CoH Sidekick
A character build planner for City of Heroes, built as a gift to the CoH community.
CoH Sidekick is designed to stay free and community-maintained for as long as the game endures.
The Sidekick Suite
CoH Sidekick is the main feature of a small suite of community tools for the CoH data ecosystem:
- CoH Sidekick — the character build planner (this app). React/TypeScript web application in src/.
- Pigg Wrangler — a viewer, extractor, and Python library for the game's
.pigg archive files. Lives under tools/pigg-wrangler/, with a PyInstaller build configuration in tools/pigg-wrangler-dist/.
- Bin Crawler — a parser for the game's binary
.bin data files (Cryptic Parse6 / Parse7 formats), plus an HTTP API for consumers. Lives under tools/bin-crawler/. Depends on Pigg Wrangler for archive access.
Pigg Wrangler and Bin Crawler exist so the community has maintained, open tooling to keep extracting and inspecting game data as the game evolves.
License
CoH Sidekick is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later). See LICENSE for the full text.
In short:
- You are free to use, study, modify, and redistribute this software.
- Any modified version you distribute — including versions you run as a hosted web service — must also be released under AGPL-3.0 with full source code available to its users.
- There is no warranty. Use at your own risk.
This license was chosen deliberately to keep CoH Sidekick free and open: it prevents anyone from taking the code, closing the source, and selling it back to the community as a proprietary product.
Copyright (C) 2026 Wednesdaywoe.
Trademarks
"CoH Sidekick" is the project's name and brand. The AGPL license covers the code; it does not grant permission to use the CoH Sidekick name or logo for forks or derivative works. See TRADEMARKS.md for details.
Game IP Notice
City of Heroes and all related assets are the property of their respective rights holders. CoH Sidekick is an unofficial, fan-made tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NCsoft, Paragon Studios, Homecoming, or Rebirth. Game data referenced by this tool is used solely to support community play.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome. By submitting a pull request, you agree that your contribution will be licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later on the same terms as the rest of the project. Please include a Signed-off-by line in your commits (Developer Certificate of Origin).
A Word About Agentic Development
Development and continued maintenance of the planner is aided by LLM tools. This is the best way to avoid the otherwise inevitable future when the developer loses interest in the game, or is unable to devote time to maintaining the app. As it stands now, anyone could clone the project and take over development just using something like Github's Copilot. That is a better outcome than having another planner fall into disrepair, or be inaccessible to a significant portion of the player base who are on MacOS or Linux. The reality is that the CoH playerbase includes capable programmers and developers, but in multi-decade history of the game, only one full-featured planner has ever existed. That's because making a CoH planner is really really hard.
