Questions, answered the same way the rest of this site talks.
Nothing here is softened to sell you something. Where the answer is no, or it depends on your machine, it says that.
Running it
Why is the overlay so laggy?
It is not drawn in sync with your game, because it is not drawn by your game. Dusk is attached from outside, watching, and painting its own window on top. Two windows on two clocks will never line up perfectly, so on a fast flick the boxes trail.
That gap is smallest when the two are close in frame rate: cap Minecraft near your monitor's refresh rate rather than letting it run at 400 fps.
Do I have to start Minecraft first?
No, and the order never matters. The menu opens straight away and does not wait for a game, so you can set everything up at the desktop. Dusk finds Minecraft in the background whenever it appears, and the sidebar says which state it is in: waiting for a client, attached, in game. If several instances are running it asks which one you mean.
Which versions and clients does it work with?
Minecraft 1.8.9 only, on Windows x64 only. Any client on that version is fine: Lunar, Badlion, Forge, vanilla. That is the version competitive PvP plays on and the one Dusk is built for.
There is no support for newer versions and none is planned, and there is no macOS or Linux build. This is a design decision rather than a roadmap item.
Windows says the file is dangerous. Is it?
Two separate things are happening, and neither is a virus scanner finding something specific. Dusk is not code signed, so Windows cannot tell you who published it, and every unsigned download gets that dialog. Separately, Dusk reads and writes another program's memory, which is exactly what antivirus heuristics watch for, so some scanners flag it on behaviour alone.
The steps to get past it, and the SHA-256 to check the file against so you are not taking our word for any of this, are on the download page, beside the button rather than buried here.
It will not start, or the menu never appears.
Dusk needs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime and the Edge WebView2 Runtime. If WebView2 is missing, Dusk notices on launch and links you to the installer rather than failing quietly.
The other cause is where you put it. Dusk replaces its own exe when it updates, so it needs a folder it can write to. Anywhere under your user folder works; Program Files does not.
How do I update it?
You do not. On launch Dusk checks its channel for a newer build, verifies the download against a SHA-256 before touching anything, then swaps its own exe and relaunches. If the check cannot reach the network it does nothing and says nothing: no nagging, no blocked launch.
Getting caught
The short version: Dusk is not undetectable and it is not ban proof. Anyone telling you otherwise about any client is selling something.
Is Dusk a ghost client?
Yes, in the sense the word is used. A ghost client runs outside your game instead of inside it, and that is what Dusk is: a separate program reading and writing the game's memory, with no mod on the classpath, no modified jar and nothing written into your .minecraft folder.
That is a description of the architecture, not a promise about what a server or a person watching your screen can see. Dusk is not undetectable and it is not ban proof, and the two answers below say exactly why.
Will I get banned?
You can. Running outside the game avoids the artifacts a screenshare looks for in your files, but server-side anticheat judges the packets your client sends, and those look the same whether the input came from your hand or from a program. Reach that is too long and aim that is too clean are visible in the packets no matter where the code lives.
This is exactly why the detectability meter exists: it scores your live settings out of ten and shows which setting is spending the score. It is deliberately conservative, and it is not a promise you will not be caught. The full list of limits.
Does it survive a screenshare?
Nothing is written into your .minecraft folder, nothing is installed, and nothing is registered, so the file-level checks a screenshare runs have nothing to find. A screenshare can still list running processes and open handles, and Dusk is a running process.
The capture-hiding setting: what does it actually hide from?
It asks Windows to leave Dusk's windows out of captures. That is honoured by OBS display, window and game capture, by Discord, Teams and Zoom, and by the Snipping Tool and print screen.
A phone camera, an HDMI capture card or a mirrored display sees everything. It also says nothing at all to the game or to a server. It describes what it does; it does not protect you.
Your machine, and your data
Does it modify Minecraft or my mods folder?
No. Dusk is a separate program: there is no jar to patch, no mod to drop in and no launcher profile to change. Your game's folder stays exactly as it was, and you can prove it rather than trust it, by comparing your jar's hash before and after.
Where does it keep my settings, and how do I uninstall it?
One folder: %LocalAppData%\DuskClient, holding settings.json, your named configs and a local log with paths stripped out. Deleting that folder resets Dusk completely.
Uninstalling is deleting two things: the exe and that folder. There is no installer entry, no service and no registry footprint to clean up. WebView2 keeps a small cache in your temp directory, cleared like any other temp files.
Is there telemetry?
The application has none. The only thing it ever asks the network for is its own update check. This website has analytics like any website: page views and download clicks, so we know what to fix. Nothing is sold and no profile is built about you.
The whole accounting is on the privacy page, including how to tell the site to count page views only.
Does it cost anything, or need an account?
No installer, no account and no licence key. It is one portable exe of about 5 MB that you download and run.
Using it
Where is the Save button?
There is not one, anywhere. Everything applies live and the active config tracks your edits as you make them, so there is nothing to forget to press. Named configs are for keeping several of these around, not for committing changes.
I turned a module on and nothing happened.
Check the sidebar first: a green dot sits beside everything currently armed, and the status line says whether Dusk is attached to a game at all. Every module has exactly one enable switch, in the master card at the top of its page, so there is never a second state hiding further down.
Ctrl K searches every module and every individual setting by name, which is faster than the sidebar once you know what you are looking for.
What does the panic key do?
One press turns everything off. Its deeper tiers also hide the menu, or shut Dusk down entirely, for when one press is not enough.
Can I share a theme without sharing my settings?
Yes, that is what theme codes are for. A code carries a look and cannot carry anyone's settings, so pasting one you were sent can only change how the menu looks.
Why does Bridge say it is beta?
Because it is. It works and it ships enabled if you turn it on, but it is the one module still being tuned, and it says so in the menu as well as here rather than only in the small print.
Still stuck, or asking something that is not here? The Discord is where questions get answered, and where this page gets its next entries.