Set up a death counter in OBS

Step by step

// How it works

1. 01

   Set it up in the Config Hub

   Open the Config Hub, pick the Death Counter, enter your Twitch channel and click Next. Tick the terms of use, choose a folder and save. The hub needs Chrome or Edge.

2. 02

   Add it as a browser source in OBS

   In OBS click the plus under Sources, then Browser. Tick Local file, choose the widget.html in the games/zaehler folder, width 1920, height 1080, OK. The counter sits in the bottom left of your scene by default, the corner is set in the hub under Position in the scene. If any of these moves trips you up, the general guide to browser sources walks through them in detail.

3. 03

   Choose what gets counted

   In the hub, open Change the look on the Death Counter. Preset offers ready-made sets: deaths, push-ups with a goal of 100, fails, tinfoil hat, water with a goal of 8 glasses, and wins and losses. Below it you turn that into your own counter: title, unit and goal, for example Bicep curls, curls, 50. With a goal the card shows "of 50" and a bar up to it. Save, then refresh the source in OBS once so it reads the new settings. The counter keeps its value, even when you change the title.

   

4. 04

   Count in chat

   !plus counts one up, !plus 3 three at once. !minus counts down, !set 47 sets the value to a number when someone miscounted, and !reset goes back to the start value. A line the counter cannot read, such as !set abc, changes nothing. Wins and losses puts two counters in one source, so you name the one you mean: !plus wins.

5. 05

   Who may count

   Out of the box only you and your mods can count. When a viewer types !plus, nothing happens, and that is on purpose: otherwise the counter would hit a thousand within five minutes. To open it up, go to All settings of this overlay on the Death Counter in the hub. In the Commands block, Who may sets for each command whether Everyone, Mods or only you can use it, and you can rename the commands there too. That helps when another overlay in the same stream also listens for !set or !reset.

6. 06

   Add the control panel as an OBS dock

   The most comfortable way to count needs no chat. The control panel is a second page next to the overlay, the host.html, and it goes into the OBS window as a dock instead of into a scene. Enter the path of your folder once in the OBS step of the hub, and the finished address for the control panel appears there, ready to copy. In OBS open Docks in the top menu bar, then Custom Browser Docks (up to OBS 29 it sits under View). Enter a name, paste the address from the hub, Apply. The panel has plus, minus, a number field with Set, and Back to start. None of it shows up on stream, the dock is part of OBS, not a source. Do copy the address from the hub: the dock and the source only find each other when both addresses have the same form.

7. 07

   Count a word in chat

   The counter can also count how often a word comes up in chat, without any command. The tinfoil hat preset does exactly that with the German word Aluhut. For your own word, enter it under All settings of this overlay in Count a word in chat. Every message containing the word counts once, even if it appears five times, so spam does not push the number up. Only the whole word counts: "gg" matches "gg wp" but not "eggs".

Frequently asked

// In short