Editor reference — every screen

The walkthrough builds one pack end to end. This page is the reference: what every screen holds, and why.

The window

The title bar carries the open pack file and the build stamp of the editor itself — Galactic Heroes Editor — ewt32.ghpack.json [build 2026-09-18 17:15], and DEBUG when it is a debug build. Which build am I looking at should be a reading, not a deduction.

The toolbar is seven buttons:

Button	What it does
New / Open… / Save / Save as…	the .ghpack.json source file — your pack, not the extension
Check	run the validator and go to the Check tab
Export…	write the extension into the export folder
Export into the game	write it straight into extensions/<packid> — asks first, game must be closed

The status bar is two halves. On the left, what is in this pack and what the host already has: “1 fleet template(s), 1 hero(es) in this pack · 17 fleet(s) and 261 hero(es) already in the game, shown read only.” On the right, the harvest receipt: “6 archetypes · 28 perks · 390 ships · 17 host fleets · 261 host heroes · 1 PROBLEM(S).” Zeroes on the right mean the folders on the Pack tab are wrong.

The eight tabs

Tab	Authors	Notes
Pack	the manifest, the text page number and the three folders	covered in the overview
Fleets	fleet templates	a ladder, one tier per hero star
Heroes	hero templates	covered in the walkthrough
Missions	corporation missions	see below
Spend plans	what heroes buy, in order	covered in the walkthrough
Corporations	companies	not a catalogue entry — see below
Check	nothing — it reports	104 rules, the full list; the same findings are shown on every other tab
What was read	nothing — it reports	six screens proving the harvest

Fleets, Heroes and Corporations share a left-hand shape: a filter box, then In this pack above Already in Galactic Heroes — read only, then Add, Copy into this pack and Remove. Host objects are shown so you can read, filter and copy them; they can never be edited, because an edit to something the host owns would be silently discarded and the host may reshape it in any later version.

Missions and Spend plans list only what the pack itself defines, with Add, Copy and Delete. What the host already declares is on the What was read screens instead — Spend for its eleven plans.

Missions

A corporation mission is paid work a company offers you against a rival it is already fighting. The mod ships six; a pack can add more. See Corporation missions for what they are in game.

Field	What it decides
Mission id	permanent, prefixed, unique against the host’s own six
Title	what the player reads in the corporation’s offer list
Briefing	the longer text
Objective	the one line the game shows while the mission is active
Control panel	what the player actually walks up to and uses
Reward	base payout in credits
Minimum grudge	how many campaigns one company must already have run against the other before this is offered. 0 means “offer it even without a feud.”
Mission level	difficulty band

The control panel list is read out of the game’s own schema — libraries/common.xsd declares them as the controlpaneltypelookup enumeration — not typed into the editor. A patch that adds a panel gives it to the editor with no code change, and a panel that does not exist is an error rather than a mission nobody can finish.

One note rather than an error is worth knowing about: access_* panels only look at something, hack_* panels break it. An access panel with a sabotage-sized reward is a balance choice, not a defect, so the editor says it out loud and lets you keep it. For scale, the core reconnaissance mission pays 90,000.

Corporations are not like the rest

Everything else the editor writes is a catalogue entry. The mod wipes its fleet and hero tables on every load and each extension registers into the empty table, so exporting again simply replaces what was there.

A corporation is not that. It owns money, contracts, favours, liabilities, a chronicle and a share register, and all of it lives in the player’s save. So the host’s registration is ensure-exists, and the split matters:

Field	On a save that already has the company
name, bucket, lore, aggression, defence reserve	re-read on every load, so an edit does take effect
founding capital	read once, at founding — an edit never tops it up

There is no way to remove one, either. Uninstalling a pack leaves its corporations in the save, inert but intact, because every contract, grudge, share register and chronicle entry that ever named them would otherwise dangle. The Remove button says so before it does anything.

