Path of Exile is a free-to-play dungeon crawler that isn’t afraid of cluttering your screen with loot. This is expected from the genre, of course. But as you gain enough levels and get closer to the endgame, stumbling upon the same low level axe repeatedly becomes tiring. Using a loot filter solves this problem and optimizes your overall experience, and in this explainer we’ll guide you through the installation process in a few simple steps.
What Are Loot Filters in PoE?
Developer Grinding Gear Games implemented item filters in Path of Exile years ago, which opened the possibility for players to customize their UI experience. In other words, folks who are already past the first few acts of the game’s story and are getting tired of finding unnecessary crap can hide it at will. Alongside this, filters can also highlight important items instead, and provide a better organization overall.
Take the Chaos Orb as an example. This item is a long-established currency by the community used to “purchase” gear by trading with other players. Yet by default the game does not distinguish it as is. Instead it looks like any other regular drop. In the fray of battle it’s very easy to lose track of important objects, and nobody wants to be making full stops to re-organize their inventory and comb through a pile of drops every few minutes either. Choose the right filters, however, and you’ll never miss a Chaos Orb again.
Manually filtering the large list of items in PoE requires a bit of programming experience… but we’re going to skip all that (happy for you though, or sorry that happened).
How to Best Use a PoE Loot Filter
Simple and straightforward are not words you’ll be hearing often when people talk about Path of Exile, but luckily FilterBlade is the exception to the rule. This community project has completely streamlined the process, to the point where you will only need to follow a few simple steps to have your filter ready. Keep in mind that it’s recommended to update your filter with each new league.
When you first enter the site you’ll see seven different tabs. Unless you want to truly get into the nitty gritty, don’t worry, since you won’t need to tweak every single field. Whether you’re just starting out or need a refresher on how this all works, here’s how to tailor your filter to best suit your needs.
Let’s start with the Overview tab. This will set the general behavior of your filter based on a certain criteria. Experienced players might not be interested in seeing every single item that drops on the floor, for which choosing Strict or Very Strict might be enough. Others might be pursuing advanced builds and need to adjust their priorities accordingly. But for the most balanced experience we recommend Semi-Strict.
Onto Customize. In this tab you’re going to focus on three categories:
- Currency: Click General Currency and choose Auto-Sort from the first row
- Unique Items: Choose Auto-Sort from the first row
- Divination Cards: Choose Auto-Sort from the first row
As we mentioned before, each league can change the relevancy of certain loot, so it’s important to sort these categories with each new filter you create. Auto-Sort does the job for you, and will immediately show you the results if you scroll down the page, so you can see what has been of interest for the community. Of course, if you want anything more specific, there are many other tabs to interact with – but these are the ones you shouldn’t miss.
Simulate is rather straightforward, and will showcase you how the filtered items will look in the game. If you went for Semi-Strict you’ll notice how the more relevant items are displayed in a bigger font, each category/rarity has its own color, and useless items won’t be shown at first glance (unless you press the left alt button). You can change the color of everything, too, but we’re going for the default version to make it more simple.
And that’s it, your filter is all set! We are skipping the Advanced tab, but Save & Load is optional — you can choose to save your filter locally on your browser’s storage so it’s easy to pick things up the next time you want to update your filter. But all in all, if you’re only focusing on the options we mentioned and using Auto-Sort, it’s not really necessary.
You will notice there is an option to sync the filter with your PoE account, but we’re not going to do that. Head to the Download tab, name and download your filter, and copy paste it to %userprofile%/Documents/My Games/Path of Exile. For the final step, once inside the game open up the options menu, go to the UI tab, select your filter in List of Item Filters, and save changes.
Congrats, PoE will now be way less cluttered for you! Keep in mind that unless you’re only interested in specific items, we recommend pressing the left alt button periodically so you don’t miss anything important. But again, it’s all a matter of preference, and you can tweak the filter to Soft or Regular if you want something similar to the original experience but with a far better visualization overall.
[Disclaimer: Tencent, the parent company that owns Fanbyte, is also a majority holder of Grinding Gear Games, the developer of Path of Exile. That being said, there is no direct nor indirect involvement in coverage whatsoever. We do share the love for hack-n-slash games, but that’s about it, really.]
