The short answer

Albion Meter doesn’t open, read or change the game. It reads a copy of the network traffic that already reaches your computer, much like Wireshark would, and it never sends anything to the game servers.

How game traffic reaches Albion Meter
The game talks to its servers as usual. The meter only gets a copy.

This matters because reading the game’s memory or injecting code into it is exactly what anti-cheat systems look for. We can’t speak for Sandbox Interactive, but the meter does nothing inside the game process.

What it listens to

Albion uses UDP on ports 5055, 5056 and 5058. The meter keeps only those ports and drops the rest, so your browser, Discord and everything else on your network are never read. This is the actual filter it uses:

(ip and (udp port 5055 or udp port 5056 or udp port 5058 or (ip[6:2] & 0x3fff != 0)))
or (ip6 and (udp port 5055 or udp port 5056 or udp port 5058))

The ip[6:2] & 0x3fff part keeps fragmented packets. Large game messages sometimes arrive split in pieces, and without it they would be lost.

The Capture tab shows how much it’s reading. In a normal dungeon it’s a few megabytes:

The Capture tab during a run
26,931 packets and 3.2 MB of game traffic, and nothing else.

On Windows the meter listens on every network adapter by default. That’s what keeps it working when ExitLag, NoPing or a VPN moves the game to a different adapter.

From a packet to a line in the table

Say Lusphu hits a mob with a Weeping Repeater. The server sends a health change to everyone nearby, your client included. The meter decodes it from the Photon protocol the game uses and turns it into something like this (simplified, the real event carries more fields):

health change   -1,284
target          mob #48211
source          Lusphu
item            Master's Weeping Repeater (main hand)
kind            ability

Thousands of these add up to the damage table: total per player, share of the party and DPS. The same goes for healing, with positive health changes.

Sometimes the meter knows who did the damage but the game never sent your client what that player is wearing. In that case it identifies the weapon from the abilities used and marks it as “seen in combat”, instead of guessing.

Players and equipment table
“seen in combat” means the weapon was identified from the abilities the player used.

What stays on your computer

The meter screen is a page served by the program itself at http://127.0.0.1:5187. Only your computer can open that address. Recordings and settings stay in your user folder.

Nothing goes to AlbionLab unless you click to share a session. When you do, you choose whether it is private, unlisted or public, and you can hide the other players’ names.

What it can’t see

The meter only knows what the server sends to your client. A fight on the other side of the map, or a player outside your area, may show up partly or not at all. Healing is counted as observed health going up, so it can’t tell overhealing apart, and damage can include the extra on a killing blow.

And if you play through GeForce NOW or another cloud service, the game runs on someone else’s machine. Your computer only receives video, so there’s no game traffic for the meter to read.