xanadu-extract

Asset extractor and bestiary viewer for Xanadu Next (Falcom, 2005).

The Steam build of Xanadu Next ships every asset in Falcom's proprietary .arc/.dir archive pairs, with images stored in the planar-RGBA G32 format that almost no general-purpose tooling understands. This project reverse engineers the archives, decodes the G32 images, parses the binary Object.tbl to recover monster stats and drop tables, and emits a static HTML site you can browse — including a complete bestiary cross-referenced against the per-area encounter tables.

A live build of the site is published from this repo's gh-pages branch.

Pages

• monsters.html — bestiary with sprite, stats (Lv/HP/MP/ATK/DEF/XP/Gold), drop table with normalized weights, area cross-references, and the AI-script commentary from each monster's .alg file.
• areas.html — every area declaration from area*.inf: the in-game English block names, encounter slot count, and DROP() entries for breakable scenery in that map.
• index.html — image / audio / video grids over every extracted asset with a click-to-open lightbox (mouse-wheel zoom, drag-pan, prev/next).
• debug.html — the dev cruft Falcom shipped: bilingual rendering of all Japanese commentary in sound.tbl, bgm.tbl, the AI scripts, and effects tables, plus an inventory of backup folders, test maps, and scenario placeholders left in the data files.

Reverse-engineered formats

• .arc/.dir pair — parallel files; each .dir record is 108 bytes (100-byte filename + uint32 size + uint32 dummy), files are packed into the .arc in declaration order. (src/xanadu_extract/archive.py)
• .G32 image — 16-byte header (uint32 w, h, then two flag words) + RLE-compressed body interleaving four R/G/B/A planes. Eight opcodes: literal-copy and three flavors of run (RLE byte / RLE 0x00 / RLE 0xFF). Decoder ported from G32_DecompressBody at 0x004e4880 in XANADU.exe. (src/xanadu_extract/g32.py)
• Object.tbl — 1108-byte fixed-size records: 16 byte ID + (English/JP) name + 16×uint32 stats with the actual value in the high 16 bits + an ASCII drop table at offset 0x2FE. Drops use <id>(<weight>) syntax; positive ids reference world props that act as pickups, negatives are engine-internal gold/exp pools. (src/xanadu_extract/objects.py)

Building

uv sync                 # install dependencies (Python 3.12+, Pillow)
uv run xanadu-extract   # walk DATA/, decode archives + G32 → out/
uv run xanadu-viewer    # generate the asset browser (out/index.html)
uv run xanadu-monsters  # generate the bestiary + areas pages
uv run xanadu-debug     # generate the dev-cruft commentary page

Default game path is ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Xanadu Next — override with --game DIR if you have it installed elsewhere. Default output is ./out/.

Acknowledgements

Reverse engineering performed in Ghidra against the Steam binary. No game assets are checked into this repository — the extracted output (out/) is deployed to the gh-pages branch only, and is built from the user's local copy of the game.