So you're playing Path of Exile and every once in a while you grab a gem, throw it into your stash. Then a few days later you grab a gem from your stash. Of course, you're lazy, and eventually you're left with a stash tab for gems that looks like this:

This triggers you worse than CWDT and cannot be tolerated. But, you're still very lazy and certainly won't be spending precious seconds organizing all of those gems.

Thankfully, you've got Python and an unexplainable desire to spend your time doing anything but real work. See it in action here:

(Video: Path of Exile Gem Sorting)

The pyautogui toolkit is pretty awesome. It provides basic functionality for grabbing screenshots and simulating mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts. For this task we really only need to grab the screen and do some mouse clicks.

pip install pyautogui

Originally I had planned on simply looking at the average color of a gem. As it turns out, that really doesn't work very well for this task. There are a few different problems throw a wrench into those gears:

• Gems have a background hint color of either red or blue, depending on if your current character has the stat requirements to equip the gem. If your character can equip, it's a blue-ish background, otherwise it's a red-ish background.

• Many gems in the game have a Vaal counterpart, like Vaal Cyclone. Each of these gems will have a red thingy on the gem image, even if the gem is actually a blue or green gem.

• Non-Vaal gems have a goldish thingy on the gem image. For some gems this isn't a big deal, but for others, like Cast When Damage Taken or Cast on Critical Strike it composes a significant portion of the image and throws off the average color.

I attempted to work around this by filtering the image for certain colors, but once I remembered that Vaal skills exist (which is strange because my main character's main skill is a vaal skill) I realized I needed a better way of classifying gems. As you'll see a reoccurring problem is my inability to remember things.

Yes, you have permission to get mad now. Stay mad too, since there is no point in context switching as you're probably going to get mad again while reading this.

pip install tensorflow

The goal here is we need to train an image classifier to detect the three main different colors of gems, as well as empty inventory slots since the in-game behavior of clicking an empty inventory slot is different. Before we can train a model we need some sample data. That's easy enough since we can grab a few images and label them by putting them into different directories.

First, we have to determine the size of a inventory slot. I'm a highly qualified expert, so I open the screenshot up in mspaint.exe and drag select the general area of a gem and "approximate" it at 52x52 pixels.

Next we have to grab some examples of gems for Tensorflow to use during training. Paint fights me a bit here by constantly resizing the canvas, so I switch to Photoshop and make the canvas 52x52 then use the Move Layer tool to slide the image around periodically saving it out as a new .png file with an incremented name.

Now we create directories for each label, in this case: 'blue', 'empty', 'green' and 'red'. Note that anytime we use labels they will be in this (sorted) order. This is because under-the-hood Tensorflow is creating a model that has 4 outputs, each of which is confidence values for these different categories. If we mess up the ordering on the labels or change it after training things won't line up correctly.

Each directory includes some images of gems of that color, for example blue/ contains:

Firstly, you'll notice that our code starts out with this snippet:

# Tensorflow crashes and burns on a video card if this doesn't exist...
gpus = tf.config.experimental.list_physical_devices('GPU')
if gpus:
  try:
    # Currently, memory growth needs to be the same across GPUs
    for gpu in gpus:
      tf.config.experimental.set_memory_growth(gpu, True)
    logical_gpus = tf.config.experimental.list_logical_devices('GPU')
    print(len(gpus), "Physical GPUs,", len(logical_gpus), "Logical GPUs")
  except RuntimeError as e:
    # Memory growth must be set before GPUs have been initialized
    print(e)

This makes about as much sense as Pepsi for TV game, but without it Tensorflow does crash when trying to use a GPU. Training this model never gets close to exceeding the system memory or GPU memory, so yeah, I don't understand why.

Thankfully the data pipeline for training is very simple:

train_ds = tf.keras.preprocessing.image_dataset_from_directory(
    data_dir,
    validation_split=0.2,
    subset="training",
    seed=123,
    image_size=(img_height, img_width),
    batch_size=batch_size)

This automatically creates a dataset that reads the labels from the names of the directory and each individual image is treated as a sample.

