iecli

iecli is a CLI-first, Rust-based Infinity Engine inspection tool.

The project is aimed at trustworthy extraction rather than GUI editing. The goal is to read installed game resources, resolve them through the same archive and override rules the games use, and export stable machine-readable output that is useful for:

• inspection
• scripting
• diffing
• AI-assisted analysis
• future patch-generation workflows

The motivation is to have a tool that AI agents can use natively to explore/fix/modify Infinity Engine games.

Status

The Rust rewrite is in progress. The current workspace already supports:

• game root validation via chitin.key
• Enhanced Edition lang/<locale>/dialog.tlk discovery
• dialog.tlk string lookup with out-of-range handling
• dialog.tlk string append for release-candidate local testing
• typed chitin.key parsing
• resource lookup from:
  • override
  • KEY-backed BIFF mappings
• byte extraction from:
  • BIFF
  • BIF
  • BIFC
• dump-raw export for located resources
• source-selectable lookup for locate, dump, and dump-raw via --source
• resource enumeration with list
• typed JSON export for:
  • ITM
  • SPL
  • CRE
  • STO
  • DLG
  • BCS
  • ARE
• Tier 1 CRE scalar patching with byte-exact copy behavior outside requested fixed-offset fields

Not implemented yet:

• real-resource fixture coverage for decoded formats
• broad Near Infinity comparison coverage for ITM and SPL
• JSON golden/snapshot coverage for decoded formats
• structured write support for variable-length resource sections

Current validation for decoded formats already includes:

• real-install dump smoke coverage for ITM and SPL
• manual Near Infinity comparison for selected BG2EE SPL resources
• env-gated real-install regression tests for validated SPL resources

Workspace

The Rust workspace is organized into:

• crates/ie-core
• crates/ie-io
• crates/ie-formats
• crates/ie-cli

IESDP and Near Infinity remain the main external references for format work. See Format References for the expected workflow.

Acknowledgements

This tool has been developed with two important references:

• IESDP for Infinity Engine file-format specifications, offsets, and field descriptions.
• Near Infinity for behavioral comparison, resource-loading behavior, and validation of parser output against real game resources.

iecli is a separate Rust implementation with a CLI-first product direction. It is not a Near Infinity fork, but it does explicitly use IESDP as a specification source and Near Infinity as a comparison target when behavior needs to match established engine-facing tooling.

Build

cargo build

Run tests:

cargo test

Show CLI help:

cargo run -p iecli -- --help

Current Commands

iecli locate --game /path/to/game --resource ACIDBL.ITM
iecli locate --game /path/to/game --resource KIRINH.CRE --source bif
iecli dump-raw --game /path/to/game --resource ACIDBL.ITM --output ./ACIDBL.ITM
iecli dump-raw --game /path/to/game --resource KIRINH.CRE --source bif --output ./KIRINH-stock.CRE
iecli dump --game /path/to/game --resource ACIDBL.ITM --format json
iecli dump --game /path/to/game --resource SPWI112.SPL --format json
iecli dump --game /path/to/game --resource BALDUR.BCS --format json
iecli dump --game /path/to/game --resource AR0202.ARE --format json
iecli verify --game /path/to/game --source override --format json
iecli patch --game /path/to/game --resource KIRINH.CRE --set morale=9 --set morale_break=3 --output ./KIRINH.CRE
iecli patch --game /path/to/game --resource ARR019.ARE --set "regions.Door1900.destination_entrance=Exit1903" --output ./ARR019.ARE
iecli list --game /path/to/game --type CRE --name "kirin*"
iecli list --game /path/to/game --type ITM --source override --format json
iecli tlk --game /path/to/game --strref 1
iecli tlk-append --game /path/to/game --text "New line" --tlk-out ./dialog-patched.tlk --output-strref-to ./new-strref.txt

Documentation

• Architecture
• Todo priorities
• Regression plan
• Format references
• Project skills — Claude Code skills shipped with the repo (diagnose-dialog, explore-dungeon)

Notes

This is a new tool with its own architecture and scope. Its parsers are developed against public format references and validated against real game resources.

Disclosure

This project is agent-coded. The concept, product direction, architecture, validation priorities, and final review are human-directed, but the Rust implementation was written by AI coding agents, primarily Codex from OpenAI, with review and debugging assistance from Claude by Anthropic.