`

V8.9h

Thanks for trying Hero Lab! This document includes some basic information about the product, including
system requirements, technical support details, and more. For further information on using Hero Lab,
please see the User Manual.

Starfinder is now available for Hero Lab Online!

Visit herolab.online and try it today!

Contents

What’s new in this version of Hero Lab? ...................................................................................................... 2

Product Installation ....................................................................................................................................... 9
Recommended System Requirements.......................................................................................................... 9
Minimum System Requirements .................................................................................................................. 9
Technical Support ....................................................................................................................................... 10
Removing Hero Lab ..................................................................................................................................... 10
Using Hero Lab with Third Party content.................................................................................................... 10
Changes in Previous Versions ..................................................................................................................... 11
Legal Information ........................................................................................................................................ 55

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 What’s new in this version of Hero Lab?

Notes about running Hero Lab on recent versions of macOS, including Catalina (10.15):

The first time you run the application after downloading it, you may be presented with a dialog

This dialog is caused by Apple’s security system. In order to correctly execute Hero Lab, you should
click on the “Show in Finder” button in the dialog above, then right click on the application:

Selecting “Open” from this menu will provide a dialog similar to the original one, but with an
additional “Open” button. Once Hero Lab is opened from this dialog, this process will not need to
be repeated until a new version is downloaded.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.9h:

1. Fixes a bug that could cause an Infinite Loop error when loading portfolios.

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 2. Fixed a bug where comments for files being imported would not be displayed.
3. (Mac) Fixes a few locations within the UI that were shown as black boxes.
4. (Mac) Fixes issues running HLExport from within Hero Lab.

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.9g:

1. Hero Lab was updated to support new Savage Worlds content.

2. Numerous internal improvements and updates.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.9f:

5. (Mac) Fixes a bug causing the update mechanism to always show a new version available.
6. (Mac) Fixes a crash that could happen when adding multiple items from some dialogs.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.9e:

7. (Mac) Fixes a bug causing an error loading many portfolios.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.9d:

8. (Mac) Fixes a bug which prevented dragging and dropping of items.

9. (Mac) Fixed an issue preventing HLExport from running.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.9c:

1. (Mac) Fixes a bug which would cause a crash on startup for some users.
2. (Mac) Fixed an issue where the Ally/Enemy/Neutral dropdown was not displayed for character
creation/configuration.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.9b:

3. Fixes a bug which would cause a crash when viewing the “View License Info”.
4. (Mac) Fixed an issue causing crashes for many users.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.9a:

5. Fixed an issue which could cause certain fields to show an incorrect value (notably auto-added
ammo).
6. (Mac) Fixed several UI issues causing odd graphics placement
7. (Mac) Fixed an issue that could cause a crash in some views in older versions of macOS (notably
the Personal tab in Pathfinder).

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.9:

3. Hero Lab now supports 64-bit applications on both Windows and MacOS operating systems. On
Windows, the 32-bit application is still supported and is installed alongside the 64-bit version. It
is completely up to the user which version to use, but the 64-bit version is generally

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 recommended. On the Mac, only the 64-bit version is now supported because of MacOS
Catalina requirements.
4. In order to save to PDF on Windows 64-bit, you will need the latest version of the PDFPlugIn for
Windows (1.8 or higher).

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.8h:

1. Added support for new Pathfinder Adventure Path.

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.8g:

2. Added support for a “@iscontinuation” variable used within printing that will be true if the
portal being printed is not the first instance of that portal in the printout.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.8g:

8. Fixed an issue causing some changes to not register immediately, particularly when removing
certain items.
9. Fixed an issue that could cause a crash when deleting some class levels.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.8f:

10. Fixed an issue causing some changes to not register immediately.

11. Fixed an issue that could cause errors loading certain packages.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.8e:

12. Fixed an issue causing certain changes (e.g. changing from PC to NPC in Mutants &
Masterminds) to not register immediately.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.8d:

13. Fixed an issue causing slowness in many game systems.

14. Fixed an issue causing duplication of text in several game systems.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.8c:

15. Fixed an issue updating some fields in the 5e game system.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.8b:

16. Fixed an issue preventing loading of 4e data files.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.8a:

17. Fixed an issue preventing exporting of characters with quotes in their name.

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.8a:

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1. Substantial improvements were made to memory footprint of characters within a portfolio.
2. added several script/data file commands
a. added support in tag groups to have singular or exclusive tag
i. if issingular=true is set on a tag group, that sets the default behavior for tags within
that group to be singular, defaults to false
ii. if isexclusive=true is set on a tag group, only 1 tag of that group is allowed on any
object, defaults to false
1. if a tag in an exclusive group gets added to a pick or thing and a tag from
that group already exists, that tag is removed and it is replaced with the
new tag
b. added support for tags to be singular
i. issingular optional attribute may be true, false, or default. Default is 'default' which
defaults to the setting on the tag group
1. if issingular is true for a specific tag, no more than 1 instance of that tag
may exist on any object. If a second identical tag is added and the tag is
marked singular, nothing happens and the tag count of 1 will remain
unchanged
c. added assignval support for arrays and matrices
i. the <assignval> command now accepts xml attributes of:
1. index=<number> -- for arrays and matrices
2. column=<number> - for matrices
d. added support for accessing hero fields within <deletetest> scripts
e. added optional required/default tags to comprefs
i. syntax: <requiredtag group="required" defaulttag="optional"/>
ii. group id is required, defaulttag is optional
iii. if defaulttag is not specified and a thing derived from this compset does not have
any tags in the required group, a compiler error is thrown
iv. if defaulttag is specified and a thing derived from this compset does not have any
tags in the required group, the default tag is added
f. added optional parameter 'usefocus' to foreach, at the end after sortas
i. this parameter will add the existing focus, if any, into the list of items iterated
through within the foreach.
ii. The focus is always added if it exists, not keyed by any existing “where”
expression
iii. The focus is always the first item processed by foreach if it exists
iv. NOTE: usefocus is not supported by getcount[] (below).
g. getcount was added to get the count of items within a foreach loop without actually running
through the loop
i. syntax: getcount[<any foreach expression>]
ii. example:

instead of:

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 foreach pick in hero from BaseWonder where "Custom.Mutagen &
!Custom.Infused"
totalcount += 1
nexteach
you may use:
totalcount = getcount[pick in hero from BaseWonder where
"Custom.Mutagen & !Custom.Infused"]
Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.8:

3. Added support for the 7th Sea game system

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.7:

1. The maximum length of unique identifiers for Things and Tags only has been reduced to 17
characters. This is necessary to support future planned capabilities. This change should only
affect users who may have created their own gamesystem content and may have created long
identifiers.
2. The startup dialog has been enhanced to allow loading of portfolios directly instead of only after
a game system is selected.
3. The updates dialog was enhanced to better show new items, and sorts those items to the top by
default now.
4. Scripting system was enhanced to detect and report infinite loops.
5. Numerous other small enhancements to the editing/gamesystem development process.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.7:

1. Fixed an issue preventing loading of Pathfinder Beginner Box content.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.6b:

1. Fixed an issue preventing importing from Encounter Libraries.

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.6:

1. Increased the maximum length of unique identifiers from 10 to 20 characters. Because of this
change, data files compiled with prior releases will need to be re-downloaded to match
compatibility with the altered file format.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.5c:

1. Fixed an issue which caused some tables to display error messages when selecting an option.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.5b:

2. Fixed an issue which could cause a crash when switching tabs

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Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab v8.5b:

1. Expanded the amendthing[] scripting method to support nameappend and descriptionappend,

which will append to the existing name or description instead of replacing it.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.5a:

1. Fixed an issue preventing the 4e gamesystem from loading properly.

2. Fixed an issue which could cause a crash upon loading of a gamesystem.
3. Weapon attacks are now re-calculated correctly when moving special ammo to or from a
weapon that might change its reload time.

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab 8.5:

1. Added support for the new pathfinder package “Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos”

Enhancements & Changes in Hero Lab 8.4d:

2. Added the capability to properly validate the requirements on Warpriest bonus feats (and other
similar abilities). When feats are taken as Warpriest bonus feats, your base attack bonus and
fighter level are counted differently than they are for normal feats. (A future version of the
Pathfinder data files will be required to take advantage of these changes.)
3. Added the capability to automatically exclude content defined in .user files from Pathfinder
Society support. (A future version of the Pathfinder data files will be required to take advantage
of these changes.)

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.4d:

4. You can now hold items (such as weapons) in holders that are part of other items (e.g. in a
holster modification to your armor in Shadowrun).
5. Pre-requisites whose severity wasn’t “error” would display correctly in the validation log the
first time they were reported, but incorrectly after that.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.4c:

1. Fixed a bug that would cause choosers not to work properly when used on certain tabs (for
example, class tabs in Pathfinder).
2. Fixed a bug that could cause characters to import with the wrong allegiance.
3. Fixed a bug that could the history of damage (or other “usage pools”) for a character to be lost.
4. Fixed a bug that caused certain abilities being sorted by a number (for example, sort by level) to
sort in the wrong order.
5. Fixed a bug that caused certain abilities to have their names displayed incorrectly after splitting
a stack of items, or moving a selection between containers.
6. Fixed a bug that caused Plunder & Peril to appear incorrectly in the Encounter Library.
7. Fixed a bug that would cause errors when a user data file included a “preclude” element
referencing a thing you didn’t have access to due to not owning a particular package.

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 8. Fixed a bug that would cause Hero Lab to ignore the game system if you specified both a game
system and a portfolio to load on the command line.
9. Fixed a bug that was causing certain data files to behave incorrectly, specifically the Spheres of
Power data files for Pathfinder. If Hero Lab reports errors when loading Pathfinder after the
update, and you’re using the Spheres of Power data files, make sure you update to the latest
version of that addon.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.4b:

1. Fixed a bug that caused Razor Coast to appear twice in the Encounter Library.

Bug Fixes in Hero Lab v8.4a:

1. Fixed a bug which would sometimes cause checkbox text on the In-Play tab to display incorrectly
(for example, for Kineticist Infusions).
2. Fixed a bug which could cause a crash if a script tried to process a tag expression beyond a
certain length.
3. Fixed a bug which could cause HL to sometimes calculate incorrect values if certain script
commands were used (for example, when calculating the “discount” to be applied to metamagic
feat levels).

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. Added the “fileconstants” element to data files, which you can read about here.
2. In Hero Lab v8.4a, fixed a bug which was preventing the “gizmo tags” from appearing in the
“pick tags” info window.
3. In Hero Lab v8.4a, you can now read from the "shortname" field even if the pick or thing doesn't
have the shortname component. If that happens, you get the normal name for the pick/thing
instead. (A bug with this new logic was fixed in HL v8.4b.)
4. In Hero Lab v8.4c, comparing the contents of fields in a sort set now ignores encoded text (so
“{i}a{/i}” now sorts before “b”, not after, even though ‘{‘ > ‘b’).

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 Product Installation

On Windows, double-click the installer, and follow it through to complete the installation. After
installation, you can launch the product via the Start menu, from "Start -> All Apps -> Hero Lab".

On the Mac, double-click the downloaded file. Once you accept the license agreement, drag the Hero
Lab icon to your Applications folder to install it. After installation, you can launch the product from your
Applications folder.

