Extracting Files

Before you start making your mod, you’ll need to extract the game’s base files so you can find what you actually want to edit.

Note

This process is exactly the same as P3P and P5R. If you’ve extracted their files previously you already know how to do it for P4G!

Extracting CPKs

All of the game’s files are stored in CriWare CPK files as follows:

• data.cpk: Contains most game files
• data_movie.cpk: Contains the animated cutscenes
• data_XX.cpk: Contains files for the given language
  • Example: data_e.cpk contains English specific files

To unpack these, download CriFsV2Lib.GUI. Select the file called CriFsLib.GUI.zip and extract it somewhere. From there, run CriFsLib.GUI.exe and you’ll be greeted with a window asking you to select a CPK file.

Note

The main cpks will contain anything that doesn’t change with the language (like models) plus the Japanese versions of all files.

The other cpks (under the data_XX folders) will only contain the files that are specific to that language (mostly text).

Drag your desired CPK into the program and you’ll be shown the names of all files inside it. Right click any file, click Extract All and select an appropriate folder; after a little bit all of the files will be extracted into it.

Extracting Archives (PAKs)

When you look through your extracted files, you’ll find there are many large bin, pac, and pak files. These are archives (collectively referred to as PAK files) which contain files inside of them. These are roughly analogous to a zip or rar file. To extract these you’ll need to use one of the following tools.

Note

Sometimes the bin extension is also used for files that are not PAK archives. If the normal tools don’t seem to work on a file, then it probably is a raw binary file rather than an archive.

Amicitia GUI

The easiest way to extract files from these archives is Amicitia. Download the Release.7z and extract it somewhere appropriate. When you open a file in Amicitia, if it is a valid archive you’ll see a tree of files that you can export or replace by right-clicking on them.

PersonaEditor GUI

PersonaEditor is an alternative program. While Amicitia is preferred in most cases, PersonaEditor is more useful for some file types, and features limited built-in text editing support. It has a similar UI to Amicitia.

PackTools

Although Amicitia and PersonaEditor are the most user friendly, they are not good for batch extracting files as only one file can be selected at a time. If you need to perform batch operations, download PackTools.

Command Line

Note

Pack Tools is a CLI (command line interface) so double clicking on PAKPack.exe will do nothing. You need to run it through the terminal to use it.

Running it without any arguments will give you some help information. The command you’ll likely want to use is unpack to extract files from an archive. For example, a simple command to extract all .bin files in a folder (and subfolders) is:

Command Prompt

for /R "Path\To\Folder" %i in (*.bin) do "Path\To\PAKPack.exe" unpack %i

PowerShell

Get-ChildItem "Path\To\Folder" -Recurse -Filter *.bin | Foreach {&"Path\To\PAKPack.exe" unpack $_.fullname}

Context Menu

To use PAKPack through the Windows context menu to unpack or pack PAK archives, use PAKPack-Registry. After downloading and extracting it just run PAKPack Registry.exe and the context menu options will be added.

Now, if you right-click a file, you’ll have a PAKPack option at the top of the menu which can be used to extract the PAK.

Other Files

This page focused on extracting archives, but to do anything useful you need to work with the files you’ve gotten from those archives.

Have a look at one of the following sections for more details on working with different types of files:

Caution

These docs are still very under construction so I don’t have a list of pages to link to yet! TODO add a list :)