The Field Guide
A field guide to your own machine
A permanent, plain-words reference for the things running on your gaming PC that you never installed by name: the drivers, the background processes, the anti-cheat that loads before the game does. Look any of them up. Decide for yourself.
A gaming PC quietly runs hundreds of things you never installed by name and never see: kernel drivers, background daemons, the anti-cheat that loads before the game does.
The Field Guide gives every one of them a plate. What it is, who makes it, how deep into your system it reaches, and what the public record says about it.
So the next time something you don't recognize asks for the keys to your machine, you are not guessing. You look it up.
Live numbers. The guide's master seal is struck from exactly these, so it re-strikes as the guide grows.
The gate doesn't check what you think it checks
Modern Windows is built to load only signed kernel drivers, and a signature feels like a stamp of safety. It isn't. The signing gate checks that a driver was signed by a company with a valid certificate at the time. It never checks whether the driver is good. A driver that reads your GPU temperature and a driver that can switch off your antivirus pass through the very same gate.
That gap has a name in the security world: bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver. When a vendor patches a kernel driver, the old signed build still loads forever, on every machine, because revoking it at boot would break too much. So a real reference for what's on your machine is not a luxury. It is the only way to tell the everyday tool from the one that has been documented, by name, in real intrusions.
The community already knows the questions. What is this thing? Why is it on my system? Should I care? The honest answers were never written for them.
Three kinds of inhabitant
The guide holds three kinds of thing, and each wears a mark struck only from its own identity. Same identity, same mark, forever. Nobody draws them by hand. The shape tells you what kind of thing it is before you read a word, so you build a quiet muscle memory for the catalog without trying.
Every driver on a public risk list, explained simply. From the public record.
444 catalogued →What a game asks of your system, and why. The reader decides; we describe.
57 curated →The real processes Vera sees running, published only after more than one machine shows them.
638 observed →How deep does it reach?
The one fact that matters most about a piece of system software is how far into your machine it can reach. The guide draws that as a core sample: a stack of system layers filled from the surface down, so the glyph itself is the answer. More fill means deeper. The colour is the depth, never a verdict.
The indicator is the data. Never a decorative pill stuck on after the fact.
It describes. It never condemns.
A reference that hands down verdicts becomes just another accuser, and the gaming world has enough of those. The Field Guide points at what the public record already says, and stops there. The same plate that tells you a driver has been misused by named criminal crews will never tell you that your machine is compromised. Four rules hold the line:
- Presence is evidence. It is not a verdict. A thing being on your system is not proof it was used against the game. We surface it; we never accuse you with it.
- Ground truth or silence. Where we can't vouch for a curated explanation, the plate states only the plain facts and links to the canonical public source. No filler.
- A reference, never a manual. The guide translates the defensive record into plain words. It never explains how to abuse anything.
- The practical thing at the end. Every plate leaves you something a normal person can actually do.
The record before the accusation. The reference before the alarm. The art before the argument.
Proof you can see
The marks are built on guilloché, the interfering-line engraving that has protected banknotes and certificates for two hundred years precisely because it cannot be faked by hand. Here, the same craft is turned to the guide's own record. The master seal below is struck from the whole catalog: the drivers, the field notes, the games, the processes, the date the public list was last refreshed. Change any of those and it re-strikes, down to the fingerprint milled into its rim. The image is the proof.
Vera's own mark, made from the whole catalog as it stands today.a2e4 98e9 9fe4
The people we built it for are the ones who never get the reference made for them. They deserve craft.
Type a driver, a process, or a game and get the plain story. Plain enough to read without an engineering degree, deep enough to follow all the way down to the kernel.
Read the launch story →Drivers come from the public LOLDrivers project (refreshed July 10, 2026). Games are researched from each maker's own anti-cheat docs and named reporting. Processes come from what Vera actually sees running.