If you purchased the CD version of Hero Lab, follow the instructions on your Hero Lab license card.

Recommended System Requirements

We recommend you run Hero Lab on a PC running Windows 10, 8.1, 8 or 7, or a Mac running OS X 10.11
(El Capitan) or macOS 10.12 (Sierra). Internet access is required for product licensing, and to obtain data
files.

Please note that Hero Lab will not run on Windows RT devices like the Surface RT and Surface 2.

Minimum System Requirements

Hero Lab requires a PC running Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, or XP (with Service Pack 3), or a Mac
running OS X 10.7 (Lion) or above.

User Manual

Once you install Hero Lab, you can launch the general User Manual by going to the “Help” menu,
choosing “Help Topics” and then “Hero Lab Manual”. You can also view the manual for the current game
system by clicking the “View Manual” button on the Configure Hero form for that game.

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 Technical Support

Questions? You can often get quick answers from the Hero Lab web site:

www.getherolab.com

Otherwise, technical support for Hero Lab is provided only via email. You can contact our support staff
at the email address below:

[email protected]

Please do NOT attempt to phone us for support, as we most likely will not be available to help you when
you call, and no support calls will be returned. We do our best to ensure that all email support questions
are answered in a timely manner, so please contact us via email.

Finally, our staff and many of our users are also present on our support forums, where you can post
questions and share information with other users:

forums.wolflair.com

Removing Hero Lab

On Windows, go to the Control Panel and choose “Programs and Features” (or “Add / Remove
Programs” in older versions of Windows). Find Hero Lab in the list of applications and double-click to
uninstall it. Your saved files and images will not be deleted by the uninstall.

On the Mac, drag the Hero Lab icon from your Applications folder to the trash. Your data files, saved
files and images will not be deleted by the uninstall.

Using Hero Lab with Third Party content

If you're a publisher who plans to formally publish Hero Lab data files and/or output in conjunction with
your own RPG content, our requirements for usage can be found in the license agreement you agreed to
when licensing the product. For more information, you can consult this page on our web site:

www.wolflair.com/powered_by_hero_lab.htm

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 Changes in Previous Versions

A list of changes made in previous product releases can be found below. To see what was changed in
this version of Hero Lab, see the “What’s new in this version of Hero Lab?” section at the top of this
document.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.4c

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a bug that would cause choosers not to work properly when used on certain tabs (for
example, class tabs in Pathfinder).
2. Fixed a bug that could cause characters to import with the wrong allegiance.
3. Fixed a bug that could the history of damage (or other “usage pools”) for a character to be lost.
4. Fixed a bug that caused certain abilities being sorted by a number (for example, sort by level) to
sort in the wrong order.
5. Fixed a bug that caused certain abilities to have their names displayed incorrectly after splitting
a stack of items, or moving a selection between containers.
6. Fixed a bug that caused Plunder & Peril to appear incorrectly in the Encounter Library.
7. Fixed a bug that would cause errors when a user data file included a “preclude” element
referencing a thing you didn’t have access to due to not owning a particular package.
8. Fixed a bug that would cause Hero Lab to ignore the game system if you specified both a game
system and a portfolio to load on the command line.
9. Fixed a bug that was causing certain data files to behave incorrectly, specifically the Spheres of
Power data files for Pathfinder. If Hero Lab reports errors when loading Pathfinder after the
update, and you’re using the Spheres of Power data files, make sure you update to the latest
version of that addon.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. Comparing the contents of fields in a sort set now ignores encoded text (so “{i}a{/i}” now sorts
before “b”, not after, even though ‘{‘ > ‘b’).

Changes in Hero Lab v8.4b

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a bug that caused Razor Coast to appear twice in the Encounter Library.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

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 1. Fixed a bug encountered when reading from the “shortname” field if a pick didn’t have that
field.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.4a

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a bug which would sometimes cause checkbox text on the In-Play tab to display incorrectly
(for example, for Kineticist Infusions).
2. Fixed a bug which could cause a crash if a script tried to process a tag expression beyond a
certain length.
3. Fixed a bug which could cause HL to sometimes calculate incorrect values if certain script
commands were used (for example, when calculating the “discount” to be applied to metamagic
feat levels).

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. Fixed a bug which was preventing the “gizmo tags” from appearing in the “pick tags” info
window.
2. You can now read from the "shortname" field even if the pick or thing doesn't have the
shortname component. If that happens, you get the normal name for the pick/thing instead.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.4

Enhancements & Changes:

1. Added the capability to properly validate the requirements on Warpriest bonus feats (and other
similar abilities). When feats are taken as Warpriest bonus feats, your base attack bonus and
fighter level are counted differently than they are for normal feats. (A future version of the
Pathfinder data files will be required to take advantage of these changes.)
2. Added the capability to automatically exclude content defined in .user files from Pathfinder
Society support. (A future version of the Pathfinder data files will be required to take advantage
of these changes.)

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. Added the “fileconstants” element to data files, which you can read about here.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.3

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Enhancements & Changes:

1. Characters can now choose the “Neutral” allegiance, as well as the existing “Ally” and “Enemy”
allegiances.

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a bug where certain character changes would not be triggered under some circumstances.
2. Fixed a bug where rounding whole numbers down would sometimes unexpectedly round down
to the next integer (e.g. 5 -> 4). This could be seen when trying to sell a stack of 5 Feed in
Pathfinder, where you’d be offered 4cp for the stack.
3. Hero Lab could crash when trying to compile certain invalid data files.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. The editor now has a “Change Thing Type” option under the Tools menu, allowing you to move a
thing from one tab of the editor to another. This is usually only helpful between tabs that are
very similar, otherwise you’ll need to make a lot of changes to the thing to make it work on the
new tab.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.2a

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a bug that prevented you from loading portfolios that had been saved from the Encounter
Library.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.2

Other Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab now supports longer “details text” being displayed on choose forms and info buttons.
This will require us to update some game systems, but once those changes are made, Hero Lab
will (for example) no longer truncate long description text for races like the Abysogh from the
Giantslayer AP.

Bug Fixes:

2. Fixed a crash that would rarely occur some time after opening a choose form.
3. Fixed a crash that would occasionally happen after deleting a pick.
4. The name of the “Summon Monster Creatures” encounter library for Pathfinder has been
changed to “Summoner’s Sidekick”.

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 5. Fixed an error that would cause Hero Lab to report “Invalid Shadow Time Update” in certain
situations.
6. Fixed a crash that could happen when checking a menu selection in a prereq in an incorrect way.
7. Under certain circumstances, Hero Lab could crash when creating a new class in the editor.
8. Script errors are no longer reported when adding magic items to a Paladin’s mount.
9. Fixed a crash that could occur if certain errors were present in the game system definition file.
10. The names of certain encounters in the Encounter Library were being cut off.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. Several new errors are reported during data file compilation if certain elements are missing
from the data files (for example, if invalid components are specified for certain portals).
2. The “setlinkage” command can now be used on a pick even if its thing didn’t define a default
target for the linkage.
3. In certain circumstances, new tags defined on the “Extend Thing” tab of the Editor would be
ignored.
4. Added the “characterindex” attribute to the portfolio public index XML file and the XML
statblock file for characters. See the “Reading Hero Lab Saved Portfolios” section of the manual
for more details.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.1

Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab now supports Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition on Windows and Mac!
2. Large portfolios, especially ones with lots of minions (such as vehicles in Shadowrun) should
now open significantly faster.

Bug Fixes:

1. Under certain circumstances, Hero Lab would fail to launch the installation of a new update.
2. In rare circumstances, Hero Lab could crash when importing creatures from the Encounter
Builder.
3. Selections would sometimes give validation errors when they should have been ignored, or vice
versa (for example, when using the “Ignore Prerequisites” feat adjustment).

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. For “duplicate thing” errors, Hero Lab now reports the locations the things were found in, to
make it easier to track down the extra copies.

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 Changes in Hero Lab v8.0e

Enhancements & Changes:

1. When you open a portfolio for a different game system, and there are multiple versions of that
game system installed, Hero Lab now asks you which version of the game should open the
portfolio. (If the portfolio will open in the current game system, Hero Lab doesn’t ask, as it
assumes the currently loaded game is OK.)

Bug Fixes:

1. Opening the Encounter Library could crash Hero Lab if a corrupted encounter file was present.
2. Fixed a bug that caused new creature stats to be set incorrectly in Shadowrun.
3. Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when using the Arcane tab with super powers in Savage
Worlds.
4. Fixed a bug that was causing various crashes in Pathfinder.
5. Fixed a bug (introduced in HL 8.0d) that caused some users to crash when loading Pathfinder.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. Added a new “Show Selection Field Histories” info window. This shows not just the current field
values on a pick, but also all changes to those values throughout evaluation that led up to the
final value, and which tasks changed them.

Changes in Hero Lab v8.0c

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a crash that could happen when opening certain tables with no items to select.
2. In certain circumstances (such as the “pick / roll ability scores” menu in the 5th Edition SRD),
changing the selection in the menu wouldn’t update the menu text.
3. Certain changes were not always being applied to the hero, for example some fly/swim speeds
in Pathfinder.
4. After reordering the dashboard, characters stats would display incorrectly.
5. Fixed a bug that meant native languages were not being assigned correctly in Shadowrun.
6. Fixed a bug in the installer that was causing crashes for some users.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. Specifying an invalid identity tag match expression would cause Hero Lab to crash.
2. Foreach through picks is now allowed in transaction scripts.

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 Changes in v8.0b

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a crash some users were experiencing, typically when they deleted something from their
character.
2. When gear was moved between containers, the display of the container was not being updated
properly.
3. Hero Lab now reports an error message when certain problems arise while printing, instead of
just crashing.
4. In certain circumstances, adding advances in Savage Worlds could cause a crash.
5. Fixed (hopefully) issues some users had after repeatedly reloading the Pathfinder game system,
requiring them to restart Hero Lab.

Changes in v8.0a

Enhancements & Changes:

1. Changes you make to a character should occur with anything from 10-50% less “lag” than before
(depending on the character and game system you’re using). This improvement should be
especially noticeable with characters that include one or more “minions” (such as a character
with an arcane familiar, a mount and a hireling). This speedup should make Hero Lab more
responsive and pleasant to use, especially for complex Pathfinder characters.
2. Hero Lab no longer runs on Windows 2000, due to unavoidable changes to our development
tools. Windows 2000 users should update to a newer version of Windows to continue using
Hero Lab.

Bug Fixes:

1. Two entries for “Plunder & Peril” and “The Emerald Spire” could incorrectly appear in the
Encounter Library for Pathfinder.
2. The order in which Hero Lab does certain things should be more consistent, making it less likely
that things behave inconsistently – it’s now less likely for different characters to give different
results for the same situation.
3. The Encounter Builder could crash if it in encountered an invalid file.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. In certain circumstances, creating a new game system from the Develop menu could cause a
crash.
2. Raised the limit on “number of components in a component set” from 32 to 64.

