**Wild** is a quality-of-life addon for World of Warcraft (Retail) that consolidates many routine player interactions into a single, configurable automation framework. Rather than requiring players to manually repeat tedious tasks — clicking through dialogues, sorting inventory, managing mail — Wild watches for the relevant game events and handles them automatically according to user-defined rules.
The addon is built entirely in Lua 5.1 for the WoW client sandbox, with no external dependencies or libraries. It follows an **event-driven architecture**: instead of polling on timers, it listens for native game events (bag updates, NPC interactions, mail confirmations, etc.) and reacts to them. At the heart of the automation sits a **rule/intent engine** — a unified system where the user defines declarative rules ("what to do with which items, and when") and processors execute them in a retry-until-done loop, naturally tolerant of server lag and partial completions.
All features share three access layers: a **Lua API** (so macros and other addons can call into Wild programmatically), **slash commands** (so every setting is reachable from the chat box), and a **standalone settings UI** (a sidebar-plus-tabs window independent of Blizzard's addon settings panel). This three-tier design means the GUI is purely a convenience — nothing depends on it.
Configuration is persisted in a single saved-variables table (`WildDB`), with sensible defaults that keep most automation **off** until the player opts in. New settings are merged non-destructively on load, so updating the addon never wipes existing preferences.
The codebase is organized as a flat set of feature files loaded in a strict order defined by the TOC manifest, with Core.lua (initialization, defaults, migrations) at the top and Settings.lua (UI construction) at the bottom. Shared logic — condition evaluation, bag enumeration, item-data pre-loading — is factored into common utilities so each feature file stays focused on its own domain.
Design constraints are deliberately conservative: no secure frames (so nothing can break during combat lockdown), no global variables (everything lives on the `Wild` addon table or as file-local symbols), and no build tooling — the source files are the shipping files.
The Wild Team
