What is stored, what is not, and who else is involved. Last updated 24 September 2026.
This site is run by Valier Games, in the United States, which decides what is collected here and why. Questions about your data, or requests about it, go to contact@buildsmith.net.
This site runs no analytics: no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no page-view pixel, no session recording, no fingerprinting. Nobody here can tell you how many people read this page, and that is the trade that was made deliberately. The one count kept is that opening a published build in the catalog adds one to its public view count; nothing is recorded about who opened it. Google counts how often the adverts it serves are seen and clicked, as described under Advertising, below; this site is shown only the totals.
Used without an account, Buildsmith uploads nothing you make. Your browser still fetches typefaces from Google Fonts on every planner page and, on the map, images from a third-party image server, and both see your IP address. On planner pages with adverts it also contacts Google's advertising servers, which see your IP address too. What it keeps in your browser:
Clearing your browser's site data deletes all of it, permanently. There is no backup of local data. Builds, one at a time, and map annotations can be exported to a file; checklists, inventory and favourites cannot yet.
Accounts are optional. Creating one stores, in this site's own database on its web host:
Separately, and whether or not you have an account, attempts to sign up, sign in, renew a session or enter a two-step code are counted against a digest of the network address they come from, to limit password guessing. That digest is not salted, so treat it as the address itself. It is not deleted.
Saving and publishing are separate, explicit actions. There is no background sync, so nothing you have not pressed a button for reaches the server. Removing a build from your account deletes it from the server and the catalog; deleting it in the planner removes only this browser's copy.
To close an account entirely, delete it yourself on the account page. It asks for your password, then removes the account and everything in the list above at once. The one exception is the moderation log: an entry recording something done by or to the account stays, with its link to the account removed. Outside the database, the admin channel's notes about a refund (see who else sees something, below) stay in Discord after the account is deleted. A subscription still set to renew has to be cancelled first, so does one whose last payment failed (PayPal can still collect it), and so does a refunded subscription PayPal has not yet confirmed cancelled, because deleting the account does not stop PayPal charging it. Nightly backups on the web host are kept for fourteen days, so a deleted account is gone from them two weeks later; a backup the owner has downloaded keeps what it held on the day it was taken. If you can no longer sign in, write to the address on the contact page from the address the account uses.
Subscriptions are handled by PayPal. Card details never reach this site and are never stored here. This site gives PayPal your account id so the subscription can be matched to you. PayPal's reply carries more than this site needs, and only the PayPal subscription id, its status, its plan, when it started, when the current paid period ends, when PayPal last reported a change to it, whether it was a PayPal test subscription or a real one and when any paid time carried over from an earlier subscription ends are kept, with the date of a 14-day refund and which subscription it was for, if you have had one, because that refund can be given once per account.
A subscription renews automatically until you cancel it, which you can do on the account page or in your PayPal account. Cancelling stops the next payment. It does not refund the current period, and the ad spaces stay hidden until that period ends.
The one exception is the right to change your mind that the law gives subscribers in the EU, the EEA and the UK. If you live there, you can cancel and get a full refund within 14 days of subscribing with the button on the account page. Pressing it asks PayPal which country your PayPal account is registered in; that answer decides the refund and is not kept. If the country is one of those, every payment of the subscription in those 14 days is refunded in full to your PayPal account, the subscription is cancelled and the ad spaces come back straight away. If PayPal does not accept the cancel, the refund still stands and the ad spaces still come back, but until the subscription is cancelled PayPal could still charge you: the account page says so and offers a Finish cancelling button, and you can also cancel it in your PayPal account under automatic payments. It can be used once per account. PayPal can take a few hours to report a new payment, so if the site cannot confirm your country, it says so and changes nothing: try again later, or write to contact@buildsmith.net from the address your account uses within the same 14 days.
Once Google has approved the site and its ad units are set up, the planner shows adverts from Google AdSense, which help pay for the site. They are shown only to visitors who are not subscribers, staff or contributors. A page opened while you are signed in to one of those accounts does not load the advertising script: it waits for the server to confirm the account, and then leaves the script out. If a tab loaded the script before you signed in, it stays loaded in that tab until the tab is reloaded or closed, but no adverts are placed for you once the account is confirmed.
Adverts appear only on the planner's own pages, its database pages such as the item database among them. The About, Privacy and Contact pages, and the page written for each single item, recipe, runeword, boss and mechanic, carry none.
Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve adverts based on your earlier visits to this site and to other sites. Google's use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve adverts to you based on your visits to this site and to other sites on the internet. Google and its partners also use cookies and similar identifiers to measure how adverts perform and to guard against fraud.
Visitors in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland are asked for their consent through Google's consent message, and can refuse it. You can change your choice later from the privacy and cookie settings link Google shows on pages with adverts.
Anyone can turn off personalised adverts, and see why an advert was shown, in Google's Ad Settings. Google explains how it uses information from sites that show its adverts, and how it handles advertising data on its business data responsibility site.
Other vendors and ad networks may also use cookies to serve adverts on this site. You can opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalised advertising at www.aboutads.info/choices, and, if you are in Europe, at www.youronlinechoices.eu.
Buildsmith is not directed at children under 13 and no account should be created by one.
This page changes when the site does, and the date at the top says when. It describes what the code does rather than what a template suggests, so if you find a difference between this page and the site's behaviour, that is a bug and worth reporting.