Logs

Prospect writes down what it does, and shows it without leaving the app: the Logs page in the sidebar covers the launcher itself, the Journal tab of each instance covers the game.

The Logs page

It shows the tail of the application log, up to the last 500 lines. Ordinary lines stay plain; warnings and errors are tinted, because the unusual is what you open a log for. While the page is on screen it rereads itself every two seconds: leave it open while you reproduce a problem elsewhere and the line shows up as you watch. The Refresh button forces a reread to the second, and the file’s path is printed under the list.

The file is capped at 1 MB: past that, it starts over rather than growing forever.

The zip export

The Export button writes an archive (prospect-logs.zip by default) that carries the whole logs/ folder: the application log and every instance’s launch log. For a report on GitHub, attach that zip and nothing else: it holds what is needed to understand what happened, and it settles most questions.

The launch log, per instance

Each instance has its own. At launch, Prospect writes a header line (the instance’s name, its game version, the time), then everything the game says, error output included. The file is overwritten by the next launch: it is the log of the last launch, not a full history. You read it in the Journal tab of the instance’s page, as is.

That log is not just for reading: after each session, Prospect reads it back for you. A mod that failed carries a badge on the Mods tab (“3 errors at the last launch”), and detected integrations between mods show up as “works with”. The badges themselves are described on the Mods page.

Deleting an instance takes its launch log with it.

On disk

Logs live in logs/, under Prospect’s root folder:

• Linux: ~/.local/share/prospect/logs/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Prospect\logs\
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Prospect/logs/

prospect.log is the application log; the instance-*.log files are the launch logs, one per instance. That is exactly what the zip export carries.