The boring-but-important page. I've tried to write it the way I'd explain it to someone in Discord rather than the way a lawyer would, and nothing here is meant to be taken on trust — the source is right there, and I've pointed at the relevant files wherever it helps.
It's an independent, unofficial project with no connection to Blizzard Entertainment. Not endorsed by them, not sponsored by them, not reviewed by them. They don't know I exist.
World of Warcraft, Battle.net, Hearthstone, Diablo, Overwatch, StarCraft and Warcraft are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. They appear here because this is software for running their games, and for no other reason.
Lightforge contains no Blizzard game files and redistributes none. What it does is talk to Blizzard's own content servers — the same hosts, the same protocol, the same files the official client fetches — using your account and your subscription.
No account, no game time, no game. Lightforge doesn't provide any of those and doesn't get around needing them. If you can't download WoW with Blizzard's launcher, you can't download it with mine either.
This is the part I care most about getting right, because it's the first thing anyone sensible asks about a third-party launcher for an online game.
Lightforge works entirely outside the game. It manages:
- the Wine prefix the game runs in,
- files on your disk — downloads, config files, addon folders,
- the lifecycle of the process it starts, and stale ones left behind.
It never goes inside the game. No reading or writing Wow.exe's memory,
no injection, no patching the executable, no automating anything you'd
otherwise do with your hands. Not "we don't currently" — this is a design rule
the project is built around, and a feature that needed to cross it wouldn't
get written.
It never handles your credentials. There is no single-sign-on path, no token storage, no interception of the login flow, nothing that touches a password. You sign in to Battle.net in Blizzard's own window, exactly as you would without me. Lightforge couldn't log in as you if it wanted to; it has nothing to log in with.
I'm not going to tell you that you can't get banned for using this, because nobody can promise that about any third-party software, and anyone who does is either guessing or selling something.
What I can tell you is specifically what the software does, which is everything above: it manages files and processes around the game and nothing within it. Your relationship with Blizzard is governed by their terms of service, not by mine. Choosing to use a third-party launcher is your call, and the risk — whatever you judge it to be — is yours.
And since the licence says it in legal language, here it is in plain words: this software comes with no warranty of any kind (GPL-3.0, sections 15 and 16). It moves hundreds of gigabytes and deletes files when you ask it to. It's beta software written by one person. Keep backups of anything you'd be upset to lose.
Short version: nothing about you, unless you press Send on a bug report.
There's no analytics, no usage tracking, no crash pings, no phone-home on startup. There isn't even a panic handler that could send something without you — reports exist only because somebody filled in a form.
The longer version, because "we respect your privacy" is what everyone says and a list is more useful:
| Who it talks to | When | What they see |
|---|---|---|
*.version.battle.net, level3.blizzard.com |
installing, updating, checking for patches | Blizzard's own CDN, same as their client |
lightforge.tuxcore.pro |
artwork, news, addon search | your IP address, and what you searched for |
api.mmoui.com, cdn.wowinterface.com, api.tukui.org, api.github.com, edge.forgecdn.net |
installing or updating addons | your IP address, by those providers |
wow.zamimg.com |
news headlines with pictures | your IP address, by Wowhead's CDN |
api.github.com |
checking for new Proton-GE builds | a public release listing |
bugs.k3nny.tech |
only when you press Send | exactly the report shown to you first |
About that last row, since it's the only one that carries anything personal:
- The report shows you its whole contents before it goes anywhere — your message, the recent log lines, your GPU and driver, the launcher version, and the screenshot if you attached one.
- Your IP is not recorded with it (
send_default_pii = false), and your machine's hostname is replaced withredactedbefore sending — desktop hostnames are usually somebody's actual name. - A screenshot you attach is uploaded to
lightforge.tuxcore.proand the report carries a link to it. Have a look at what's on your screen first. - Sending the same report twice in five minutes is refused, and if it can't be sent at all it's copied to your clipboard instead of being queued somewhere.
If you'd rather read this as code than as a table: it's all in
crates/launcher-gui/src/report.rs and crates/core/src/net.rs.
Proton-GE is downloaded from GloriousEggroll's releases and checked against the sha512 published alongside it before anything is unpacked. It's his project under his licence; Lightforge just fetches and manages it.
Addons come from CurseForge, WoWInterface, Tukui and GitHub under their own terms. I don't host addon code, I don't review it, and I can't vouch for it — an addon is someone else's program running inside your game. Where an author has asked not to be distributed by third-party tools, Lightforge says so and sends you to their page instead of downloading it anyway.
The icons in the launcher are Lucide (ISC) and
Simple Icons (CC0), listed file by file in
crates/launcher-gui/assets/README.md. The Discord and X marks are links to
those services and nothing more — neither company endorses this.
Come and say so: discord.gg/vtTgmUV9Bq. That goes for anything on this page — if you represent a rightsholder and something here is wrong, I'd much rather hear it directly and fix it than find out some other way.
Lightforge is GPL-3.0. See the README for what it actually does.