VRCSM: VRChat Cache Cleanup and Settings Management Tool

VRCSM is a cache management tool for VRChat on Windows. It handles cache cleanup, settings backup and migration, and diagnostics and repair. VRChat’s Cache-WindowsPlayer directory quietly eats up tens or hundreds of gigabytes, all of it cached avatars and worlds from other people. Digging through the directory by hand to tally sizes and spot broken links is slow and easy to get wrong. This tool automates that work.

The core is a C++20 host, with the UI running React 19 (Vite 6 + Tailwind 4 + shadcn/ui) embedded through WebView2. It’s a native, borderless Windows 11 window with Mica, so it looks like part of the system without dragging in Electron and its memory footprint. C++ does the dirty work — scanning directories, computing sizes, unpacking bundles, manipulating junctions — while the frontend just handles display. The two sides talk over the WebView2 message channel.

Cache is the core. Scans classify by directory and lay out size, file count, timestamps, and broken links clearly. Deletion defaults to a dry-run: destructive operations show a list first and then ask for confirmation, and before deleting it checks whether VRChat.exe is running and blocks outright if it is. What actually frees up your C drive is NTFS migration — using a junction to move the cache to another drive, completely transparent to VRChat and without needing administrator privileges.

It also covers the things players care about: unpacking local UnityFS bundles straight into 3D models for avatar previews, reading and writing config.json and launch arguments, replaying output_log_*.txt offline to reconstruct friend join/leave events and time spent in worlds, and a built-in SQLite store for notes and favorites. Later I added Steam Link / Quest diagnostics and repair, always backing up before any fix. Localization covers Simplified Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hindi, and Russian.

If you don’t want to mess around, grab the .msi from Releases and install it. To build it yourself, the environment is Windows 10 22H2+ x64, VS 2026 Build Tools, CMake 3.28+, Ninja, pnpm, and vcpkg — I’ve tucked it into third_party/vcpkg.

cd web && pnpm install && pnpm build && cd ..
cmake --preset x64-release
cmake --build --preset x64-release
.\build\x64-release\src\host\VRCSM.exe

VRCSM is local-first: scanning, parsing, cleanup, and migration all work on local files first, and it only calls the VRChat API when you log in — it makes no unusual requests to the servers. The source is public under VSAL, for study and audit only; it’s not open source. Use it yourself however you like, but don’t redistribute it, modify and republish it, or use it commercially.