That permanence is why an id collision is an error here rather than a warning. A colliding fleet id produces a refused registration and a missing fleet, which is annoying. A colliding corporation id produces two packs both believing they own a company that holds money and shares in a live save, and that cannot be repaired afterwards.

The three behaviour knobs

Each defaults to what every corporation in the mod does today, so a company written without touching them behaves exactly like one written before the fields existed.

• Founding capital — the host’s own companies start with 100,000,000. This is the number that decides a takeover: a raider roughly 1.6× richer than its target reaches control, so this field is what says whether a company is predator or prey.
• Aggression (percent, 100 = ordinary) — scales the two budgets that gate whether the company commissions raids and assaults against rivals. 0 is a company that trades, bids and defends but never moves against anybody. It changes nothing else.
• Defence reserve % (-1 = follow the mod’s global) — the share of its own money it refuses to spend buying back shares when somebody is taking it over.

The What this company will be line at the bottom says what the three add up to in sentences, because three integers do not tell an author that they have just founded somebody’s lunch.

Origin faction is not decoration. Favour accrual, relation gates and market access all key off it, and the host refuses a corporation without one.

What it refuses

104 rules: 68 errors, 28 warnings, 8 notes. Errors block export; warnings and notes do not. Every issue says what to do about it, and double-clicking a row on the Check tab jumps to the field it is about.

Where it says it

The check runs by itself about a third of a second after any edit, and every finding carries an address — the object, the nested object (a tier, a perk row, a plan step) and the field. That address is used in four places at once:

Where	What you see
the tab header	Heroes ✖ 2 or Fleets ⚠ 1 — the worst kind and the count, so a problem two tabs away is visible
the object’s row in the list	the same mark; a perk row, a plan step or a tier is tinted, with the findings as its tool tip
above the form	one line per error or warning, message and fix together, five at a time and then a scroll bar; notes are counted underneath and listed on the Check tab
the field itself	a red or amber outline on the box that sets it, with the message and the fix as its tool tip

Fix the field and every mark goes. The Check tab remains the full list, notes included, and its double-click lands on the tab, selects the object and the row, and focuses the field.

One finding is not a rule about the pack but about the screen: text typed into a number box (GH140). WPF keeps the previous number and says nothing; the editor shows the box outlined, names the value the field still holds, and refuses to export until the box holds a number again.

The rules fall into three kinds, and keeping them apart is the point:

1. What the host also enforces — no id, no tiers, a tier with no flagship, no archetype, no faction, a duplicate id. Checking here is not redundant: the host can only refuse, hours later, into a log file the author may never open.

2. What the host cannot enforce. Namespacing above all. Once a save has seen an id it is permanent, and a collision between two guest packs cannot be repaired. The host cannot tell an unprefixed guest id from a core one — the editor knows which pack it is writing.

3. What makes a template good rather than valid — a perk the archetype cannot use, a fleet hung on a station-bound hero that will never upgrade it, a founder name that repeats its own rank. None of these break anything, and all three are defects the core roster itself contains.

Codes	About
GH001–GH009	the pack itself: id, prefix length, display name, registering nothing, version, the text page
GH010–GH023	fleet templates: tiers, flagships, escort counts, ship sources
GH030–GH057	heroes: ids, group, rank, faction, archetype, fleet, biography, the spend plan it names
GH060–GH069	perks on a hero: unknown, duplicated, unreachable, wrong archetype
GH080–GH096	corporations: collisions, origin faction, capital, aggression, reserve
GH100–GH111	corporation missions: ids, title, objective, panel, reward, grudge
GH120–GH131	spend plans: ids, label, steps, a perk step naming nothing or a perk twice, a shares target
GH140	text typed into a number box
GH150	a brace in a name or a story — X4 reads {…} on a text page as a reference to another entry

The generator also handles what an author cannot see coming: an apostrophe in a biography would end an MD string literal, a " would end the XML attribute, and -- is illegal inside an XML comment. All three are neutralised at the one place they are written.

