exigentec EVE tools

EVE tools / EVE Settings Workbench

In developmentEarly build 0.1.0

EVE Settings Workbench

A Windows editor for EVE Online character and account settings files, with a built-in explanation of what each setting does.

At a glance

Status
In development. An early build (0.1.0, Windows x64) exists.
Platform
Windows, .NET 10, WPF
For
Players who manage many characters or accounts and want to copy, compare or repair settings.
Built on
EVE Settings Toolkit, which holds the file format and editing model
Source and licence
MIT licence declared. The repository is private for now.
Availability
Not publicly available yet.

What it does

EVE stores per-character and per-account settings in core_char_<id>.dat and core_user_<id>.dat files. The Workbench opens these files, shows them as a tree of groups, settings and values, and lets you edit them safely.

  • Open many files at once. Pick files directly or from a list of every profile’s files, newest first. The list sorts and filters by id, kind, profile and server. Looking up character names through ESI is optional, off until you ask, and cached locally.
  • Know what a setting is. A built-in catalog gives each setting a title, a description, its default and its allowed values. Each entry says how confident the analysis was: high where the reading and writing code was found, low where it was inferred from the key name and value shape.
  • Edit with the right control. A form view shows labelled fields with units, ranges and drop-downs. Maps, lists and sets open as editable tables. Colours get a swatch, a hex box and the system colour picker. A value tab edits any setting directly.
  • Clone to other files. Copy a group or a container setting into any number of other settings files. Files you have open change as an undoable edit for you to review. The rest are written to disk with a backup, after a confirmation that states how many of each.
  • Everyday editing. Undo and redo, add, duplicate, move, search, and copy or paste between files and windows.
  • Bookmarks. Jump straight to a setting from a menu. Built-in bookmarks ship with the app, and your own are stored in a plain JSON file you can edit or share.
  • Compare and verify. Compare two files setting by setting, or verify that a file decodes and re-encodes to the same bytes.

Safety

  • Saving decodes the written stream again to verify it, writes through a temporary file, and keeps a timestamped .bak next to the original.
  • Saving is refused while an EVE client is running, because the client rewrites these files when it exits.
  • Expert mode unlocks raw edits: rewriting any node as a Python literal, editing text as hex, or pasting arbitrary text as data. It shows a warning, enables only after a ten-second countdown, and is off again at the next launch.

The editor guarantees that what it writes is a valid stream that decodes to what you see. It cannot know what the game client expects inside every individual setting, so keep your backups.

Limits and what is not done

  • Windows only.
  • The settings catalog is incomplete. Some of the client’s code could not be analysed, so a share of entries are low confidence, and the “obsolete” flag on entries should not be relied on.
  • A group clone replaces the target group as a whole instead of merging keys into it, so settings that exist only in the target group are dropped.
  • The current build has not been released publicly.

Independence

Exigentec’s EVE tools are independent third-party software. They are not made, endorsed or supported by CCP Games (now Fenris Creations). EVE Online, the EVE logo and all related marks and assets belong to their owner and are used here for identification only.