before it is run, and discarded if it does not match.
Everything Loadstar stores is in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Loadstar\, and none of it is transmitted:
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
settings.json |
Preferences — build URL, chosen window, hotkeys, region, provider and model |
credentials-<provider>.bin |
Your API key, encrypted with Windows DPAPI at CurrentUser scope, so another account on the same machine cannot read it |
crash.log |
Exception stack traces, appended when the app fails, so bugs can be reported with detail |
Your API key goes to exactly one place: the provider it belongs to. It is never sent to us.
Captures and advice are never saved. The session conversation, including every image, is held in memory and discarded when Loadstar closes. The application writes no image files. (The repository also contains a developer capture-test CLI that does save PNGs; it is not part of the installer.)
crash.log never leaves your machine, but stack traces can contain file paths. Read it before
attaching it to a bug report.
Loadstar is not directed at children, and collects nothing from anyone of any age.
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Loadstar\. That folder is the entire
footprint — uninstalling removes the program, deleting that folder removes your data.Changes are recorded in this file’s public git history, so you can read not only the current policy but every earlier version and the exact date it changed. Substantive changes also bump the consent dialog’s version, so you are asked again rather than silently opted in.
Open an issue at https://github.com/eugenebednik/loadstar/issues.
Loadstar is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to NCSOFT, Amazon Games, or questlog.gg.