What the rules say about the host

Pointing the editor’s rules at the mod that taught it those rules costs nothing, and the self-test writes the result to host-audit.txt. Zero errors, and four kinds of warning:

GH047 ×200	a founder name that repeats its own rank — the game prints “Commodore Commodore Falo”
GH063 ×16	a perk whose applies_to does not include the hero’s archetype, so nothing reads its effects
GH042 ×14	a coordinator carrying a $fleet_template_id, which fleet_upgrades=false means is never used
GH021 ×9	a tier with an escort ship chosen and a count of zero

The audit also found one thing in the editor rather than the mod: GH017 fired five times on the Xenon fleets, which declare XL_I and XL_K for the I and the K. Those are the host’s own class labels, not typos, and the rule now compares only the size.

What was read

Six screens, and the reason they exist is that an empty list somewhere else in the editor is always a harvest failure, never an empty world. If a dropdown has nothing in it, the answer is here.

Reading — did it read, from where, and how much

Three blocks:

• Problems while reading — anything skipped and why. The line in the shot is a good example of the class: a folder named extensions_disabled_backup_20260820 holds extensions the game does not load from, so reading it would have offered ships that are not really installed.
• Where the game loads data from — every archive and folder X4 will read, in load order, with its entry count.
• Counts — the harvest in one block. This is the fastest way to answer “did it see my mod?”

Game — what the installed game provides

Every faction the game has, with its source and its tags. claims space is the one to read: it is the game’s own tag for a faction that owns territory. Without it the mod cannot resolve a home sector, and a hero of that faction never spawns. The from column tells you whether a faction came from the base game, a DLC or a mod.

Heroes — what the host declares

The archetype table is the most useful thing on this screen, because it is where the differences between the six live:

Column	Why it matters to a pack
commands	fleet, summon_pool, fleet_leaders, subordinates — what the hero actually directs
fleet upgrades	off for coordinators and hive lords. Giving one a fleet template is a warning: nothing will ever build it.
station bound	the hero does not fly. It also means the hero cannot be hired.
Kha’ak only	seeder and hive lord
subordinate cap	coordinator 5, hive lord 8; zero for the rest

Where the words come from

Galactic Heroes keeps all of its text on a translatable page rather than inline, so a perk name is stored as readtext.{65644}.{6567} and a rank as readtext.{65644}.{6935}. The editor reads the mod’s own text file and resolves them, which is why this screen says “Veteran” and not a number.

It reads the default page — the one X4 falls back to for every language that has no page of its own, and which is therefore always complete. Translations beside it are found and listed on the Reading screen, but not used for display. A reference the page does not hold is left visible rather than blanked: an id that resolves to nothing is a defect in the mod, and showing it is how anybody finds out.

An older host with no t folder still carries its text inline, and everything simply displays as it always did.

The editor also writes a page. Every string a player reads in your pack — founder name, a rank the host does not have, biography, a company’s name, field, dirty side and backstory, mission title, briefing and objective — goes to t/0001.xml on the pack’s own page, and the script refers to it exactly the way the host does. A rank the host already has is written as the host’s reference, so it stays translated wherever the host is. The page number is picked free of every page the installed game, DLC and mods declare (the harvester reads one language of every source’s t folder for its page ids) and shown on the Pack tab; the ids on the page are assigned at the first export, saved into the pack file, and never move — a translation lines up by them.

Decisions — the two halves, compared

Two lists describe decisions, they live in different files, and neither one knows about the other — so the editor compares them here.

• Decision kinds — the catalogue: what a decision can be, and which archetypes may take it. A kind is a name and its holders, never behaviour; the behaviour lives in the mod’s decision worker.
• Task kinds — what a faction’s board can ask for, and which archetype works it. A decision is what a hero chooses; a task is what the board offers. An archetype is composed from both.
• Decision sets — what a template offers, with priorities. These are the six the host keeps private, and the ones your exported pack carries as literals.

