A personal overhaul of Diablo II, built over three years and never distributed. What is published here is the record of it: what was rebuilt, and the reverse engineering underneath.
Open a stock 1.13c install beside this one. The health and mana orbs have merged into a single orb at the centre of the screen. The stamina bar is gone, and so is the run toggle. The minimap shows only champions and elites. The lines that play when you click something you cannot do — that is impossible, you need a key, you need more mana — are silent.
Three principles account for a great deal of it. The mod treats the player as an expert: those lines exist to explain a click that did nothing, and an expert already knows why. Reduce noise to gain signal — the minimap filter is that one at its most forceful. And reduce stress and annoyance, which is a rule he applies well outside this game.
Others are not interface decisions at all. Running drains 1 point of stamina instead of 20 — 15, for the Assassin — and the bar goes with it: an early-game impediment that resolves itself through gear and progression anyway, and has no place in a modern ARPG. Two dependency arrows are gone from the skill trees, and they are gone because two prerequisites were: Valkyrie no longer requires Evade, Armageddon no longer requires Hurricane. That is class rebalancing showing through the interface, not a decision about the interface.
Almost none of that was added — it was removed, or changed in place. The game underneath is Blizzard's.
The 1280×720 mode itself comes from D2DX and SGD2FreeRes, both credited on the showcase. Fitting the interface to it is hand-written assembly.
This page is the rest.
One column in sounds.txt differs
from vanilla: Volume. Eighty-one rows changed — seventy-nine to zero, two reduced, none
raised.
Fifty-six are the same eight lines across all seven classes, with no exceptions and no partial cases: the ones that play when you click something you cannot do. That is impossible. You need a key. You need more mana. Not in town. 255 to 0.
Eighteen are the Barbarian's shout vocals — battle cry, battle orders, command, shout, taunt, war cry, three variants each. What went is the voice, not the skill. Rebuffing still gives you three sounds; they are simply no longer three shouts. Battle Cry and War Cry keep their effect audio at full volume, and his grunts, his hit reactions and his death are untouched. Five are the cow level's moos, 200 to 0.
Two were turned down rather than off. Redemption fires once per corpse, thousands of times in a session: 224 to 80. Shenk's quest music: 255 to 220.
There is no setting for any of this and no line in any readme. It shows up only by diffing the table against a stock install.
Every unique and set item in Diablo II, found, inside this mod: 123 of 123 unique armors, 195 of 195 unique weapons, 127 of 127 sets, 55 of 55 remaining. Five hundred of five hundred. Alongside them, 199 of 301 ethereal and 728 of 879 divine.
The hunt ran alongside the build rather than after it, across the same years — in item tables that were being rewritten while they were being played.
Every figure describing a change is measured against a pristine 1.13c install and certified before it is written down — separately from the writing, by someone whose job is to disagree with it. The grail counts are read off the save. An unreconciled figure is worse than none.
This page carried no zone count at all for weeks, because four defensible numbers existed for it and only one could be right. It now says 36, queried from the level table rather than recalled — ids 137 to 172, where the unmodified game stops at 136. That is what settled looks like. The grimoire grades its own reliability the same way, record by record, and publishes what it has disproven alongside what it has confirmed.