NoMansSky:Creating Mods From MBINs

From Step Mods | Change The Game

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Mod Creation by Hex Editing MBINs[edit | edit source]

If the MBIN you want to edit is not supported by MBINCompiler (yet) after an NMS update, you can still edit MBIN files with a hex editor. The MBIN files store the game values in a binary serialized form. In order to update a mod you can use a binary comparison between the original MBIN file (from previous version) and modded MBIN file. Then you can apply the changes you have detected to the new original MBIN file. Sometimes values have shifted and you need to recognize the patterns by human eye.

Here is a HexEditor tool list:

  • 010 (paid, with 30 day trial)
  • HxD (freeware, proprietary)
  • Hex Editor Neo (free, has paid versions)
  • Hex Workshop (paid)
  • HexEdit (mac only?)
  • XVI32 (freeware, very small (~1Mb) and portable)

MBIN Files are all using little indian byte order.
They all start with a 24 (0x18) bytes header starting with a 0xCCCCCCCC Magic data.
Then there's a 72 (0x48) bytes string reserved for the internal file name.
In total the header of an MBINfile is 96 (0x60) bytes.
For details on the header format of MBINfiles see here. There are also associated pages which contain the header format for MBIN files produced by MBINCompiler as extra info is added to indicate the version of MBINCompiler used to compile the file.
The rest of the file contains the data.

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