this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Paradox Games

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Whats up with .ck3 files? (reddthat.com)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by dr_robotBones@reddthat.com to c/paradoxgames@lemmy.world
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Whats the deal with this non-standard file type? Has Paradox ever talked about why they created it? Does anyone know when they made this change to the file system?

Edit: I've been trying to save my edited gamestate by figuring out how to recompress it into a .ck3 file. I don't really know how to replicate the header. Its really a shame I didn't back up the original save. The file starts with SAV and then a unique set of metadata bytes and then the plaintext stuff which, it turns out, is for the main menu and the icon next to the save name, and then it has the rest of the save data compressed with the PK header, which means its in the .zip format. I can replicate all this but the save doesn't properly load due to the incorrect metadata in the header I believe.

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[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Most developers do this eventually. It's just a proprietary file format. Usually a zip file, or text file renamed, or along those lines.

[–] dr_robotBones@reddthat.com 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Its making save editing real annoying. I went into it really confident without backing it up because I did it before and now my save is corrupted.

[–] Morlark@feddit.uk 1 points 4 months ago

Not wanting to link to Reddit, but there's a thread on there that suggests that if you take the unzipped gamestate file, and rename it with a .ck3 extension, the game will just load it anyway. No need to understand the header format.