Safety boundary

How Next Raid reads your Tarkov logs

Next Raid knows which quests you have accepted because it reads one kind of line in a text file your game already writes to your own disk. This page describes that path precisely: the files it opens, the line it looks for, the four values it keeps, and everything it deliberately never touches.

Updated 29 August 2026Next Raid Standalone, the closed-alpha Windows build

01The short answer

Escape from Tarkov writes plain-text log files while you play. Among thousands of unrelated lines, it records a chat notification every time a trader hands you a quest, you complete one, or you fail one. Next Raid opens those files read-only, looks for that one notification, and takes the task identifier, the outcome and the timestamp out of it. That is the whole mechanism.

02Which files it opens

Next Raid works inside the Logs folder next to your Tarkov installation, and nowhere else. It finds that folder in one of two ways. If the game is running, it asks Windows for the executable path of the EscapeFromTarkov process and takes the Logs directory beside it. That is a path lookup through the ordinary process API, and it does not open, attach to or inspect the game itself. If the game is not running, it checks the usual launcher locations on your fixed drives instead:

• …\Battlestate Games\Escape from Tarkov\Logs
• …\Games\Escape from Tarkov\Logs
• …\Escape from Tarkov\Logs

Inside that folder it considers only files ending in .log whose name contains output. Every other file is ignored because it never matches that filter: crash dumps, backend traces, anything a future patch adds.

The files are opened for reading with sharing left wide open, so the game keeps writing to its own log without ever being blocked or locked by us. Next Raid never writes, renames or deletes anything in that folder.

03The one line it looks for

The scanner reads through a log line by line looking for a single marker:

Got notification | ChatMessageReceived

That marker is followed by a JSON payload, sometimes spilling across several lines, which the scanner reassembles by counting braces until the object closes. It also notes lines containing Session mode: Pvp, Session mode: Pve or Session mode: PvpSeason, so that PvE progress is never mistaken for PvP progress. Notifications recorded under a mode you are not currently planning for are discarded rather than parsed.

Every other line in the file is skipped without being interpreted. Chat messages from other players, flea market activity, matching, network errors, your account identifiers: none of it is examined, because the scanner has no code path that looks at anything but this marker and the mode line.

04What it keeps from that line

When a notification does match, the parser accepts it only if it is a new_message whose message type is one of exactly three values. Everything else returns nothing at all.

From an accepted notification it keeps four things: the 24-character task identifier, the status above, the timestamp, and the literal source label eft-local-log so the planner can always tell you where a piece of evidence came from. The task identifier has to match a strict 24-character hexadecimal pattern or the whole notification is dropped.

The task identifier is the same public one that tarkov.dev uses for that quest. It says nothing about you: it is a property of the quest, not of your account.

05Screenshots: the file name, never the picture

Tarkov encodes the map, your coordinates and the direction you are facing into the name of every screenshot you take. That is the only reason Next Raid is interested in screenshots at all: pressing the screenshot key is how you tell the planner where you are, without anything reading the running game.

The parser takes the file name, matches it against a pattern, and pulls out the map, the two coordinates and the heading. It rejects the reading if the name does not match, if the map is not the one you are planning, if the coordinates fall outside the map bounds, if the heading is not between 0 and 360, if the same file name was already used, or if the jump from the previous position is too large to be plausible.

06The limits built into the scanner

A log folder that has grown for a year should never cause a companion app to eat your memory. The scanner is bounded on every axis, and when a bound is reached it reports the result as truncated instead of handing you a partial result as though it were complete.

07What leaves your machine

The closed-alpha build makes outbound requests to exactly one place: json.tarkov.dev, for the public quest, trader, item and map catalogue in your language. Those are plain downloads of data that is public for everyone. They contain nothing about you.

In the other direction there is nothing at all. The application contains no upload path at all: no telemetry, no crash reporting, no account and no sync. Your plans, progress and settings are written to files on your own PC and stay there.

08What it never does

• It does not read or write the game's memory. The optional Overwolf edition is covered below.
• It does not inject anything into the game process or load code inside it.
• It does not hook your keyboard or mouse input into the game.
• It does not intercept, proxy or inspect the game's network traffic.
• It does not automate anything in the game. It cannot move, aim, loot or click for you.
• It does not ask for your Battlestate account, and it has nowhere to send one.
• It does not show you anything the game does not already tell you: no live enemies, no loot positions, no other players.

09The Overwolf edition, and why it is listed separately

Everything above describes Next Raid Standalone, which is what the closed alpha ships. A second, optional edition is planned for Overwolf, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a footnote at the bottom of the page.

Overwolf's Tarkov integration includes a signed provider of its own, and that provider does read the game's process memory. We know because we inspected the package before deciding whether to build on it. Next Raid does not contain that code and never sees what it reads. Our adapter receives a short list of normalised events through Overwolf's documented interface: the current map, the session type, and the phase of the match. Any field outside that list is rejected before it reaches the planner.

So the accurate form of the answer is this. Next Raid reads no memory in either edition. In the Overwolf edition it would depend on a component that does, and that component is Overwolf's, distributed and signed by them rather than by us. If that distinction matters to you, and it reasonably might, the standalone edition carries no Overwolf dependency at all.

The Overwolf edition is not released. It is still under review by Overwolf, and nothing in the planner requires it.

10What we will not claim about bans

We are not Battlestate Games, and no third-party developer can promise you what their rules permit. Anybody who does is guessing on your behalf.

What we can do is be exact about the mechanism, so that you can judge it yourself. Next Raid reads a text file that the game wrote to your own disk, in read-only mode, after the fact. It is the same category of action as opening that file in Notepad. It never touches the running game, and it never sends anything about you anywhere.

If that is not a boundary you are comfortable with, the manual-progress setting removes log reading entirely and the planner still works. That option exists because the decision is yours.

11Check it for yourself

You do not have to take our description on trust. Open your own Tarkov Logs folder, take the newest file whose name contains output, and search it for ChatMessageReceived. You will find the notifications this page describes, written by the game, sitting in a text file on your computer, whether or not Next Raid is installed.

Then compare them against what the planner says it detected. Every quest in the app shows the source it came from, and log-derived entries are labelled as inferred rather than confirmed.