Path of Exile 2 has a lot of moving parts: thousands of modifiers, item bases, currencies and runes. Ask a general-purpose chatbot about crafting and you tend to get confident answers that are subtly out of date or plain wrong.
ExileSage is my attempt at fixing that. It is a local advisor that answers PoE2 questions (crafting, items, currencies, builds) by querying real game data through tools, so the answer is grounded rather than guessed.
Code: github.com/JackyLiu47/exilesage
The data pipeline
| Table | Rows | What’s inside |
|---|---|---|
mods | 14,840 | Explicit and implicit modifiers, value ranges, spawn weights |
base_items | 2,902 | Item bases, defence values, requirements |
currencies | 780 | Stackable currencies and their descriptions |
augments | 123 | Soul Cores, Runes, Talismans |
Everything is validated with Pydantic on the way in, and every text column has an SQLite FTS5 index, so natural-language search is fast and needs no extra infrastructure.
The advisor
A question goes through a small router before any expensive model sees it:
- Classify. A cheap model (Haiku) labels the query: factual, crafting, analysis, guide, or innovation.
- Pick a model. A simple map chooses the cheapest model that fits the label, from Haiku up to Sonnet or Opus.
- Agentic loop. The model calls search tools (mods, base items, currencies, augments) for up to 8 iterations, then answers from what it found.
Routing keeps the cost sensible: most factual lookups never need the biggest model.
Reliability work
The second stage was less glamorous but more important. Data refreshes are now atomic, so a failed scrape can’t leave a half-written database. Search is Unicode-safe, and the CLI handles interrupts cleanly. The advisor also does freshness tracking: it knows how old its data is and says so, which matters in a game that patches often.
What I took away
- Grounding beats prompting. Giving the model tools and good data fixed more errors than any prompt tweak.
- Boring infrastructure (SQLite, FTS5, Pydantic) is a great fit for this kind of project.
- An advisor that admits when its data is stale is more trustworthy than one that never hesitates.
Path of Exile 2 and its logo are trademarks of Grinding Gear Games. ExileSage is an unofficial fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.