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 Changes in v7.6d

Enhancements & Changes:

1. More helpful error messages are now reported when you try to load a character that uses
content to which you don’t have access to, which isn’t available because you’re in demo mode,
or which isn’t available because you don’t have the appropriate user content installed.
2. The Hero Lab Manual (accessible from the Help menu) now includes a section to help users build
their own encounter libraries.

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed a crash that could occur when trying to start Hero Lab with a significant amount of
community content loaded.
2. Error messages were being incorrectly reported for some users when loading creatures from the
encounter builder.
3. Fixed a crash that could occur when you deleted certain selections.
4. Making certain changes to other actors from the Tactical Console could cause unusual behavior,
because the portfolio was not being updated properly.
5. The effects of the “Shrink Images” option under the Portfolio menu were not being applied until
the next time the portfolio was loaded, then saved again.
6. Certain fields would be set incorrectly after moving selections between different characters.
7. Saved portfolios for some game systems, especially Pathfinder, will now be slightly smaller.
8. Under certain circumstances, a menu selection could be lost when loading a portfolio. For
example, if a character had claw attacks from two different sources, and selected one of those
attacks with the “improved natural attack” ability, the selection might not be recognized next
time the portfolio was loaded. (If you’re affected by this bug, it should be fixed the next time
you save the portfolio.)
9. Fixed an issue where certain eval rules with long messages could crash Hero Lab.
10. If the “Enable Debug Tracing” setting was enabled, it could take a very long time (over a minute)
to load the Encounter Library.
11. On the mac, the “cost” area of custom magic items in Pathfinder wouldn’t always update
properly.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

1. In any info window showing task information, the last line was unintentionally being omitted.
2. If a script defines an invalid (non-numeric) priority, an error will now be reported.
3. In the Editor, closing a file then opening a new file could result in the wrong tab group being
selected.
4. Certain info windows will no longer crash after showing “too much” information.

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 Changes in v7.6b

Bug Fixes:

1. In tables, scrolling using the mouse wheel would make the current selection disappear.
2. If you had two sources with the same name, but different unique ids, only one of them would be
displayed on the “Configure Hero” form.
3. Hero Lab could crash after using “Test Now” on certain things in the editor, then trying to use
them in the application.
4. Hero Lab no longer crashes under certain unusual circumstances, such as when certain
Shadowrun characters try to add ability score advancements.
5. Hero Lab no longer reports “pick not found” error messages in certain situations when not
needed, which was causing problems in the Fate and Spirit of the Century Tactical Consoles.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. In the editor, “customize bootstrap” input things would sometimes display incorrectly.
2. A more sensible error is now reported if you define two macros with the same name.
3. Trying to define two “assignval” elements on a bootstrap for the same field is now reported as
an error, if data file debugging is enabled (to avoid causing problems with user-created data files
that have this issue).

Changes in v7.6

Enhancements & Changes:

1. User-created data files which reference content from packages you don’t own can now be used!
Previously, if a user data file referenced content from (for example) the Advanced Player’s
Guide, but your Hero Lab license wasn’t authorized for the APG, the data files would fail to
compile, and you were unable to use them.
Beginning next Pathfinder release, those data files will now load properly, and Hero Lab will
simply warn you (via a validation error) if you try to use something that references content from
the package you don’t have. (You won’t be able to use the missing content, it’ll simply be
ignored.)

Bug Fixes:

1. Certain items couldn’t be put into certain holders (for example, magical arrows could not be put
into a Vanishing Sheath in Pathfinder); this has now been fixed.
2. The same spell could often not be added for different classes, or within different spellbooks.

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 3. Using “Test Now!” in the editor would sometimes ignore the values you set for fields, often if
the field value set was “2” (for example, ability score bonuses in 5th Edition).
4. Certain messages would not appear immediately, for example when you pressed an “undo”
button if there was nothing to undo.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. A new “Extend Thing” tab is present in the editor, allowing you to add tags to things that are
defined in other files (or in packages). This should make it easier to (for example) add new
character classes to existing spells.
2. The editor is now much more responsive when switching between tabs.
3. Added a “Find Thing” button to the Hidden, Preclude, and Procedure tabs in the editor.
4. In debug field info windows, the name and unique id of menu selections are now displayed.
5. Added the “displaytxt” attribute to things and picks, allowing you to generate the full
description text for them after evaluation is finished.

Changes in v7.5b

Enhancements & Changes:

5. When activating a new Hero Lab license, the list of game systems is now ordered alphabetically,
instead of in a weird order that doesn’t make sense.

Bug Fixes:

1. When switching between heroes, the color and text of certain labels wasn’t being updated.
2. In the 5th Edition SRD, wizard spells you memorized would not be removed from the list of spells
to select.
3. In certain situations, a list of automatically added things would be displayed in the wrong order.
4. Under certain circumstances, the wrong tabs would briefly appear for minions like arcane
familiars before disappearing again.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. “foreach bootstrap in entity” and other similar references can now be used in transaction
scripts.
2. “foreach bootstrap in entity” could fail, depending on what the script just before it had done.

Changes in v7.5

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Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab now supports the 5th Edition SRD on Windows, Mac, or iPad! You can select the new
game system on the “Select a Game” form.
2. We’ve made more optimizations! Importing new characters from the encounter builder, or from
other files, should now happen faster than before.
3. Switching between different characters in the portfolio should now also be faster.

Bug Fixes:

1. On the Mac under El Capitan, you could still enter full-screen mode by clicking the green button,
even though it should be forbidden for the app.
2. Hero Lab could crash after adding an item through a choose form, when the table used to add it
had a maximum item limit.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. When loading the editor for the first time, a 3-character user id will automatically be selected
for you. You can change this under the Tools menu in the editor.
2. Hero Lab would crash under certain circumstances when pressing the “Test Now” button

Changes in v7.4a

Enhancements & Changes:

1. More optimizations – Hero Lab now uses about 30mb less memory when used with Pathfinder.
(Other games will also use less memory, but it’ll be a smaller amount.)
2. Hero Lab now compiles data files around 10% faster, which should save several seconds when
loading the Pathfinder data files after a new update.

Bug Fixes:

1. Under certain circumstances, leftover spells like “Spark” would sometimes appear in Pathfinder
portfolios. These spells will now be removed.
2. The level of spells and class abilities in description text in Pathfinder would sometimes be
displayed incorrectly.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. Transaction templates now have a sensible width when created, and no longer need to use
“parent.width” to set their width.

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 Changes in v7.4

Enhancements & Changes:

It’s optimization time! We’ve made three important optimizations with this version of Hero Lab:

1. When used with certain characters, such as Shadowrun 5th edition characters with lots of
vehicles, Hero Lab now applies changes you make up to 10% more quickly, reducing the “delay”
you see after changing something on the character. Unchecking the checkbox beside vehicles on
the Shadowrun Vehicle tab now makes Hero Lab respond even faster – a Drone Rigger with all
vehicles unchecked now takes only half as long to update after you make changes, for example.
2. Memory usage for characters is now much lower – a few megabytes lower for a single character,
up to dozens of megabytes lower for a portfolio with multiple characters (or a character with
multiple minions). This doesn’t make a huge difference on Windows and the Mac, but should
greatly improve stability in Hero Lab for iPad, especially on older iPads like the iPad 2.
3. We’ve laid the groundwork for data file changes that should make Hero Lab much more
responsive when dealing with portfolios that include multiple characters. These capabilities will
be taken advantage of in data file releases over the coming months.

Bug Fixes:

1. On the Mac, full screen mode is now disabled on El Capitan due to bugs in the new OS. We’re
investigating solutions for these bugs and will restore full screen mode as soon as we can. Sorry!
2. On the Mac, fixed a bug which caused Hero Lab to crash when opened for some users.
3. In Pathfinder, trying to sell a room in a building would cause a crash.
4. Tightened the conditions under which “Usage pool has been orphaned” error messages are
displayed, so they won’t appear when they aren’t relevant.
5. The “Damage Resistance” section of the Shadowrun printout would sometimes be missing one
or more lines of text.
6. On Windows, if you try to save to a PDF which is already open in Acrobat, the error message you
get is now more helpful.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. The “Task Performance” info window now also displays the total time taken for each pick,
allowing you to identify “high-density” picks that are candidates for removal, and no longer
shows most tasks from non-live picks (because they didn’t run).
2. The “iscoupled” and “coupledfield” options were added for minions, allowing you to designate
minions that don’t need to be updated when their parent hero is updated (and vice versa).
3. Added the “prependtoname” and “appendtoname” attributes on panels.
4. When preparing portfolios, you’ll see new options to do hopefully useful things with them.
5. Added the “minlistwidth” attribute on menu portals.

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 6. New source types can be used to hide sources in the list.
7. The task timing report no longer includes entries for tasks of picks that are non-live.
8. “enmasse” elements can now have a “containerreq” element to control the enmasse’d picks
live state.
9. Added “foreach thing in idlist”, allowing you to iterate through things by unique id extremely
fast (much faster than the normal foreach thing).
10. Fixed a crash that would occur if important pieces were deleted from an Authoring Kit game
system.
11. When iterating through bootstraps with a foreach, you can now access the values set in
“assignval” elements, using “eachthing.assignvals.field[fieldid].text” and
“eachthing.assignvals.field[fieldid].value”.

Changes in v7.3

Enhancements & Changes:

1. The License Wizard has been streamlined. When you’re activating a new license, Hero Lab will
automatically ask the questions it needs to continue, and will skip any questions that don’t
apply. For example, if your license already has a game system selected, you won’t be asked to
pick one again.
2. Performance improvements! Evaluation time for some characters, particularly Shadowrun
characters, has been improved by anything from 20-50%. We have more performance
improvements planned for the future.
3. On choose forms, section headings are no longer shown if there are no entries in that section.
For example, if you search for “Poisons” in the gear list in pathfinder, sections without any
poisons are simply not displayed, instead of displaying the section heading with no entries under
it.

Bug Fixes:

1. In Pathfinder, archetypes for classes not present in Hero Lab would be incorrectly displayed
throughout the list of archetypes. Such archetypes are now grouped together at the bottom of
the list instead.
2. On the Mac, cancelling a print job would incorrectly dismiss the “Print” form.
3. On the Mac, using the print form a certain way could cause an “unrecognized selector” crash.
4. Characters loaded from very old portfolios (4+ years old) would sometimes not be usable on
devices other than the one on which they were created.
5. Importing characters would sometimes append the wrong “#2” suffix to their names.
6. Fixed Hero Lab occasionally crashing when opened with the tactical console open. I hope.
7. If your email address doesn’t match the one for your license on our server , Hero Lab will now
display a more helpful message than “Unauthorized”.

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 8. On the Mac, the editor would report that you were trying to save a file in the wrong place under
certain unusual circumstances.
9. Trying to reload the current game to launch the encounter builder wasn’t offering to save your
portfolio.
10. The end of very long mouseover text could display invalid characters.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. The “optional” element was not suppressing error messages when used with the “amendthing”
target.
2. When iterating through bootstraps with a foreach, you can now use tag operations to access
autotags, using “eachthing.autotags.tagis[Group.Tag]”,
“eachthing.autotags.tagvalue[Group.Tag?]”, etc.
3. The “principal” reference will now always find a live pick, if one is available.

