Recettear Repacker

A set of scripts to unpack and repack Recettear game files

How it works

Recettear stores most of its data in bin/dataxxx.bin.
These files contain almost all assets, individually compressed with LZSS.
lnkdatas.bin (or lnkdata.bin for the Japanese version) contains info about
which assets can be found in which file and their offset.

All the dataxxx.bin files combined contain about 1200 files (120MB, 435MB uncompressed).
For every update that touches one of these files, all of them would need to be recompressed.
All 120MB would need to be redistributed, even if only a tiny part of it is changed.

For this reason, Recettear has a similar file called bmpdata.bin.
This file contains assets too, and the game will look here first before
looking in lnkdatas.bin. This allows the developers to push small updates
without having to touch lnkdatas.bin. They simply drop the updated version in
bmpdata.bin. Unlike lnkdatas.bin, bmpdata.bin contains both the data and the metadata.
bmpdata.bin is compressed with LZW.

Getting started

Prerequisites

The scripts require Python 3 to be installed.

Usage

In this section I will show you how to make changes to the game files.
I recommend dropping the scripts in the games root folder for ease of use, but this is not required.

Unpacking lnkdatas.bin

First, unpack the dataxxx.bin files with the lnk_unpack.py script.
It requires 2 arguments: the path to the game root, and the folder to unpack to.

python lnk_unpack.py . lnk-unpacked/

Unpacking bmpdata.bin

Next, unpack bmpdata.bin with bmp_unpack.py.
It requires 2 arguments: the path to bmpdata.bin, and the folder to unpack to.

python bmp_unpack.py bmpdata.bin bmp-unpacked/

Repacking bmpdata.bin

You can then browse the files and choose which ones you want to change.
Drop the changed versions in the folder you unpacked bmpdata.bin to (bmp-unpacked here).

Then, repack bmpdata.bin. Please make sure to make a backup of the original first.
bmp_pack requires 2 arguments: the folder to pack and the path to the output file.

# THIS WILL OVERWRITE bmpdata.bin!
# CREATE A BACKUP!

python bmp_pack.py bmp-unpacked/ bmpdata.bin

That's it! Boot up the game and you will see your changes.

Identifying files

If you lose track of which file is the original, run the following.
It will identify the file for you.

python crc.py FILE

Notes about the game files

All text files are encoded with Shift-JIS, not ASCII. Make sure your editor is configured properly.
Lastly, here is an overview of the packed game files.

dataxxx.bin
├── bmp/                  All images
│   ├── chr/              Character spritesheets
│   ├── en/               Enemy icons
│   ├── item/             Item spritesheets
│   ├── ivent/            Cutscene/event images
│   ├── nami/             Fog textures
│   ├── title/            Boss titles
│   └── umi/              Water textures
├── data/                 Misc game data
│   ├── buysell.txt       ??? Customer dialogue settings
│   ├── chara.txt         Adventurer stats
│   ├── config.txt         Font settings
│   ├── enemylist.txt     Dungeon enemy settings
│   ├── enemy.txt         Dungeon enemy stats
│   ├── event.txt         Event flags and conditions
│   ├── gousei.txt        Fusion recipes
│   ├── item.txt          Item list
│   ├── kyaku.txt         Customer settings
│   ├── model.txt         ??? 3D model metadata
│   ├── news.txt          News
│   ├── oder.txt          Orders
│   ├── snews.txt         Dungeon news
│   ├── tuto1.txt         Selling tutorial
│   ├── tuto2.txt         Buying tutorial
│   └── tuto3.txt         Suggestion selling tutorial
├── ef/                   ??? Effect animation data
├── idx/                  ??? Maybe spritesheet or animation info
│   ├── stageidx.txt/     Dungeon data
│   ...
├── iv/                   Event scripts
├── kyaku/                Shop customer data
├── xfile/                 3D model textures
├── xfile2/                Boss 3D model textures
├── fontdata.bin          Bitmap font
└── fontidx.bin           ???