BW2 Stuff Explorer

A modern, OpenIV-inspired, read-only asset explorer for Black & White 2 *.stuff archives.

BW2 Stuff Explorer is being built as a comfortable front end for understanding the game's packed assets: browse the archive, inspect known formats, follow proven relationships and export files without modifying the original STUFF archive.

Current release: 0.6.0

Version 0.6 expands the asset-inspection layer introduced in 0.5.

Highlights

• Browse Everything.stuff in an Explorer-style folder tree with navigation, search, sorting and grouping.
• Export individual files, selections, folders or the complete archive with progress, cancellation and atomic writes.
• Classify all 13 format families found in the verified retail archive.
• Inspect factual DDS metadata, including dimensions, compression, mip levels, declared color-space information and supported BC1/BC2/BC3 alpha analysis.
• Inspect BWM v5/v6 metadata and complete material rows through the Contents tab.
• Follow bidirectional BWM ↔ image relationships with explicit Exact, Unique, Not found and Ambiguous resolution states.
• Inspect bounded metadata for TGA, BMP and BW2 .555 sky textures.
• Keep unsupported or unresolved data neutral instead of guessing.
• Keep the source archive strictly read-only.

The retail corpus used for regression contains 3,928 archive entries, including 822 BWM entries, 106 TGA files, 19 BMP files and nine .555 sky textures.

Format support

All 13 known Everything.stuff extensions are recognized and receive friendly classifications. Specialized structural inspection is currently deeper for the formats listed below.

Format	Current 0.6 support
DDS	Header details, compression/mips, alpha capability and supported payload alpha analysis, BWM relationship targets
BWM	v5/v6 metadata, static/skinned detection, complete material contents and image references
TGA	Dimensions, encoding/RLE, origin, pixel layout and TGA 2.0 storage details
BMP	DIB header, dimensions, row order, bit depth, compression and pixel offset
.555	Verified 256 × 256 X1R5G5B5 sky-texture layout and raw header facts
BIK, CAM, EXC, CSK, CHA, CCS, ABN, DAN	Friendly classification with neutral fallback inspection; deeper providers are planned on the path to 1.0

Image preview is intentionally not part of 0.6. The next priority is to finish evidence-based providers for the remaining STUFF formats before expanding into the loose Black & White 2 installation data.

Download and run

Download the latest Windows package from the GitHub Releases page.

Requirements:

• Windows 10 or Windows 11
• x64 .NET 8 Desktop Runtime

Extract the complete ZIP and start BW2StuffExplorer.exe. Keep the included .dll, .deps.json and .runtimeconfig.json files beside the executable.

The public Windows build is currently unsigned, so Microsoft Defender SmartScreen may identify it as an unknown publisher. Release SHA-256 hashes are published with each release for verification.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+O	Open a STUFF archive
Ctrl+F	Focus the search field
Ctrl+E	Export selected file(s)
Enter	Open Properties for the focused file
F5	Refresh the current view
Esc	Clear search or cancel an active export

Build from source

Requirements: Visual Studio 2022 or the .NET 8 SDK with the Windows Desktop workload.

dotnet build .\BW2StuffExplorer.sln -c Release
dotnet run --project .\tests\StuffCore.SelfTest\StuffCore.SelfTest.csproj -c Release

An optional strict regression can be run against a user-owned retail archive:

dotnet run --project .\tests\StuffCore.SelfTest\StuffCore.SelfTest.csproj -c Release -- ".\Black & White 2\Data\Everything.stuff"

Project structure

• StuffCore — archive parsing, validation, extraction, asset classification, metadata providers and relationship analysis.
• StuffExplorer — WPF desktop interface.
• StuffCore.SelfTest — dependency-free synthetic tests plus the optional retail-corpus regression.

Documentation

• STUFF format notes
• Research index
• Roadmap
• Changelog

Research documentation separates confirmed binary facts, corpus-supported interpretations and open questions. Historical reports are retained where useful, with newer findings clearly marked when they supersede earlier terminology.

Scope and safety

BW2 Stuff Explorer does not include original game assets and does not modify the source archive. Current releases are intentionally read-only. Future write/import functionality, if implemented, will remain a separate later milestone with explicit validation and safe-output rules.

License

BW2 Stuff Explorer is released under the MIT License.