Changes in v7.2

Enhancements & Changes:

1. The Encounter Library now displays cover images for adventure paths and other items in your
library. Click on the cover to see just encounters for that adventure path – your last position in
each adventure path is saved separately.
2. When activating a license via the License menu “Activate New License” option, you’re now
shown a menu of options to choose how to proceed. This allows you to skip the “select game”
and “enter access code” parts of the license wizard if appropriate.
3. Hero Lab now supports Windows 10.

Bug Fixes:

1. When using initiative tiebreakers to compare characters with the same initiative value, the
tiebreakers would be compared wrongly.

Changes in v7.1, v7.1a and v7.1b

Enhancements & Changes:

1. When activating your Hero Lab license, you must now specify a “device nickname” for your
computer, for example “Bob’s Laptop” or “Living room PC”. If you need to contact technical
support because of problems with your license, this will help us troubleshoot those problems
more effectively.

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Bug Fixes:

1. On the Mac, Hero Lab 7.1 would crash on launch for many users.
2. When using the live filter mechanism on choose forms, clearing the live filter would change the
selected item.
3. If you set a different paper size when printing, the new size would not be remembered the next
time you tried to print.
4. When using optional rules like the Background Skills from Pathfinder Unchained, error messages
would be incorrectly reported on heroes other than the active hero.
5. On the Mac, numeric controls (like those in the encounter builder) would allow you to enter
non-numeric content.
6. When activating your license, your email address is now saved by default. You can change this
behavior from the “Other Settings” menu under Settings (or Preferences on the Mac).

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. The initial size of debug info windows is now larger.

2. Added a “live filter” for debug info windows, allowing you to search for tags and fields.
3. The “show fields” debug info window is now sorted by field id, which should make it easier to
find the field you’re looking for.
4. Reduced the time it takes to load large portfolios. This will be a very small speedup for most
users, but should make “heavy loads” (e.g. preparing all portfolios in a folder) faster by 20-50%.
5. Checking tag values in the thing list could return incorrect values under very unusual
circumstances.
6. You can now define a <match> tag expression for identity tags, allowing you to only add the
identity tags to certain things.
7. The “haschoices” target no longer indicates that items are available if the only things to show
are show-only things.
8. The “haschoices” target can now be used with table_auto portals. For those portals, it indicates
whether the auto-thing for the table is live or not.
9. The “digitgroup” intrinsic (and other intrinsics which take a numeric parameter) now report an
error if you pass them something which can’t be converted to a number.

Changes in v7.0b

Bug Fixes:

1. In unusual circumstances, when switching between heroes while a tab for a secondary class was
selected, Hero Lab would try to display two tabs at once (obviously not a good thing).

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 2. In unusual circumstances, the contents of controls wouldn’t be reset properly (for example,
when switching from one custom monster character in Pathfinder to a new, blank custom
monster character).
3. After scrolling down the class special abilities table in Pathfinder and changing a menu selection,
menus in that table would behave erratically until the table was scrolled again.

Changes in v7.0 and 7.0a

Enhancements & Changes:

1. Encounters from the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path are now available in Hero Lab! Find
out more on our web site!
2. When importing characters from the encounter builder or any other source, if the only
character in the portfolio is the unmodified "unnamed hero" you start off with, it is deleted once
the import is completed.
3. When loading characters that use content your copy of Hero Lab doesn’t have access to, Hero
Lab now does a better job of reporting which sources are missing and which selections are
affected.

Bug Fixes:

1. Switching between “all heroes” and “current hero” on the “output statblock” form would not
always apply the change properly.
2. Fixed a bug in Hero Lab 7.0 for the Mac where certain updates wouldn’t download properly.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. Hero Lab would crash when the assignstr or deletestr targets were used when no pick was
present, for example on choose forms.
2. “fieldval:” would give errors if used in the “match” expression of prereqs.
3. The “Prepare Portfolio” operation was ignoring sources required on minions.
4. Specifying an invalid field id in an “field edit” input thing would not report an error correctly in
Hero Lab, and would crash the editor when used.
5. You can now use an optional “lookup:thing” parameter with the linkage[] transition on a pick to
switch to the thing for the linkage, instead of the pick. This can be useful if the pick isn’t present,
but you still need to get information from the thing.
6. You can now combine a dragdrop script (allowing a table to be dragged into or out of) with user-
ordering for that table. If a pick is dragged within the table, it’ll be user-ordered; if it’s dragged
out of the table to another table, it’ll be moved to the target table.
7. Tags from the “preclude” group are now present on things and picks to indicate which sources
they are precluded from appearing under.

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 8. The “childfound” target now treats non-live picks the same as picks that aren’t present – the
transition is ignored and an error is no longer raised.

Changes in v6.2b

Enhancements & Changes:

1. Added new capabilities to support PACKS in the upcoming Shadowrun release of Run Faster.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. AugmentGizmo and AugmentMinion elements can now be added to AugmentBootstrap

elements when using auto-adds, allowing you to add to the gizmos of bootstrapped items.

Changes in v6.2a

Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab now supports Polymorph spells and abilities in Pathfinder! You can find them in the
“Spell Adjustments” table on the in-play tab.

Bug Fixes:

1. In certain circumstances, changes to the name of a selection (for example, a lifestyle in

Shadowrun) were not being properly saved.
2. Checkmarks were being displayed incorrectly in the Hero Lab editor.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. When finding a pick with the child or childfound transitions, Hero Lab will now try to find a copy
of the pick that is “native” to the container (i.e. not shadowed or displaced into it). If no “native”
copies are available, a shadowed or displaced one may still be used.
2. The “hasbootstrap:thingid” term may be used in tag expressions (for example, table candidate
expressions), and specifies whether or not the thing being tested bootstraps the thing with the
specified id.
3. The “Prepare Portfolios in Folder” menu item now optionally logs errors to a file, automatically
enters subfolders, and/or performs a “strip missing sources” operation in addition to preparing
the portfolio.
4. The “compare” and “replace” intrinsics now support an additional, optional parameter to make
the comparison case-insensitive: compare(x, y, case-sensitive:no)
5. Loadfixup scripts were not being run properly on minions.

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 Changes in v6.1h

Enhancements & Changes:

1. Authoring Kit games are now flagged as such on the “Select a Game” form.

Bug Fixes:

1. Items which needed to be printed on the following page were sometimes being omitted while
printing.
2. Hero Lab could sometimes crash when generating a statblock.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. The showpicks=”hero” attribute on tables was not being obeyed.

2. Fields and tags were not being assigned properly from displaced picks to their bootstraps.

Changes in v6.1g

Bug Fixes:

1. Some users were experiencing crashes when saving their portfolios or saving custom output.
2. Changes made to dates in the Journal were being ignored.
3. Text formatting in buy/sell rejection messages was not displayed properly.
4. When Hero Lab was at its minimum window height, tables on choose forms would sometimes
not be the correct size.
5. Under unusual circumstances, trying to buy something would later cause Hero Lab to crash.
6. When you clicked a chooser, the currently selected item would not be displayed properly if it
was lower than the first “page” of items.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. Portfolios saved with a .stock extension are now approximately 50% smaller; however, they only
include enough information to be loaded into the Encounter Builder, which means they omit
their HTML statblocks and the majority of their XML statblocks. To view their full statblock
output, they must be saved as normal .por files instead.
2. The “haschoices” target is now available for table portals, and indicates whether any things or
picks are available to be added to the table via the choose form.
3. You can now use “foreach thing in <etc>” in creation scripts.

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 Changes in v6.1f

Bug Fixes:

1. Hero Lab could crash when adding choices to tables with multiple columns (for example, the
spellbook form in Pathfinder).

Changes in v6.1e

Enhancements and Changes:

1. On Windows, Hero Lab now generates a “dump” file when it crashes, which can be submitted to
Lone Wolf Development for easier problem diagnosis.

Bug Fixes:

1. In narrow tables, the text in the “Add” button would sometimes extend off the sides of the
table.
2. Fixed a crash bug encountered (ha ha) when launching the Encounter Builder.
3. Hero Lab could crash when it was opened by double-clicking a saved portfolio and the Tactical
Console was open.
4. If a hero’s name was too long, duplicating it wouldn’t add the proper #2 suffix to the name.
5. In the editor, non-English letters entered into an existing data file wouldn’t be properly saved
out.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes, and Bug Fixes:

1. Using the “pushtags” target on a thing (rather than a pick) would cause Hero Lab to crash.
2. Added the “loadonce” XML element to all files, allowing you to avoid loading files with similar or
duplicate contents. See the authoring kit wiki for details.
3. Custom bootstraps in the editor (for example, natural attacks on races in Pathfinder) can now
have up to 15 child elements, up from 3.
4. The “Prepare Portfolio for Distribution” command was ignoring sources that should have been
selected in some situations.

Changes in v6.1b

Bugs Fixed:

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 1. Hero Lab on the Mac could crash while saving.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. The behavior of the “alignedge” target now matches the documentation.

Changes in v6.1a

Enhancements and Changes:

1. Hero Lab now uses less memory for each hero loaded (anything from 3-5mb less per hero),
allowing it to run more smoothly on low-memory systems.

Bugs Fixed:

1. An incorrect “read only files detected” message could appear when you imported new data files.
2. Fixed a crash bug on OS X 10.6 – if you’re using that OS and still experience crashes after this
release, please let us know at [email protected]!
3. When importing data files, an extra comma would be present in the list of files.
4. Fixed an error that would be encountered when saving a character with certain letters in their
name (such as double quotes) and a portrait.

Changes in v6.1

Enhancements and Changes:

1. Users with non-English characters in their usernames (such as the many fine users named
Дми́трий who reported this error) can now use Hero Lab without having to manually set the
directories it uses.
Please note: Files saved in this version of Hero Lab cannot be loaded on previous versions on
Hero Lab for Windows. If you send data files or saved portfolios to friends who have trouble
reading them, make sure that they’re using the latest version of Hero Lab too.
2. Many more letters and symbols are now available for use in Hero Lab! No longer are you limited

to the regular alphabet – fun symbols like ☯, ☎, ♫, ☃ and more can now be used by your
characters, as well as many more that are actually useful!
3. Hero Lab is now Unicode-compliant on both Windows and Mac. (This is the technical
explanation of items #1 and #2, above.)
4. Data files now compile significantly faster on Hero Lab for the Mac.
5. Tooltips which take more than one screen of space (for example, skill descriptions or statblocks
in the encounter builder) can now be scrolled with the mouse wheel.

Page 29
 6. When deleting heroes, you can now easily delete all enemies or allies in the portfolio.
7. On the Mac, Cmd+F now takes you to the “search” field on a choose form, just as Ctrl+F does.
8. On the Mac, you can now use Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab to move back and forth in the tab list,
just like you can on Windows.
9. Table header titles in summary panels now display in a more appropriate style.
10. Although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we think the separator line used in printed
statblocks now looks nicer.
11. Hero Lab can no longer upgrade from extremely old versions of the product (anything older than
HL 3.7, which is several years old). To upgrade from these to the latest version of Hero Lab, you
can simply download and install Hero Lab 6.0a first. This will perform the appropriate changes
that will allow you to update to the latest version of Hero Lab.