Now we'll create a model:

model = Sequential([
    layers.experimental.preprocessing.Rescaling(1./255, input_shape=(img_height, img_width, 3)),
    layers.Conv2D(8, 3, padding='same', activation='relu'),
    layers.MaxPooling2D(),
    layers.Dropout(0.3),
    layers.Conv2D(16, 3, padding='same', activation='relu'),
    layers.MaxPooling2D(),
    layers.Dropout(0.3),
    layers.Conv2D(32, 3, padding='same', activation='relu'),
    layers.MaxPooling2D(),
    layers.Dropout(0.3),
    layers.Flatten(),
    layers.Dense(128, activation='relu'),
    layers.Dense(num_classes)
])

This is a model that uses convolutional layers, max pooling and a dense layer at the end. For this purpose, it probably could have simply been a small dense layer without the other stuff. The convolutional sizes probably don't even make any sense for this specific problem since 32x32 is almost half the size of the image.

The last thing that might matter at all is to do some basic data augmentation:

data_augmentation = tf.keras.Sequential([
    layers.experimental.preprocessing.RandomTranslation(0.1),
    layers.GaussianNoise(0.1)
])

Here we're adding a bit of random noise and some random translation. The noise is to avoid the network overfitting; if possible we want it to generalize so I don't have to generate new images when a new skill gem is created. The random translation is in case I have the inventory grid slightly off by a few pixels or if the game changes it's graphics in insignificant ways in the future.

Lastly we train the model and save it:

history = model.fit(
    train_ds,
    validation_data=val_ds,
    epochs=epochs
)

model.save("gem_classifier.hdf5")

We basically now have a 1.8MB blob of data in gem_classifier.hdf5 that when asked "What color gem is this?" it will respond with 'blue', 'empty', 'green' or 'red'.

If you have the repository you can do this by running:

python train_sorter.py

We've got our blob of AI magic that predicts images, so now we need an easy way to pass images to it. First, let's get a screenshot:

screen = pyautogui.screenshot()

This assumes that the game is running in "windowed fullscreen" mode. Yeah, that is what it's actually called. Pepsi for TV game. Also your resolution should be set to 1920x1080 and if not you'll need to rescale the image:

screen = screen.resize((1920, 1080))

Note that if you resize you're officially in "no man's land" since I have no idea how tolerant any of the code is to being resized. I actually expect the classifier is decent at handling images that are scaled up or down, but I can't say the same for the code for grabbing inventory slots on screen.

Before we can do much with an inventory we need one. We'll make two classes:

@dataclass(repr=True)
class Cell:
    col: int
    row: int
    type: str = 'empty'

class Stash:
    def __init__(self):
        self.cells = []
        for row in range(0, 12):
            for col in range(0, 12):
                self.cells.append(Cell(col, row, 'empty'))

    def get(self, col, row):
        return self.cells[col + row * 12]

    def update(self, cell):
        self.cells[cell.col + cell.row * 12] = cell

    def swap(self, a, b):
        a_col = a.col
        a_row = a.row
        a.col = b.col
        a.row = b.row
        b.col = a_col
        b.row = a_row
        self.update(a)
        self.update(b)

Let's make a function that when we pass it an inventory slot it uses the model to predict the contents of that slot:

def predict_cell(col, row):
    x, y = locate_cell(col, row)
    cell = screen.crop((x, y, x + cell_size, y + cell_size))
    img_array = tf.keras.preprocessing.image.img_to_array(cell)
    img_array = tf.expand_dims(img_array, 0)
    predictions = model.predict(img_array)
    score = tf.nn.softmax(predictions[0])
    confidence = np.max(score)
    gem = class_names[np.argmax(score)]
    return gem

First we crop the screen with screen.crop() so that we're left with a 52x52 image. Next we turn that into an img_array or "batch" which is just something Tensorflow likes to do. Finally we'll get an array of predictions from the model and select the one with the highest confidence value. Since we want to work with the text labels we'll map back the class_names instead of working with arbitrary integer index values.

Oh, yeah, we're supposed to be sorting these damn gems. But, by this point my ADHD is kicking in pretty hard:

(Video: Rick & Morty: I just got bored, everybody out)

This is the part where I'm supposed to get really in-depth about how this is an in-place sort and how we have limited bandwidth on swaps because we have to actually click a game in gem. In the code we have all kinds of time.sleep(0.1) to avoid spamming the game with too many actions or risk the game not detecting a mouse action. I don't even want to imagine what madness occurs if it misses a click. It probably vendors all my exalts. That's about as much as I'll say about the cool things one could do with sorting correctly, but I think someone else could make an entertaining follow-up that expands on this.

