Rune rewards put three or four options in front of you and give you one. Rune Scout reads what is on offer, prices each option, and marks the best one.
Open it from Scanners → Rune Scout, or bind a hotkey under Overlays → Hotkeys.
What it does
Open the reward panel in game, then press Scan rune rewards:
- The panel is found automatically. ePOE locates the reward panel in the game window by itself — for the keyboard layout first, then the controller layout if that finds nothing — so there is no region to set up.
- Each reward row is read on its own, at higher resolution, rather than the whole panel as one block of text. Common OCR misreads are corrected, and two rewards that were read as one line are split apart.
- Each reward is priced against the market for your league, stack size included.
- One best choice is marked — the single highest total — and every priced row gets its value drawn over its own row in game for 20 seconds.
Placeholders are never priced. Rewards such as "Unique Helmet", "Rare Unique Item" or "Uncut Skill Gem" only say what *kind* of item you would get, not which one, so they are listed without a price rather than matched to some random unique that happens to share the words.
Like the other screen-reading features: pixels only, no game memory, no clicking on your behalf.
Best by price is not always best for you
The highlight tells you which rune is worth the most. That is usually the right answer and sometimes not:
- A rune your build actually wants can be worth more to you than a pricier one you would sell for a modest amount. Socketed power is immediate; a sale is not.
- Liquidity cuts both ways. A high-priced rune with thin volume may sit unsold. A common rune at half the price might convert to currency today.
- Early in a league, prices are noise. In the first days, take what your character needs.
So: take the highlighted one unless you have a specific reason, and have the reason be "my build needs this", not "I feel like it".
Runes and soul cores, briefly
Both socket into items and add modifiers without consuming prefix or suffix slots. That makes them unusually valuable for two reasons:
- They are swappable. You can move power between items as your gear changes, which no affix lets you do.
- They stack on top of a full item. A rare with six good mods can still gain from a socket.
Which is why a well-socketed decent item frequently beats a badly-socketed good one, and why Upgrade Finder's rune planner scores socketables against your actual build rather than by price.
Artificer's Orbs add sockets. Keep a few — a socket on an item you are keeping is often the cheapest upgrade available to you.
When the read is wrong
OCR on a stylised game font is good, not perfect. Unusual resolutions, heavy UI scaling, a non-English client, or anything drawn over the reward panel will degrade it.
If names come back garbled, hovering and copying an item and price-checking it directly (Ctrl+Alt+D) is always the authoritative path. The OCR toggles live under Settings → General → Screen reading.
Every scan saves the whole game window and what the scanner made of it to %APPDATA%\ePoe Overlay\scanner-captures\rune (the newest 20 are kept). If the panel is not found, or a row comes back wrong, attach the newest PNG from there as a screenshot on a report under Help → Submit a Bug.
Related
- Ritual Loot for the Ritual reward grid.
- Upgrade Finder for scoring runes against your build instead of the market.