NoMansSky:Tutorials/PSArcTool Guide

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Introduction[edit | edit source]

PSARCTool is a tool created by Periander to uncompress .pak files to and from usual files and folder.
To simplify, .pak files are just another .zip format. It stores in one file several files and folders in a compressed form. This format as never changed since the initial release of No Man's Sky.
This means you can still unpak mods created for the very first version of the game !

Using PSARCTool[edit | edit source]

PSARTool is very easy to use :

  • just drag and drop any .pak file over it and it will decompress it into the contained files and folders.
  • just drag and drop any group of files and folders over it and it will compress them into a psarc.pak file.

Extracting all the game assets[edit | edit source]

If you want to start modding, the first thing to do is to extract all the .pak files. The same way is used here : select all the .pak files from the game PCBANKS folder and drag them over the tool icon. Be aware though that this will open as many instance of PSARCTool than there are .pak files ! This means you won't really be able to use your computer for a few minutes, the time all the game assets will be extracted. Be also aware that you will need some free space on your hard drive as latest 2.61.1 assets occupy 24.1GB !

repacking a simple mod[edit | edit source]

For a mod, you often only edit a single file, or just a few of them. If the file is a global, no problem as it is at the root of the extracted files. But if it is nested inside some folders, it is important that the exact same folder structure will be kept and dragged over PSARCTool exe. For example. You edited


Once you extracted the files from the .pak, you can now edit them directly (textures, .BIN files...) or decompile them with MBINCompiler (.MBIN files).
It's now up to make the changes that will create a great mod ! Template:NMSPageClose