Bugs Fixed:

1. In certain circumstances, the scroll bar for a tab would not adjust appropriately when the tab
changed size.
2. BBCode and plain text for statblocks with superscript text was being output incorrectly.
3. In certain circumstances, Hero Lab could crash when generating statblocks from the Develop
menu.
4. The “Output Statblock” form now saves the last tab / statblock used more reliably, and should
no longer appear to “hang” while generating the statblock for large files.
5. In unusual circumstances, the same word could be printed both at the end of a line and at the
the start of the next line.
6. When editing scripts on things with long names in the editor, Hero Lab could crash.
7. If you entered more than 5000 characters of text into a notes form, the extra text would be
truncated.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. All XML files saved by Hero Lab are now in UTF-8 encoding. Please ensure that any tool you’re
using to read or display Hero Lab’s output is UTF-8 aware, or the contents of those files may be
corrupted when displayed.
2. You can now create, copy and edit procedures in the Hero Lab editor!
3. Custom bootstrap edit things defined in user-created data files would display their contents
incorrectly.
4. Certain controls in the editor (for example, the tag id control) could accept contents too long for
unique ids.

Changes in v6.0a

Enhancements and Changes:

Page 30
 1. When auto-adding picks (for example, equipment Kits from the late September Pathfinder
update), custom names and quantities are now displayed for the gear being added.
2. In the encounter builder, copyright text is no longer shown at the bottom of each statblock.
3. Hero Lab now verifies saved portfolios after writing them, reducing the chance that an error
could cause problems reading a saved file.

Bugs Fixed:

1. In certain circumstances (for example, when selecting class spells in Pathfinder), the list of spells
would not scroll for several seconds after it appeared.
2. On Windows, saving an HTML statblock was using the wrong encoding, resulting in the
“unknown character” glyph appearing for certain characters.
3. On Mac, the Fate Core game system wasn’t appearing in the list of games until installed from
the updates mechanism.
4. Clicking the “Cancel” button on the “Select Sources” form would sometimes change the selected
sources.
5. Hero Lab could crash if the mouseinfo text to be displayed was too long, rather than just
truncating the text.
6. Double-clicking to add an NPC in the encounter builder wouldn’t update the calculated
challenge ratings properly.
7. Cancelling the game reload after adding a new class in the editor would display an incorrect
error message.
8. In the Encounter Builder, the list of NPCs added to the current encounter would not scroll
properly.
9. In d20 or Pathfinder, the “Choose Gear Size” menus would get out of sync with each other.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. The “setchosen” transition can now be used in any trusted script.

2. Added “state.isautoadd”, which can be used in creation scripts to tell whether the new pick is
being auto-added or not.
3. Added the absolute() intrinsic, to return the absolute value of a number.

Changes in v5.3

Enhancements and Changes:

1. In portfolios with multiple characters, changing the hero settings now takes much less time to
complete.
2. Hero Lab now uses much less memory when compiling data files, especially for large games like
Pathfinder.

Page 31
Bugs Fixed:

1. Hero Lab would crash when loading a game with missing graphic files.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. On picks, the “intersect” target was not working properly when used in the “countsource” and
“counttarget” modes.
2. You can now switch to the “agent” context in a description script.

Changes in v5.2b

Bugs Fixed:

1. Hero Lab could crash when saving a character with unusually long text on the Personal tab.

Changes in v5.2a

Enhancements and Changes:

1. In Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition, adding sample powers now constructs customizable
versions of the powers based on the base effects. For example, instead of a separate “Blast”
power, adding Blast adds the “Damage” power with the “Ranged” extra, which you can then
change however you’d like. (This only applies to powers added with version 3.2 of the M&M3
data files - powers added to the hero with previous versions of the data files will be unchanged.)
2. In Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition, you can now choose between showing the full list of
powers, or only the base power effects on the “choose power” form.

Bugs Fixed:

1. Under certain rare conditions, when told to round numbers up, Hero Lab would appear to round
certain numbers incorrectly (e.g. the number “5.0” could be rounded up to “6”). We contacted
experts who told us this is Not How Math Works and have now changed this behavior.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. Added support for “autoadds”, which allow adding of multiple things when the user adds a
single thing to the hero.
2. In the editor, the forms for editing scripts now size themselves more sensibly to avoid showing
large blank spaces when there’s only enough space to show half of a script.
3. You can now use “foreach gear in <pick>” to iterate through the items held by a container.
4. Assigning thing.holder and related tags at runtime was not flagging a thing as a holder.

Page 32
 5. Encoded text in user text fields is now displayed properly in statblock output.
6. Tags from the “usesource” group are now present on things and picks to indicate which sources
they belong to.
7. Encoded text now supports {super}{/super} to turn superscript on and off.

Changes in v5.2

Enhancements and Changes:

1. Shadowrun 5th Edition is now available for Hero Lab! Add it to your license by going to the
License menu and choosing “Purchase Data Package”.

Bugs Fixed:

1. There was a significant delay when opening the list of deities in Pathfinder.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. The “setchosen” target can now be used to set the field to a thing.
2. Added “initiative override” mechanics to allow an actor to sort before or after all other actors in
the tactical console, regardless of initiative.
3. Added the “state.initresort” transition to allow the data file author to resort the list of actors
after initiative has changed.

Changes in v5.1a

Bugs Fixed:

1. When adding items on choose forms, Hero Lab would occasionally crash for a few users.
2. Fixed a bug that caused a crash when loading Shadowrun 5th Edition characters on the Mac.
3. On later versions of OS X, the last words in text would be cut off (this was especially noticeable
on the Import form, for example).

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. On the “Choose Tag” form in the editor (and on other similar forms), you can now filter the list
of things displayed to only show those with some specified text.

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 Changes in v5.1

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. In the Encounter Builder, certain games now allow you to filter the list of monsters by their
rating. For example, in the d20 System and Pathfinder, you’ll be able to limit the list of monsters
to (for example) CR 5 to CR7 monsters only; in Mutants & Masterminds, you’ll be able to limit
characters by power level in a similar way.
Note: This will require the April Pathfinder data file update to use in Pathfinder, and is available
now for selected other game systems.

Bugs Fixed:

1. On Windows XP and Vista, an unsuitable color was being used for the background color when
you clicked on an incrementer to type text into it.
2. Several minor bug fixes were made to improve drag & drop support (for example, dragging and
dropping no longer occurs over edit controls, as it would interfere with dragging and dropping to
select text.)
3. In certain situations, Hero Lab would fail to import heroes in demo mode.
4. On choose forms, the transaction panel wouldn’t update properly in some situations (for
example, when choosing augmentation grades in Shadowrun).
5. When creating a new Hero Lab portfolio from Realm Works, a warning message would
incorrectly be shown.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. On the “Choose Thing” form in the editor, you can now filter the list of things displayed to only
show those with some specified text.
2. Fixed a crash caused by inheriting from a tag group that wasn’t defined yet.
3. The “hasminion” target is now available on things and picks and returns non-zero if the thing or
pick has a minion.
4. You can now use “foreach bootstrap in minion” to iterate over the things bootstrapped to a
minion on a thing or pick, and “foreach root in <pick>” to iterate over the picks that bootstrap
the specified pick.
5. Creating a tag with an order of more than 255 would produce unexpected behavior, and is now
reported as an error.

Changes in v5.0

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Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab’s new Encounter Builder is now available! The Encounter Builder is a powerful new
tool, making it easier than ever for GMs to build encounters from the hundreds of stock
characters included with most game systems. Try it from the new Gamemaster menu!
2. The Fate Core game system is now available for Hero Lab! All licensed Hero Lab users now
receive full access to this game system at no additional cost.
3. You can now drag and drop picks within certain tables (for example, the dashboard and the
table of class levels in Pathfinder) to re-order them.

Bugs Fixed:

1. Certain incrementers (such as the “number to add” incrementer in Pathfinder) had text which
was too light to see.
2. Text in buttons on OS X was being positioned a few pixels too far up.
3. On OS X, the Help menu now appears properly for the Tactical Console.
4. On Windows, when maximized, the Tactical Console form could appear under the task bar.
5. Heroes with certain unusual characters in their names, such as characters with accents, could
have errors reported when trying to save portfolios including images.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. Added the “titlecase” and “sentencase” intrinsic functions.

2. Added “Set Portfolio Sourcebooks” option on the “Develop” menu.
3. The “addbehavior” setting on components is now respected for auto tables.
4. Certain combinations of bootstraps in data files could give a timing error.

Changes in v4.3a

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab should now load game systems more quickly than it used to, letting you get to your
characters several seconds faster than before.

Bugs Fixed:

1. When ordinal numbers were generated, numbers ending 11-13 were labeled “11st”, “12nd” etc
instead of “11th”, “12th”.
2. On OS X 10.8 and above, corrected a problem where spacing for text with formatting would
often be incorrect.

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 3. On the Mac, most text controls no longer automatically replace text with characters that cannot
be used in Hero Lab.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. The “Skip Supplement Packages” option on the Develop menu has been replaced with “Choose
Supplement Packages”. You can now selectively disable individual packages you have access to,
to test what happens without them being present.
2. Hero Lab no longer crashes when you add a pick to a table with a non-existent autothing.
3. Choosers can now be included in templates, with some limitations.
4. You can now drag and drop user-added picks between tables.

Changes in v4.3

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab now saves out less information in saved portfolios, resulting in portfolios that are 10-
20% smaller.
2. In the editor, game systems with a lot of tabs can now organize them into separate groups. This
will allow us to add additional tabs for some content in Pathfinder.
3. After adding something from a long list, like the list of spells in Pathfinder, Hero Lab no longer
“freezes” for several seconds.

Bugs Fixed:

1. If the data files changed in certain ways, loading a pick from a saved file could generate incorrect
error messages.
2. The width and height of certain images in Pathfinder was not being set properly.
3. Hero Lab was hanging for some mac users after interacting with a long list on a choose form, like
the list of spells in Pathfinder.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. The agent pick could not be properly accessed in certain scripts, such as the headertitle script.
2. The user identifier set in the editor can now also contain numbers, although we recommend you
only use uppercase letters.

Changes in v4.2d

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Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. In the editor, you can now specify a 2- or 3-character “user identifier” that is automatically
added to the unique id of records you create.

Bugs Fixed:

1. During data file compilation on Windows, if a lot of third-party data files were loaded, Hero Lab
could run out of memory and be unable to compile.
2. On certain MacBook Pro computers, Hero Lab should now run on the integrated graphics
chipset, rather than causing a switch to the discrete GPU.
3. If the dice roller rolled a number less than zero, it would be displayed incorrectly.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. If you specify text too long for an XML element, the error message now reports how far over the
limit you were.
2. Added the “dossier” option for labels, to allow easier display of statblocks in printed output.
3. Edit controls can now specify placeholder text to be displayed when empty. See the authoring
kit wiki for details.
4. Added the “ordinal” and “digitgroup” intrinsic functions to make formatting numbers in scripts
easier. See the authoring kit wiki for details.

Changes in v4.2c

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. You can now press the “integrate” button in Realm Works to import characters from Realm
Works directly into a running copy of Hero Lab.

