Turning Guardian on/off and reading its log

Guardian starts automatically when BRUTAL launches, on every tier, so usually you don't have to touch anything. But the Guardian page in the sidebar gives you full manual control — start, stop, run a cycle on demand — plus a live status card and the honest, line-by-line log of everything Guardian has done.

Opening the Guardian page

Click Guardian in the left sidebar. You'll see three areas:

• A Guardian Status card showing whether it's running, the time of the last cycle, the active emulator, and the detected game.
• An actions row with the Start, Stop, and Run Now buttons.
• A Guardian Log panel at the bottom that updates live.

Starting Guardian

1. Click 🛡 Start Guardian.
2. The status badge flips from STOPPED (red) to RUNNING (or RUNNING · FREE TIER on the free tier), and the Stop / Run Now buttons become enabled.
3. The first cycle fires after about 5 seconds; after that Guardian runs automatically every 3 minutes.

Stopping Guardian

1. Click Stop Guardian.
2. Guardian tears down its timer and, off the UI thread so the window never freezes, finishes any in-flight cycle and reverts cleanly — including restarting any services it had stopped for a gaming session.
3. The badge returns to STOPPED.

You normally don't need to stop Guardian. Leaving it running (with BRUTAL minimized to the tray) is the intended way to use it.

Running a cycle on demand

The ▶ Run Now button triggers one immediate Guardian cycle instead of waiting up to 3 minutes for the next tick. It's useful right after you launch a game if you want the optimizations applied instantly, or when you simply want to watch what a cycle does. After you click it, the log refreshes a few seconds later so you can read the result. Run Now only works while Guardian is running.

Reading the status card

• Last cycle — the timestamp of the most recent completed pass. If this is updating roughly every 3 minutes, Guardian is healthy.
• Active emulator — the emulator Guardian currently sees (or "None detected").
• Detected game — the game it matched, with "(PC)" appended for native PC games (or "None").

The card also lists the engines so you can match log lines to the engine that produced them. For what each engine does, see The Guardian engines explained.

Reading the log

The log is Guardian's honesty receipt — a plain-text record of every action and revert. Each line is timestamped, and most engines prefix their lines with a circled number (①–⑳) so you can tell at a glance which engine spoke. The panel auto-scrolls to the newest line and updates live. Typical entries look like:

• ① GameLoop detected (2 processes) — emulator found.
• ③④ Elevated 1 emulator process(es) to High priority — priority raised.
• ⑪ Driver check: 3 update(s) available (1 gaming-relevant) — the daily driver check.
• ⑨ Restarted 3 service(s) — gaming ended — the clean revert after you stop playing.

The on-screen panel shows the most recent lines. The full log is also written to a file on disk:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\BRUTAL\guardian_log.txt

To open the folder, press Win + R, paste %LOCALAPPDATA%\BRUTAL, press Enter, and open guardian_log.txt in Notepad. The file is auto-trimmed (it keeps roughly the last few hundred lines), so it never grows out of control.

Best practice

• Let Guardian auto-start and leave BRUTAL minimized to the tray — that's the supported "set it and forget it" mode.
• If you tried a tweak and want to confirm Guardian reverted it, stop a game and look for the revert lines (service restarts, "App priority: restored…").
• If something feels off, the log is the first place to look — it'll show which engine ran and whether it skipped.

Common issues / troubleshooting

• The badge says RUNNING · FREE TIER. Guardian is running with the free engines. Activate a Pro key on the License page to add the deep optimization engines; the running Guardian picks it up on its next cycle.
• The badge says RUNNING but "Detected game" stays None. That's normal when no supported game/emulator is running — the aggressive engines stay idle on purpose. Launch your game and click Run Now to see it pick up.
• Last cycle isn't updating. Confirm BRUTAL is actually open (the tray icon counts). If you fully closed BRUTAL, Guardian stops with it — reopen the app.
• I stopped a game but a service still looks stopped. Guardian restarts the services it stopped on the next cycle (or immediately when you press Stop). Wait one cycle or check the log for the "Restarted service" lines.
• The window briefly stayed busy when I hit Stop. Stop waits for any in-flight cycle to finish, but it does so off the UI thread to keep the window responsive. Give it a moment to settle on STOPPED.