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Loot Filters — Show Only What Matters

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Most of what drops on the floor is worthless. A loot filter hides the junk and highlights what matters. Farming gets noticeably faster, and — more importantly — you stop walking past things you meant to pick up.

There are two ways to set one up, and the short answer is: use the one that syncs with your account. Dropping a file into a folder means starting over every time you change machines.

Following a filter — do it this way

Korean clients use the Kakao Games item filter page; everyone else uses the official item filter page.

You don’t have to write anything. Search for a filter someone has published and Follow it — it attaches to your account and appears in the in-game item filter list straight away. Because it lives on the account, the same setup follows you to any PC, and updates from the filter’s author come with it.

If you do want to tinker, the same page has an online editor under Account → Item Filters. Following someone else’s filter and layering your own small one on top is usually the least work.

Dropping the file in yourself

The old-fashioned way: download a .filter file and put it in the game’s filter folder. Long-running filters like NeverSink are often distributed this way.

You don’t need to memorise the path. There’s a folder button next to the item filter setting in game; clicking it opens exactly the directory the file belongs in. Hunting for the path by hand — and putting the file somewhere close but wrong — is the most common failure here.

If the filter doesn’t show up after you add it, restart the game. The list is read at startup.

We haven’t confirmed the exact menu name. Sources place it under a UI section of the options screen, but the wording shifts between client versions and languages, so we won’t state it as fact. Look for an “Item Filter” entry in the options.

Raise strictness as the character grows

Well-made filters usually ship several strictness levels. Start loose so you can see most of what drops, then step up as currency accumulates and you learn what’s worth stopping for.

Set it too strict too early and the things you actually need early on get hidden. Leave it loose forever and the floor fills with text, which defeats the point.

Writing your own — the PoE2-only conditions

A filter is a list of Show and Hide blocks with conditions. Every condition in a block must match for that block to apply.

Show
    Rarity >= Rare
    WaystoneTier >= 15
    SetBorderColor 255 0 0
    MinimapIcon 2 Cyan Diamond

Add Continue and matching doesn’t stop at that block — it carries on into later ones. Import "MyRules.filter" lets you split rules across files.

This is where old PoE1 material goes wrong. The official documentation marks a set of conditions as PoE2-only:

ConditionWhat it does
WaystoneTierFilters Waystones by tier — for highlighting only the high ones
UnidentifiedItemTierFilters by the tier of an unidentified item, matching 0.5’s unidentified tier display
IsVaalUniqueWhether the item is a Vaal unique
HasVaalUniqueModWhether it carries a Vaal unique modifier
TwiceCorruptedWhether the item has been corrupted twice
AlwaysShowWhether the item is always displayed

Some things are gone, too. GemQualityType (Anomalous, Divergent, and the rest) has been deleted. Carry a PoE1 filter over unchanged and it trips on that line.

The official reference lists PoE1 and PoE2 conditions on one page and only badges the PoE2-only ones. Whether an unbadged condition still works in PoE2 isn’t something the page tells you. So don’t copy a PoE1 filter across; start from one published for PoE2.

The full list of conditions and actions is in the official item filter reference.

When a season turns over

New seasons change what exists and what it’s worth, so filters get revised. Following usually carries the update along, but some authors publish a separate filter for each season. Check your follow list once at the start of a season.