Bugs Fixed:

1. In some circumstances, if a tooltip was showing (e.g. on the “Apply damage” button), it would
prevent you from clicking on buttons until dismissed with a click.
2. If no email client is installed, trying to email someone (by choosing the “Contact Technical
Support” menu item, for example) now displays a more helpful message.
3. An invalid character is no longer shown at the bottom of HTML statblock output.
4. When rounding numbers towards zero, numbers like -0.1 would be unhelpfully rounded to -0
(negative zero, which is not really a thing) instead of 0.
5. In some circumstances, the “Print” dialog could end up behind the main Hero Lab window.

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 6. When using the mouse wheel to scroll up and down fast in the main window, display corruption
could occur.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. The “hero” transition now works more reliably in scripts with a type of “none”.
2. The editor now lets you set “assignval” attributes of unlimited length, rather than imposing an
artificial limit of 100 characters.
3. Added the batchadd/batchplace mechanism to enable easier design of class tabs.

Changes in v4.2a

Bugs Fixed:

1. On Windows, tweaked our internet code to hopefully fix some annoying problems some users
experience with bad cached downloads. We also no longer ignore invalid HTTP certificates.
2. Hero Lab on the desktop can no longer import data files for Hero Lab on the tablet (and vice
versa), which is good because doing that would cause problems.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. When exporting third-party data files, HLExport no longer enforces the product version
requirement, as this was causing incorrect behavior when trying to import files into Hero Lab for
the iPad.
2. HLExport no longer allows you to export package files.
3. Added the “fieldisempty:” check to use in tag expressions.

Changes in v4.2

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. The Spirit of the Century game system is now available for Hero Lab! All licensed Hero Lab users
now receive full access to this game at no additional cost.
2. Due to improvements in our package format, future data file releases will be around 25%+
smaller, meaning they’ll download 25% faster! We’re hoping to achieve further size reductions
in a separate release, coming soon.

Bugs Fixed:

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 1. Users without the Pathfinder game system couldn’t load the Pathfinder Beginner Box, which is
now free to all licensed Hero Lab users as it should have been.
2. Line breaks in personal description text would not be output correctly in HTML or Wikitext
statblocks.
3. Users with a ‘+’ or other non-alphanumeric characters in their email address would sometimes
get error messages when retrieving updates.
4. Using the hero# transition in a containerreq expression would sometimes cause a crash.
5. Saved portfolios of sufficient complexity (I’m looking at you, character with 26 Shadowrun
vehicles) would not load properly into Hero Lab.
6. Text would incorrectly appear above “Notes” buttons.
7. Hero Lab would crash if you tried to print a character with no live sheets defined.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. The “Selection List” debug info window now shows more information about the source of picks.
2. Using “Find Thing” in the editor wasn’t replacing the selected text properly under OS X.

Changes in v4.1b

Bugs fixed:

1. Hero Lab could crash when tables over a certain size were created. Too much memory was
being allocated to draw those tables, which would cause a failure for some Windows users.

Changes in v4.1a

Program Enhancements and Changes:

1. If you copy an HTML statblock to the clipboard, other programs that understand HTML (such as
word processors) will now be able to paste it with formatting intact.
2. Clicking a label with mouseover text will now immediately show the mouseover text, as if you
had just hovered over it. This should make Hero Lab more useful to anyone using it without a
mouse, for example on Microsoft’s upcoming Surface Pro tablet PCs.
3. Files in the temporary folder will no longer be added to the “recent files” list, as they’re
temporary and thus likely to disappear before you can re-use them.
4. The options under the License menu for reactivating your license have been clarified.

Bugs Fixed:

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 1. Hero Lab could crash when you deleted the last level of certain classes, if other classes which
shared the same abilities were still present.
2. If you ran Hero Lab on Linux under Wine, saving a portfolio would cause a crash.
3. If you moused over an info button to get the information from that button, clicking on the
button to dismiss the information would dismiss it, then register a click on the button, bringing
the description up again. Now, the information will disappear without reappearing again.
4. On the Mac, fixed some crashes that would very rarely occur after holding the mouse down over
a control and closing a form.
5. Hero Lab could crash when you tried to edit notes and the notes button wasn’t set up properly
by the data file author.
6. Hero Lab no longer requires a mouse to start, as many tablets are starting to appear with a
touch screen and no mouse connected.
7. Total encumbrance on minions was not being calculated properly for certain game systems,
such as Savage Worlds.
8. On the Mac, fixed another issue where the “buy” panel on the choose form was drawing text
without clearing the old text when you changed the quantity to purchase.
9. After opening a large number of saved portfolios (for example, by using the “Prepare Portfolios
In Folder For Distribution” menu item), Hero Lab would hit an OS resource limit and crash.
10. Hero Lab no longer refuses to start if the minimum resolution of your screen is too low, but still
displays a warning message the first time you run it on a screen that doesn’t meet the
requirements.
11. If you clicked within a scroll bar to scroll a window up or down, then moved the mouse out of
the scroll bar without releasing the button, moving the mouse back into the scroll bar could
cause scrolling to resume incorrectly.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

3. Added “Save Statblocks for Portfolios in Folder”, “Save Custom Output for Portfolios in Folder”
and “Save d20Pro Output for Portfolios in Folder” items under the Develop menu. These allow
you to generate several forms of output for a large number of saved portfolios at once.
4. The “Prepare Portfolios in Folder for Distribution” menu item now gives you the option of
preparing portfolios in subfolders as well as the folder you select.
5. The “Prepare Portfolios in Folder for Distribution” menu item would sometimes report a
nonsensical number of portfolios had been prepared.
6. The “Prepare Portfolio for Distribution” menu item no longer ignores certain picks that are
bootstrapped to a gizmo, like the Dancing Wasp sword needing the Jade Regent and Ultimate
Combat sources.
7. Added two new modes of operation to the "intersect" target - "countsource" and "counttarget".
"countsource" returns the number of tags on the source that match tags on the target, and
“counttarget” returns the number of tags on the target that match tags on the source.

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 8. Scripts with a type of “none” can now transition to the hero context, making them significantly
more useful for holding functionality that can be used in multiple different places.

Changes in v4.1

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. The Hero Lab saved portfolio format has undergone major changes. Instead of being a simple
XML file, each saved portfolio (.por file) is now a zip file containing text, html, and XML
statblocks and images, as well as the Hero Lab internal file format. This makes each saved
portfolio much smaller, and allows third party tools to read saved portfolios created by Hero
Lab! See the “Reading Hero Lab Saved Portfolios” section of the Hero Lab manual for full details.
Files saved in previous versions of Hero Lab will still load in Hero Lab 4.1 without a problem, but
files saved by Hero Lab 4.1 will no longer load in previous versions of the product. If your friends
have trouble reading your Hero Lab portfolios, make sure they’ve updated Hero Lab.
2. Importing new data file updates should now be 50-70% faster, thanks to improvements made to
our import mechanism.
3. Windows 8 (except Windows RT) and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion are now officially supported by
Hero Lab.
4. Hero Lab and its associated tools are now signed with digital certificates on the Mac, which
make it easier to run on Mountain Lion.
5. Running Hero Lab on Windows 2000 is no longer supported. All Windows 2000 users should be
aware that future versions of Hero Lab may not run on that operating system.

Bugs Fixed:

1. On the Mac, the “buy” panel on the choose form was drawing text without clearing the old text
when you changed the quantity to purchase.
2. Changing the settings for a hero was not marking the portfolio as “needs to be saved” properly.
3. Some items in choose forms were not being sorted correctly, for example the weapons list in
Pathfinder when “Only Valid Items” was selected.
4. In some cases, the validation summary bar at the bottom of the Hero Lab window was not being
updated properly.
5. Hero Lab could crash if an invalid logo bitmap was present for a game system.
6. Certain things in the editor (for example, the Wizard class in Pathfinder) could not be copied
properly.
7. If you had a custom output type installed and a new update was released, the new update
would not prompt you to download it appropriately.

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 8. When saving custom output, images would sometimes be saved with incorrect file extensions.
This problem may unfortunately persist with old portfolios, but custom output generated from
portfolios created with Hero Lab 4.1 or later should label the images correctly.
9. When saving a portfolio, some selections would incorrectly be flagged as “changed by user”,
resulting in unnecessary warnings appearing when the portfolio was loaded back in.
10. If an error was encountered while exporting heroes, it wasn’t being reported properly.
11. The list of sources generated for a thing with both sources and preclude entries would be
formatted incorrectly.
12. When a file failed to save properly (for example, trying to save in a folder that Hero Lab couldn’t
write to), an error was not being properly reported.
13. Hero Lab wasn’t reporting script errors properly in some particularly obscure cases, giving a
generic error message instead.
14. Very occasionally, extracting files from an import file could fail and cause a 0-size file to be
created, but with no actual error being reported.

Authoring Enhancements, Changes and Bug Fixes:

1. Added the "principal" target reference to get the principal version of a pick. The principal pick is
guaranteed to be the same each time it’s used within one evaluation. This can be useful when
you need to share information between multiple copies of the same non-unique pick.
2. Using hero.child[thingid] to transition to a different pick is now guaranteed to select a live copy
of that pick if multiple copies are available.
3. Added a new “Prepare Portfolios in Folder for Distribution” menu item, which allows you to run
“Prepare Portfolio for Distribution” on an entire folder of portfolios at once.
4. The “Prepare Portfolio for Distribution” menu item was ignoring picks on gizmos, such as magic
item powers for Pathfinder, and producing incorrect results.
5. XML generated by custom output is now in the more sensible UTF-8 encoding, and should now
be properly indented (and thus much easier to read) when generated on Windows.

Changes in v4.0c

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab now loads large portfolios even more quickly than before. Depending on the size and
complexity of your portfolio, it should load anywhere from 10% faster to 200% faster. The more
heroes and minions in the portfolio, the more it’ll benefit from this improvement.
2. Hero Lab and its associated tools are now signed with digital certificates on Windows, which
should make the messages when you try to install the product for the first time slightly less
distressing.

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 3. Accessing “Manage License” and related functions from the License menu now automatically
sends you to the secure version of our web site.
4. You can now specify a local file (or a file on a network drive) as an additional updates source, by
using the syntax “file://c:/path/to/file.xml”.

Bugs Fixed:

1. On the Mac, if you did certain things with the trackpad like switch desktops or open Mission
Control, Hero Lab could freeze.
2. On the Mac, certain users could not run Hero Lab in demo mode, as it incorrectly detected other
copies of itself running.
3. On the Mac, if one user installed Hero Lab and another user tried to run it, Hero Lab would give
an error message.
7. On the Mac, when a “dead key” was pressed (like the ` on a Swedish keyboard), Hero Lab could
crash.
8. On the Mac, clicks on disabled controls were not always being ignored properly, resulting in
some odd behavior.
9. On the Mac, using Hero Lab in “high-dpi” mode (for example, on a Retina Macbook Pro) would
cause it to run very slowly.
10. On the Mac, using certain custom output types could cause Hero Lab to crash.
11. On Windows, the Hero Lab window would not redraw for a time after resuming your computer
from hibernation.
12. On Windows, made some changes that will hopefully resolve internet access problems for a
number of users.
13. Fixed a nasty bug that would cause inexplicable crashes at random times, making their cause
very hard to identify.
14. If you set a choose form to show “Only valid items”, then came back to it later when there were
no valid items to see, there was no way to re-open the choose form. Hero Lab now
automatically changes the setting back to “Show everything” in this situation.
15. In a large portfolio, changing the settings for a hero would take a very long time, due to the
portfolio being re-evaluated unnecessarily.
16. In the editor, saving a read-only file in the current game folder with a new name now “unlocks”
it so it can be edited.
17. Sortsets were not comparing tags on linked things properly, so any sortkey testing tags on a
linkage was effectively being ignored.
18. When you clicked on the timing report error message to load the timing report, a “file not
found” error would be displayed.
19. Hero Lab should have been reporting an error if a thing tried to replace itself, instead of hanging
during data file compilation.

