UI Workbench: To source

To source turns a piece of the game’s UI into a project of your own. It reads the widget you selected and everything under it, with their layout and look, and writes them as ink markup in a new project, which opens in the Edit tab. Press Run and a copy shows on the HUD beside the original.

It’s the quickest way to a panel that looks like the game’s: the fonts, sizes, colours, icons and spacing come from the game’s own widgets, and you change what you want from there.

Needs the admin permission, as Projects does: To source makes a project, which is a package. See The admin permission.

What it copies

For each widget it also writes where it sits (align and grow in a panel, anchor, x and y in a canvas), its margins and padding, its size (or the size it is drawn at, when it has none of its own), its colour as #rrggbbaa, and its opacity. A { or } in a game text is doubled, so it isn’t read as a slot.

The copy is still

The copy has the original’s look, not its behaviour. The game’s own controller (its script) is what fills the original with live numbers, moves it and animates it; the copy has no controller, so its texts say what they said when you copied them. To bring it to life, put {slots} in the markup and give them data from the script: see Projects and Edit and the tutorial.

Its name and place

| | | |—|—| | Name | The widget’s name with ` copy, such as **Root copy**. A widget the game left unnamed is named by its class instead, never by the game's placeholder UNINITIALIZED_WIDGET. A second copy of the same widget is **Root copy 2**, and so on | | The project's id | Made from the name: root-copy, root-copy-2 | | Where it shows | The ` puts the copy beside the original: to its right when there's room, else to its left, else below it. Change the mount's `x` and `y` to move it | | Its description | "A copy of the game's ... made with To source in the REDnode UI Workbench", with the widget's path |

The markup’s first comment records what was copied, the date, how many widgets, how many hidden ones were left out, and what was approximated. The script loads the markup with no data:

import { ink } from 'rednode';

// The functions the markup's on... attributes name (they fire from phase I3, Input).
const handlers = {};

const view = await ink.load('panel.ink.html', handlers, {});

Walkthrough: copy the quest tracker

The quest tracker is a good first piece: it’s on screen whenever a quest is tracked, and it has texts, icons and panels. In the developer’s test it read 40 widgets in half a millisecond and wrote 25, with 3 hidden ones left out; the only approximation was a colour brighter than white.

Tip: the health bar at the top left hides itself out of combat, so it may have nothing to copy when you try. That’s why this walkthrough uses the quest tracker.

You need the UI Workbench switched on with its admin permission allowed, and a save with a quest tracked.

1. Load the save and press F10 for interactive mode.
2. In Inspect, press Pick and click the quest’s name in the tracker at the right of the HUD.
3. In the details, press Parent until the outline on screen covers the whole tracker: its title, its objectives and their icons. If you reach the tracker’s own window (class inkVirtualWindow, a box the size of the screen), that’s fine too: To source starts inside it.
4. Press To source. The status line says To source: N widgets into ..., with any hidden ones and approximations, and the Edit tab opens on the new project with no error.
5. Press Run. Leave interactive mode (Esc) to see the HUD clearly: a copy of the tracker shows beside the original, with the same texts, icons and colours, standing still.
6. Press F10 again. In the markup, find the text of the quest’s name, change the words between <text ...> and </text>, and press Save (or Ctrl+S). The copy shows your words a moment later.
7. Press Stop: the copy goes.

Keep the project to build on, or delete it in Projects (press Delete twice).

Good to know

Last reviewed 2026-11-03. Something wrong or missing? Tell us on Discord or open an issue.