Achievement Watcher Next
📚 AW Next documentation
Practical guides for setup, daily use and maintenance.
Home · Download · Preset gallery · Theme gallery · Changelog · Security · Report an issue
Start here
Read in order, or jump to what you need - every page ends with a link to the next one.
| # | Guide | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Getting started | Install, first run, Simple vs Advanced, finding games, updates |
| 2 | Compatible sources | Every source AW Next can read, and what each one needs |
| 3 | Notifications | Delivery modes, Automatic, sounds, position, screenshot souvenirs |
| 4 | Presets and the Preset Designer | The look of the popup, designing your own, sharing .awpreset files |
| 5 | Overlay | The in-game achievement list: search, filters, rarity, customization |
| 6 | Controller | Drive the app and the overlay with a gamepad |
| 7 | Game Health | The per-game report and its guided repairs |
| 8 | Troubleshooting | Discovery, progress, notification and playtime problems |
When you need it
| Guide | What it covers |
|---|---|
| FAQ | Short answers to the questions that come up most |
| Advanced tools | Maintenance, cache clearing, resets, manual games, diagnostics |
| Goldberg / GBE setup | Diagnose or repair an emulated Steam game |
| Uplay setup, R1 and R2 | The Ubisoft equivalent, for compatible titles |
| Comparison | How AW Next differs from Achievement Watcher 2.x and Achievements |
| Community galleries | Presets and themes made by other people: taking one, and sending yours |
The in-app Settings → Help tab is the quickest reference while you are using the app. Its topics are grouped as Get started, Something is wrong, Emulated games and Make it yours, it reflects your actual configuration - overlay hotkey, controller layout and bindings, notification mode, theme, enabled sources - and it filters its topic cards as you type.
Developer reference
Lower-level documentation for contributors and for anyone building AW Next from source.
| Topic | Reference |
|---|---|
| Contributing, branches, tests and commit style | CONTRIBUTING.md |
| Development setup, running and Windows packaging | BUILD.md |
| App, renderer and Watchdog boundaries; the parser contract | Architecture |
| Goldberg / GBE file formats, detection and repair invariants | Goldberg / GBE reference |
| Versioning, publishing, CI and auto-update validation | Release workflow |
| Translation, Intl formatting, link routing and the locale linter | Localization |
| Locale files and the key-parity rules | app/locale/README.md |
| The portable theme file, its limits and its versioning rules | .awtheme format |
Where your data lives
Everything AW Next writes is under one folder, %APPDATA%\Achievement Watcher Next, and the
paths below are relative to it unless they say otherwise. An upgrade keeps all of it; the first
launch imports an older Achievement Watcher folder without modifying it.
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Settings, and every index and database the app keeps | cfg\ (options.ini is the settings file itself) |
| Logs | logs\ |
| Presets you created or imported | presets\Users Presets\ |
| Pictures a preset uses as its background | presets\images\ |
| Sounds you added | sounds\ |
| Themes you saved or imported | theme-packs\ |
| Images used by the Custom theme | theme-images\ |
| A stylesheet theme you dropped in yourself | themes\ |
| Achievement backups, and the ones taken before a GBE repair | backups\achievements\, backups\gbe\ |
| Cover art and game icons | covers\, gameIcons\ |
| Screenshot souvenirs | Pictures\Achievement Watcher Next (or the folder you chose in Settings) |
| Signed-in platform accounts | steam_session.enc, epic_tokens.enc, cfg\xbox-auth.json |
| Re-fetchable: schemas, icons and rarity from a platform | steam_cache\, uplay_cache\ |
| Re-fetchable: downloaded tools and the memoised folder scans | cache\ (except cache\uplayR2, which holds a DLL you supplied) |
| GBE Fork saves (not ours: the emulator writes these) | %APPDATA%\GSE Saves |
| Classic Goldberg saves (the same) | %APPDATA%\Goldberg SteamEmu Saves |
Settings → Advanced → Clear caches empties the two rows marked re-fetchable and nothing else,
because everything in them can be downloaded again. Nothing under cfg\, presets\, theme-packs\,
theme-images\, themes\, sounds\, covers\, gameIcons\ or backups\ is ever regenerated, so
those are the folders worth copying before a reinstall.
Before reporting a problem, use Settings → Advanced → Diagnostics, reproduce it once, then remove private data from the relevant logs.
What leaves this PC
AW Next has no analytics, no telemetry and no account of its own. The only things it sends are the lookups it needs, and every answer is cached locally so the library keeps working offline:
| It asks for | From | Carrying |
|---|---|---|
| Achievement lists, icons and global rarity | Steam’s public endpoints, SteamHunters, the SteamCommunity page, Exophase | a game’s AppID, and the interface language |
| Cover art and game logos | the Steam CDN, SteamDB, SteamGridDB | a game’s AppID or title |
| Update checks and downloads | the GitHub release feed | nothing but the request |
| Repair tools, when you run a repair | the GBE Fork, Steamless, API-bypass and CrakFiles projects | nothing but the request |
| Your own library and unlocks, only if you connect an account | Steam, Epic or Xbox Network | that account’s own session token |
Some of that is not asked for at all: when a game’s executable carries a real 256px icon, that icon is read straight out of the file and used as the game’s logo, ahead of anything on the network.
Nothing is uploaded: not your library, not your playtime, not your folders, not your screenshots.
The optional Websocket @localhost:8082 broadcast listens on 127.0.0.1 only, so it is readable by
programs on this PC and by nothing on the network. A preset or theme you submit to a gallery is the
one thing you send deliberately, and only when you press Publish - see
The community galleries.