Authoring Enhancements & Changes:

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 1. Authoring: Added the "arraypush" and "matrixpush" targets to array and matrix fields. These
find the first empty row in an array or matrix, and sets values or text into it. If you have, for
example, an array of strings that need to be kept separate so they can be spliced together with a
variety of delimiters later, you can use this target to push them one by one onto the array
without having to search for empty rows in the array yourself.
2. Authoring: Added the "listpick" and "listfield" attributes to output tables, which do for the list
expression like "candidatepick" and "candidatefield" do for the candidate expression.

Changes in v4.0b

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab now creates minions and loads characters with multiple minions much more quickly
(10-100x more quickly for examples like the Shadowrun Drone Rigger).
2. Authoring: Sort sets can now contain 10 sort keys, up from 7.

Bugs Fixed:

1. On the Mac, trying to print the World of Darkness character sheet could cause a crash.
2. On the Mac, clicking to show a tooltip and then clicking the Hero Lab dock icon (after switching
away from the app, for example) would cause Hero Lab to hang.
3. Made some changes which will hopefully resolve internet access problems for some users on
Windows.
4. Loading certain saved portfolio files which included “bad” links to other heroes inside the file
could crash Hero Lab.
5. Improved the error message reported when fonts are missing, since people seem to be running
into that a lot on the Mac.
6. On the Mac, clicking the “Add XP” buttons in the Journal would sometimes not clear the
contents of the edit controls to specify how much XP you wanted to add.
7. On the Mac, following links to the main Hero Lab manual from the game system manuals would
not work.
8. Hero Lab no longer crashes when more than 7 sort keys are defined for a sort set.

Changes in v4.0a

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. In scripts, the “setchosen” target can now be used within regular scripts, but only to set the
selection for the first time, and only if the script was marked as trusted with “trustme”.

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Bugs Fixed:

1. On the Mac, when dragging the columns of a grid to resize them, a document icon would appear
and the resize cursor would be displayed off-center.

Changes in v4.0

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Hero Lab is now available for the Mac! You can run Hero Lab on any Mac running OS X 10.5 to
10.7. Both Windows and Mac versions can be downloaded from our downloads page. If you
have questions about transferring your license to a Mac, see the “Running Hero Lab on Windows
and Mac” section of our licensing info page.

Bugs Fixed:

1. Exporting a hero would sometimes fail.

2. The Validation form would sometimes show outdated information or fail to select the current
actor when displayed.
3. Importing data files would fail if the “Delete files not replaced” box was checked.
4. The “Total Cash” controls on “Buy Custom Wand”, “Buy Custom Magic Item”, “Buy Equipment”
etc forms would sometimes slowly shrink until they disappeared.
5. Borders around controls would sometimes not be refreshed.

Changes in v3.9f

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Improved the error message generated when Hero Lab tries to adjust condition timings to avoid
sequencing problems with bootstraps.

Bugs Fixed:

1. If you clicked a droplist in the editor, then clicked elsewhere to dismiss it, clicking it again would
not always open the droplist properly.
2. Hero Lab could crash when leaving certain choose forms.
3. The custom output definition DTD was not present in the documentation.

Changes in v3.9e

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Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. The Pathfinder® Beginner Box game system is now available for all licensed Hero Lab users!
Anyone with a Hero Lab license can load this game system and save and print characters. If you
don’t have a license, you can save and print characters for this game with the free Starter
Edition of Hero Lab, which you can download from our web site.
2. Redesigned the Help menu, to make it easier to find more common commands. In addition, you
can now access the Hero Lab readme through the menu.
3. HLExport has a new icon, making it easier to distinguish from Hero Lab.
4. If data file debugging is enabled, Hero Lab now warns you if you use fonts that are not present
on both OS X and Windows. This behavior can be disabled by unchecking “Warn About Platform-
Specific Fonts” on the Develop menu.
5. Added a new shortcut key – Ctrl+K (Command+K on the Mac) for “configure hero”.

Bugs Fixed:

1. Using the space bar to trigger the “Add Item” cell of a table was not working if there were no
items in the table.
2. Hero Lab could crash if things were created with very long description text.
3. Title bar scripts on choose forms were always using the hero as their starting point, not the
container as documented.
4. The “Choose Thing” form in the editor had the wrong tooltip for the list of things.
5. Hero Lab would sometimes crash when loading certain portfolios if the data files had changed in
a certain way since they were saved.
6. In certain situations, the selected item would not be properly displayed in droplists.
7. Hero Lab could fail to compile data files or crash when too many user files (100+) were loaded at
the same time.
8. Scripts set to use “childfirst” ordering were not applying that between heroes, only between
containers on the same hero.

Changes in v3.9b

Bugs Fixed:

1. Fixed a crash bug that occurred when Hero Lab tried to import a file with a bad “file modified”
date. This affected user import files that were downloaded from some web sites.
2. Fixed a crash bug that would occur if you created a thing in the editor and deleted its name. The
editor no longer allows you to leave the “name” field blank.
3. The “Show” droplist in the “Find Thing” dialog in the editor now shows things from the correct
component set when used.

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 4. Printing certain portfolios (for example, portfolios with lots of spells) could cause Hero Lab to
print very slowly and possibly hang.
5. Trying to assign a tag with a wildcard in it would cause Hero Lab to crash, and now reports an
error when compiling.
6. Changes how internet access behaves, which will hopefully solve internet problems for a
number of users.

Changes in v3.9a

Bugs Fixed:

1. Heroes with a minion were giving an error message after being saved in Hero Lab 3.9.
2. HLExport would stop exporting files if it encountered an empty folder.

Changes in v3.9

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. When you run Hero Lab for the first time, if you choose to check updates automatically, an
immediate check is performed instead of asking you if you want to do it.
2. You can now specify a filename without a game system on the command line, and Hero Lab will
ask the user which game system they want the file created for.
3. Many minor changes to prepare for the Mac version of Hero Lab.

Bugs Fixed:

1. Printing from the print preview form would sometimes cause an error for some users.
2. Fixed many issues which could potentially have crashed Hero Lab in occasional circumstances.
3. Hero Lab now launches correctly under Windows 8. However, please note that Windows 8 is not
yet a supported operating system to run it on.
4. In a dual-natured header cell of a printed table when printing multiple heroes, the wrong actor
could be used in template and portal scripts.

Changes in v3.8a

Program Enhancements & Changes:

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 1. When loading a saved portfolio that includes source settings which are not present in your copy
of Hero Lab, warning messages are no longer displayed if those sources are not active.
Additionally, Hero Lab now remembers the state of all "missing" sources and saves them at their
original values when the portfolio is changed. (If you want to manually remove the missing
sources, you can do so from the "Strip Missing Sources" item under the Portfolio menu.)
2. The "Get Updates" button has been relabelled "Find Updates" and is now more prominently
displayed on the Select Game form.
3. Added a new "Explore Folders -> Game System Data Folder" menu item under the Tools menu,
allowing easier access to the folder for the current game system.
4. When generating export files containing saved portfolios, subfolders of the folder you select are
now included by default, for consistency with how folders under the game system folder are
included by default. Previously, folders under the saved portfolio folder were omitted from the
list and could not be selected.
5. When a user action causes a minion to be added, Hero Lab now displays a progress message
during the operation, as it can take many times longer than simply adding a regular pick.
6. The new default size for "small images" is 250x250 instead of 150x150, as it looks better on the
printout while consuming only negligible additional disk space.
7. Added a new "List User Files" option under the Diagnostics menu to aid debugging.
8. Edit things in the editor can now specify default values for the "has own mode", "is inherit" and
"live field" flags on minions.
9. The Windows "Choose Folder" form is now used in a number of places, instead of our own
custom form. This fixes a number of issues where certain folders like the Dropbox folder could
not be selected as the alternate save folder for a game system.
10. Added a new "Skip Supplement Packages" setting under the debug menu that allows you to
reload the current game system without supplement packages compiled, for easier testing.
11. Custom output types can now generate XML files by specifying the "outputextension" attribute
on the output type. See the manual for details.
12. Added an @islive special symbol to "chosen" scripts on choosers, so you can tell whether the
selected pick is live or not.

Bugs Fixed:

1. The description of the d20Pro custom output type was not being displayed properly.
2. Some weapons in Shadowrun (like the Ares Alpha) would incorrectly report errors when a saved
portfolio containing them was loaded.
3. A crash could occur when trying to print preview a Vehicle or HQ in Mutants & Masterminds.
4. The editor is now properly closed when you switch game systems by loading a file from a
different game.
5. The editor would crash when a "custom bootstrap" edit thing was selected that had no input
things under it.
6. When you changed a record in the editor, the length of text in the button for that tab could
change, which could make the button bar itself take up more or less lines than it used to and

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 appear at the wrong position. The editor now repositions everything appropriately when this
occurs.
7. The color of some text on the "Third-Party Update Sources" form and "Import Hero" forms was
incorrect under certain game systems.
8. The tooltips for the "Add" and "Add & Close" buttons on the choose form were reversed.
9. "Ghost" entries would appear on the "Manage Third-Party Updates" form.
10. Links from game system manuals to the Hero Lab manual have been fixed.
11. Menu text would not be updated in certain situations, such as in the Vanities table in Pathfinder
when multiple factions were present and an item was added.
12. In the Shadowrun editor, some labels would be incorrectly disabled after scrolling or switching
between tabs.
13. Preclude elements can now be applied to things which are enmasse'd or bootstrapped.
14. The "showinvalid" attribute now operates properly for choosers.
15. Non-live things on choose forms and picks on the hero now report that they are an invalid
selection as a pre-requisite failure.
16. Hero Lab no longer gives an error when starting in 256-color mode. Please note that 256-color
mode is not supported, and we don't recommend you use it.
17. Trying to save a file in the editor with an unchanged "Preclude" entry would cause a crash.

Changes in v3.8

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. The Shadowrun game system is now supported!

Bugs Fixed:

1. Hero Lab could crash when outputting a long debug string.

2. The "addpick" and "addpickfocus" targets now work properly with auto-tables as well as
dynamic tables.

Changes in v3.7a

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. The format for custom output has been changed, to allow us more flexibility for changes in the
future. You can find an explanation of the changes here:
wolflair.com/index.php?context=hero_lab&page=hero_lab_3~7a_custom_output_changes

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 2. The "Develop" menu now includes a "Prepare Portfolio for Distribution" option. This menu item
is intended for data file authors who are preparing portfolio files for distribution to players - see
the "Main Menu" section of the manual for details.
3. Improved how errors occurring during custom output are reported to the user.
4. If a pick was added from the editor, it could produce extra error messages in some situations.
Those messages now also advise you to reload the game system to fix them.

