Just Cause 2 Windows, PS3, X360 game

About Just Cause 2 with 21 comments by FelipeFR on May 18th, 2010

You can download the modding tools for JC2 on this link:

The pack consists of many files, specially 5 .exe's which are the programs them self:

Archive Viewer
This is the program that opens up the games files for you to peruse and save. Most of the content you want to alter (and all the content that anyone so far has modded, to my knowledge) is in pc0.arc.

When you open archive viewer, you will see a huge list of sections, most of which branch off into many individual files. The modding process is saving these files, modifying them, and then dropping them into an override folder which will let you run off the changed content.

Bin2XML and XML2Bin
Many of the files present (indeed, most of the settings and such you'll ever want to change) are formatted in text files. When you look at them in archive viewer, and save them, they are pulled out in the .bin format. In order to modify them, you must convert the .bin file to a .xml text file that you can modify in notepad.

These programs simply do that for you automatically. If you drag a .bin on top of the appropriate program and drop it, it will automatically create an XML from that bin and place it in the same directory. Imagine that the program you want to use is a folder you are moving a file into, this goes for both.

Smallpack and Smallunpack
Most of the files which are not .bin format come in the form of archives. Basically just packages of associated files. Using the same method as the bin programs, you can pack and unpack archives, and modified archives are placed in dropzone just as other files are.

There are many file types which can be modded. A link to the file types can be found in the Mod installation tutorial, but I'll go over a few briefly.

• .bin - Files which are converted to XML for editing and back
• .xml - Text files containing setting data and variables for many of the various objects in the game. Most commonly modified with notepad.
• .dds - texture filetype, changeable with Paint.NET, a freeware photoshop clone.
• .blz - General collection of files meant for small unpack. It usually ends up being a folder full of other files. The process for editing a .blz is to unpack it, modify whatever files you want to inside it, and drag it back to small pack. The output is always a .sarc, simply rename it .blz and drop it in dropzone.

These tools are pretty ease to use, and I am sure that great things can be done!

I would like to thanks Gibbed for making the tools and thespiritfox from Just Cause 2.com forum for the explanation of each tools.