In a perfect world we would just call pyautogui.click() and life, uh, finds a way. My guess is that click() doesn't give the game enough time between frames to process the mouse down and up events, so instead we'll roll our own:

def click_cell(col, row):
    x, y = locate_cell(col, row, cell_size // 2)
    pyautogui.moveTo(x, y)
    time.sleep(0.05)
    pyautogui.mouseDown()
    time.sleep(0.05)
    pyautogui.mouseUp()
    time.sleep(0.05)

Note here that we're clicking into the center of the cell (cell_size // 2) since I did learn something, which is that there are actually areas of the Path of Exile inventory that are "dead spots" and don't seem to react to clicks. I also learned you can actually click and drag in the inventory, but for the purpose of simplicity we'll be using the tried and true click once, move, click again method of managing the inventory.

First let's predict all of the inventory slots:

for col in range(0, 12):
    for row in range(0, 12):
        cell = stash.get(col, row)
        cell.type = predict_cell(col, row)

Now we'll filter out the empty slots:

filtered = filter(lambda cell: cell.type != 'empty', stash.cells)

And sort them by type:

organized = sorted(filtered, key=lambda cell: cell.type)

This is the part where someone would put in some actually good code to do vertical alignment and separation or at least something decent. Instead we'll be simply taking that sorted list using it raw! I ended up adding functions for doing horizontal or vertical layout before pushing to GitHub.

col = 0
row = 0
last_type = None
next = vertical_next
gap = vertical_gap

for source in organized:
    if last_type and last_type != source.type:
        col, row = gap(col, row)

    last_type = source.type

    if source.col == col and source.row == row:
        col, row = next(col, row)
        continue

    dest = stash.get(col, row)

    if dest.type == 'empty':
        click_cell(source.col, source.row)
        time.sleep(0.2)
        click_cell(dest.col, dest.row)
        time.sleep(0.2)
    else:
        click_cell(source.col, source.row)
        time.sleep(0.2)
        click_cell(dest.col, dest.row)
        time.sleep(0.2)
        click_cell(source.col, source.row)
        time.sleep(0.2)

    stash.swap(source, dest)
    col, row = next(col, row)

There are two different use cases here. If we're moving a gem to an empty slot we can simply click, move, and click. The cursor will be empty afterwards and all is well. However, if the destination slot is not empty we have to put the gem that is placed onto the cursor into the empty source slot we created initially. It's pretty confusing to explain, and if you've never played a game that has inventory management I don't fault you for not understanding this poorly written excuse for an explanation.

Now you can move whatever you're using to run python out of the way of the inventory, run this command, then alt-tab back into game:

python sorter.py

If all goes well you'll begin seeing all your gems get sorted by color. If all goes less than well all your doodoo will get vendored or just destroyed as you drop it in your hideout. I have no idea what the frick any of this code will do if ran on a regular stash tab that doesn't contain only gems.

So now it's time to go back to discord and see what that pending message my friend sent me. He's probably super impressed by my elite skills and 5D chess:

That's a good point, friend. I should have remembered this since I regularly use this feature to price check items on poeprices.info which uses machine learning to attempt to guess at the market price of an item.

That's a good question. To be clear I do not work for or have any kind of inside knowledge of what Grinding Gear Games policies are. Obviously they (and the community) are against the creation of bots that cheat or automatically play the game. They ruin the game for the rest of us and distort the in-game item economy, which for Path of Exile is a significant part of the game.

On the one hand we have GGG saying that using a popsicle stick to press multiple buttons at once is not allowed because it adds an "unfair advantage" over other players. On the other hand we have a wealth of utilities and tools like MecuryTrade and TradeMacro which are used to make trading with many people less painful.

If I had my account flagged or banned because of this I would appeal it. I don't see any my gems being sorted or unsorted affects any other player. Obviously my opinion here means very little, though, and if someone gets banned I'm not taking responsibility for anything. I could see a possibility where Grinding Gears gets their gears grinded by replicating microtransaction features. For example, if they had some kind of special tab that sorted all your skill gems for you. Most of their special stash tab upsells are much more useful than something like this and provide more value, though, so I doubt that is a concern.