Bugs Fixed:

1. The links to the Hero Lab manual in the Start menu were not working properly.
2. Data file manuals were not being formatted correctly, because the styles applied to the manual
are in a different place under the new folder structure.
3. When saving HTML files, Hero Lab now removes all characters which might be problematic in
web site addresses (anything but letters, numbers, dashes and the underscore) and replaces
spaces with underscores in the default name for a file.

Changes in v3.7

Program Enhancements & Changes:

1. Custom output is now available for selected game systems! This feature allows users to define
their own custom output types, which can then generate custom character sheets. See the
manual for details.
2. When printing your hero or generating a statblock, you can now choose to output every hero in
the portfolio, allowing you to output multiple characters at once.
3. Hero Lab has a new installer, and now installs by default into the "Program Files" folder. The first
time you install HL3.7, your old files and settings will be migrated to new locations, and your old
pre-HL3.7 install will be removed. This means that Hero Lab is now better-behaved than before,
and you no longer have to run it in administrator mode when installed under Program Files.
4. The Hero Lab installer now automatically adds an exception for Hero Lab to your firewall, which
should hopefully alleviate internet access problems for a number of users.
5. Files opened in Hero Lab now display in the windows 7 "Jump List" (when you right-click on HL's
icon) and "Recent Documents" lists.
6. Entire tabs and summary panels, where appropriate, can now be scrolled up and down if they're
too big to fit on the screen. This will make it easier for users with small screens to use Hero Lab,
especially on tightly cramped tabs.
7. Hero Lab can now use multiple "secondary updates" sources, instead of just one. You can
choose other addresses to download updates from the bottom of the Settings menu.
8. You can now use HLExport to generate "third party updates". These updates do not include a
definition or config file, and track their version separately from that of the main game system.

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 This allows users or third-party publishers to create their own updates, which Hero Lab can then
check properly to see if the latest version is installed.
9. Users can manage and remove properly-configured third-party updates from the Tools menu,
allowing you to easily remove a third-party update you installed.
10. After importing data files, any .user files that are totally empty will now be automatically
deleted, as they don't serve any purpose.
11. When importing updates, any update that doesn't include a definition or configuration file (e.g.
a third party update for a game system) now disables the "Delete files not replaced by import"
checkbox, since those updates shouldn't be allowed to interfere with the rest of the game
system.
12. In the editor, the tab names now show the total number of records under that tab (for example,
"Ability (7)" indicates 7 records on the Ability tab).
13. When saving HTML files, Hero Lab now removes all characters which might be problematic in
web site addresses (anything but letters, numbers, dashes and the underscore) and replaces
spaces with underscores in the default name for a file.
14. You can now tell Hero Lab to use an alternate preferences file, so that two people on the same
computer can have different configuration settings. To do this, run Hero Lab with the -prefs=XXX
parameter (where XXX is the new preferences filename, such as -prefs=james). See the manual
for more details.
15. You can now specify a game system and a filename on the command line, and Hero Lab will
offer to create a file with that filename. Passing the -autocreate flag automatically creates the
file. E.g.:
herolab.exe sample "c:\mycharacters\filename.por" -autocreate
16. If an internet connection error is encountered, Hero Lab now directs you to a web page with
information on how to fix the error.
17. Streamlined the behavior of the Tactical Console when initiative changes. Instead of disabling
the "next action" button until changes to initiative are accepted, Hero Lab now implicitly accepts
changes and resorts the list when you next take an action.
18. d20pro export extensions now include user images and multiple heroes.
19. When activating your license for the first time, the logo of the game being activated is now
displayed.
20. Dynamic tables and choosers can now specify a "chooseheadertemplate", which allows them to
choose a template to appear as a table header on the choose form.
21. Improved the display of grid lines between individual cells on choose forms.
22. Added the "addbehavior" attribute to components. This allows you to customize how picks with
gizmos are treated when added.
23. Added the @isprimary special symbol to transaction setup, buy and sell scripts.
24. Added the @notransact special symbol to transaction setup scripts, and the @issingle special
symbol to transaction buy scripts.
25. Added the "movetest" script, which allows gear to be moved between different picks, and the
"move" script which runs after a pick is moved.

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 26. Added the "defchild" and "defminion" attributes to edit things, allowing things to be defined in
the editor with a default thing or minion which is automatically set up, and the "defstack"
attribute, allowing you to choose the default stacking behavior.
27. Added the "target" attribute to tag and bootstrap input things. This means the editor can now
allow the user to edit tags and bootstraps assigned to the gizmo or minion of the current thing,
simplifying editing for games with complex Gizmo or Minion behaviors.
28. Added the "thing", "pick" and "hero" assignval behaviors. This means you can now initialize the
contents of menu fields on bootstrapped picks.
29. Added the "it_entitycheck" input thing, allowing you to add or remove a child entity in the
editor with a single click.
30. The list of actors in combat is now resorted, if necessary, after the "newpass" script runs. This
allows you to make changes to initiative in the "newpass" script and have them applied
immediately.
31. Trailing zeroes after the decimal point are now trimmed automatically by Hero Lab. You can
modify this behaviour with the new "trimdecimals" attribute.
32. Entities can now specify a buy template and transact special value, which are inherited by things
which use the entities without their own values for these.
33. Hero Lab now warns you before you add 10+ individual items to a hero, in case you accidentally
typo'd or chose "add individual items" instead of "add new stack" on the choose form.
34. Added the "deletereq" pick target, which can only be used from within a trigger script. This
displays a message asking the user if they want to delete the pick, and deletes it if they say
"yes".
35. Added the "isbuying", "isbuychild", and "buystacks" pick targets, which allow you to determine if
a pick is the primary pick for a transaction that's taking place, or if it's the child of such a pick.
36. Added the "addpickfocus" which works like "addpick", but sets the new pick to the focus after
it's been created, allowing you to modify fields on it.
37. HLExport now has a Tools menu with a "Select Only .user Files" option, to allow collections of
.user files to be packaged up more easily.
38. Added state.pushfocus and state.popfocus, turning the focus into a stack. This allows you to
push the focus stack, temporarily use another focus, then pop the stack and return to using the
original focus.
39. Added the "childfirst" attribute to eval scripts and rules, allowing you to specify scripts that run
on child picks before parent picks.
40. Added the new "silentchild" loadmod, allowing authors to add or change the child entity used by
a pick.
41. Clarified the message reported when a non-live pick was present on the hero.

Bugs Fixed:

1. Hero Lab would occasionally crash if you tried to install a new version from the updates
mechanism, but only if you summoned it from the "Select Game System" form.
2. When fetching gear from another hero, Hero Lab would sometimes crash.

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3. When buying a custom magic weapon in d20 or Pathfinder, the "buy panel" would sometimes
display incorrect information just after selecting a weapon.
4. The "Move Contents To" submenu for top-level holders like "Dropped to Ground" now correctly
lists all holders on the hero.
5. Buying multiples of a custom magic weapon now correctly adds N copies of the weapon, rather
than allowing you to buy N different custom weapons.
6. When downloading files larger than 42mb, the download progress bar would reset to 0 near the
end. We have increased Hero Lab's supply of numbers to compensate.
7. The "dynamic" flag on templates would cause a crash if used on gizmo forms.
8. Pushing tags from a pick to its gizmo would cause tags to be unnecessarily duplicated on both
source and target.
9. Fixed a bug which could cause the wrong container to be used if a prereqtarget was specified on
a table.
10. The wrong "agent pick" was being used in several places, which could cause unexpected error
messages to appear.
11. Any thing that attaches a minion is automatically flagged as "cannot stack with other things".
12. When querying field history for a field with "best" history tracking, you can no longer ask for the
starting value to be returned - it's implied if the query returns nothing.
13. Items like the "standard clothing" or "money" picks in Pathfinder, or any non-user-added picks,
were being ignored when "gearcount" was called to determine how many items a container
held.
14. In the editor, selecting "No tag" twice in succession in a droplist would bring up the "Add New
Tag" dialog.
15. Fixed a display issue in the editor that sometimes happened when the comments control was
the focus.
16. Selecting "Only Valid Items" on an Advancement form could add the incorrect items to the list.
17. Splicing show-only things in the editor was not assigning the proper thing.showonly tag.
18. Hero Lab would sometimes crash if a large number of very long validation or validation summary
messages were being displayed.
19. Hero Lab now gives an error message instead of crashing if data.hlz cannot be opened (due to
being open in another program, for example).
20. Using the bag icon on the dashboard to transfer gear between heroes would cause Hero Lab to
behave oddly until another change was made to the hero.
21. If multiple bootstraps had unnamed containerreq expressions and ran at different times, Hero
Lab would incorrectly report a timing error for them.
22. The Tactical Console no longer shrinks to an unusually small size after being minimized.
23. When heroes were moved in the initiative order, the secondary intiative of the last hero in the
tactical console would be overwritten.
24. Certain pick lists, such as the lists displayed in advancement tables for some game systems,
were not being sorted properly when no sort set was specified.
25. If updates were retrieved at exactly the wrong moment, Hero Lab could crash on the "select
game system" form.

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26. If there were no heroes ready to act in the Tactical Console, making a hero who had delayed his
action act would cause him to be moved to the wrong place in the initiative order.
27. If the "Buy for free" checkbox was checked, the next time the "Choose" form appeared it would
treat the checkbox as checked but display it unchecked.
28. If more than one "preclude" element was defined for a thing, a compilation error would be
reported.
29. Fixed a crash that could happen in the editor when creating or testing a thing with exprreq
elements.
30. When testing a thing with a maxlimit set in the editor, you would receive error messages if the
maximum number of things was already present on the hero.

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 Legal Information

This software product is the property of LWD Technology, Inc. and is protected by copyright laws and
international copyright treaties. The software is NOT sold, it is licensed. This license grants the licensee
to use the software on a single computer workstation and to make a single copy of the software for
archival purposes only.

This software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not
limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and of fitness for any purpose. The user assumes
the full risk of using the software.

While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure the correct operation of this software, LWD
Technology does not warrant the accuracy, performance, or results you may encounter by using this
software. In no event will LWD Technology be liable for direct, indirect, special, incidental, or
consequential damages resulting from the use of this software or any defect within the software, even if
LWD Technology has been advised of the possibility of such damages. Any liability of LWD Technology
will be limited to the refund of the purchase price.

For complete license details, please refer to the license agreements installed with the product. The
complete license agreement for use of the product in Demonstration mode will be found on the
contents page of the User Manual. A separate license agreement for use of the product in conjunction
with a Hero Lab license number will be found within the product by going to the "License" menu and
initiating the license activation wizard.

Hero Lab is Copyright © 2006-2019 by LWD Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Hero Lab and the Hero
Lab logo are registered trademarks of LWD Technology, Inc. The Lone Wolf Development logo is a
trademark of Lone Wolf Development, Inc.

Mac and the Mac logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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