Two columns repay attention. declared by reads core, or core-no-page for a task type that exists on the board and has no drill-down page in the mod’s Order Board. And the line under the first table — “5 declared kind(s) are set by no set” — is a note, not a fault: the decision worker reaches for some kinds on its own without any set offering them.

The task table says admiral more often than it should

Read the second table as which board section a task is filed under, not as which archetype owns it. The board prints three section headings while five archetypes produce work, so the catalogue files the leftovers under admiral — which is why swarm_summon, hive_development, gate_defense, fleet_defense, call_for_help and expansion all appear against the admiral here. They are Kha’ak work. The hive lord claims the first four and the seeder the last two, and the authority for that is the claim gate in the mod’s decision script, not this column.

The editor shows the catalogue faithfully; the catalogue is what is wrong. If you are composing an archetype from this screen, check the Order Board page for who actually claims a task type.

Spend — the host’s plans, in order

Read-only, and here so a pack author can point a hero at an existing plan instead of writing one.

The closing block is the part worth reading: a hero resolves its plan the way it resolves its fleet — the template’s own spend_plan_id first, the archetype’s default second, nothing third. A hero that resolves to nothing keeps the tier ladder, so a plan is an override, never a requirement.

Live — what the running game is actually deciding

The other five screens show what a decision can be. This one shows what is being decided, read out of the running game’s own dump in debug.log. Either can look healthy while the other is wrong, which is the whole reason it is a separate screen.

It needs the game to have written a dump — asked for through the mod’s dev bridge — and the screen says so when there is none, along with the exact log path it is reading. Kinds the game holds that the catalogue does not declare is the row that catches a decision the mod produces and never documented.

Two test lanes

Both must pass before a build is worth shipping, and tools/build.ps1 runs both from the Release binary:

GalacticHeroesEditor.exe --selftest <dir>   # headless: harvest, validate, generate, read back; every rule made to fire
GalacticHeroesEditor.exe --uitest <file>    # opens the real window: 8 tabs, 34 behaviour checks

The self-test walks the validator’s own table of codes and refuses to finish green while a code exists that no case has ever made fire. Measured before that check was written: 86 codes, 23 ever exercised. It also feeds the editor pack files it did not write — nulls, unknown fields, not JSON at all — and the generated text page back through the editor’s own reader.

--uitest exists because a XAML binding is not checked at compile time. A misspelled binding path builds cleanly and shows an empty combo box to someone with no way to know four hundred ships were meant to be in it. WPF reports every one of those, but only to a trace listener nobody attaches. This one attaches, and fails the run. It caught a real crash — RowHeight="Auto", where RowHeight is a double — on its first run.

It has since earned its keep twice more. A reported bug — a group name typed into a hero, gone the moment you left the tab — was reproduced in it before anything was changed, one step per dispatcher tick, so the step that destroyed the value named itself: not typing, not the list rebuild, not saving. Leaving the tab and coming back.

The cause is a trap in WPF rather than in this program, and it is worth knowing if you write WPF: the group box is an editable ComboBox whose Text is bound TwoWay, and whose ItemsSource is a list of suggestions. Clearing that list makes the box reset its Text — and a TwoWay Text writes the empty string straight back over the model. Two rules came out of it: a suggestion list feeding an editable control is append-only, and nothing may be selected while the whole vocabulary is replaced.

A second WPF trap, found on 2026-09-21 and worth knowing for the same reason: the UI lane could not fail the build. It ended with Application.Shutdown(1), and a WPF app’s generated Main is void — it discards what Run() returns — so the process exited 0 whatever the lane found, and the build script read every UI failure as a pass. It exits through Environment.Exit now, the script also reads the verdict the lane prints, and --uitest-fail provokes a red on demand to prove the path carries one. Nothing green before that date was evidence about the UI lane.

Related

• Editor overview · Walkthrough
• Order Board — where task kinds end up
• Corporations · Corporation missions