Alright I’m gonna show you how to mod strive scripts and set up the process to be as painless as possible so you can iterate fast and make the sol 2f jab mod easily.

Extracting The Strive Files

Individual Files Extraction Method

To extract individual files from the games PAK, download FModel and open up the program, it will prompt you to select a game, so navigate to the Strive installation folder and select the file

pakchunk0-WindowsNoEditor.pak

then enter the encryption key that you can find on a certain site. This will give you a view of all folders inside the PAK. After selecting any folder you want to view the data of, go to the Assets tab and right click the file you want, then click Export, it should place the files in the Output/Exports/ folder. You can follow the rest of this guide by just extracting each file of interest this way.

Full Game Extraction Method:

Warning for this method: Extracting the full game isnt completely necessary and the full game extracted takes up about 40GB of space.

In order to extract all the Strive files you’ll want to grab a copy of QuickBMS and the Unreal Tournament 4 Extraction Script (Yes, it works with strive, and many other UE4 games too)

After that you just extract quickbms into whatever folder you want to use for Strive modding along with the script, then copy the file

pakchunk0-WindowsNoEditor.pak

from GUILTY GEAR STRIVE\RED\Content\Paks into that same folder. Once you have all those files together open up CMD and run this:

quickbms_4gb_files.exe unreal_tournament_4.bms <PATH_TO_GGST_PAK>

Note: (Be sure to use the 4gb files version, the other one wont be able to handle the Strive paks size)

It will then ask you for the UE4 encryption key which you can get from a certain site. If you did everything right it should begin extracting all of the pak files contents into a folder.

Note that you might want to minimize this cmd window while its extracting because printing to stdout takes up precious time that it should spend extracting more files.

Creating a Setup for Mod Packing

After you get everything extracted, you need to make a folder structure that mimicks the Strive folders. This will allow you to pack that up into a single .pak file that contains all your modded files which will be loaded in place of the vanilla ones.

First create a folder called mod which will contain your folder structure. Then inside that mod folder you can begin adding in all the folder structures you want to mod the contents of. For script modding that means you want to create a structure that looks like this:

mod\
  RED\
   Content\
    Chara\
      <list of character folders here>
      ANJ\
      AXL\
      CHP\
      <etc...>

Now that you have a folder structure created you should add folders inside of each character folder that look like this:

<CHARACTER SHORTNAME HERE>\
  Common\
    Data\

Inside the Data folder is where you will copy all character scripts for modding. So go into the unpacked Strive files and copy over a characters files into their respective Data folder. The scripts are named BBS_XXX for a main character script and BBS_XXXEF for a character “effect” file which contains things like their projectiles. You should copy both the UEXP and UASSET files into the Data folder. If you want to mess around with universal mechanics, those scripts are contained in the CMN folder inside Chara which is structured like any other character, however the only script you would want to look at here is BBS_CMNEF, as BBS_CMN contains almost nothing.

The tool needed to repack this folder is u4pak which takes either arguments through a config file or the CLI. I’ve created a config file here that should just work as long as you create the folder as specified:

pack
--version=3
--mount-point=../../..

"Mod.pak"
":none,rename=/RED:./mod/RED"

Paste that into a config.u4pak file and now you should be able to simply drag and drop that config.u4pak onto u4pak.exe and it will save a correctly packed Mod.pak file (as long as the mod root folder is in the same folder as u4pak.exe).

You’re done with the setup! You are now theoretically able to mod any file in the game (given you know how to modify it). In the next section you will learn how to extract, modify, and reinject character scripts into these BBS_XXX files.

Modding Character Scripts

Now that the UEXP/UASSET files of interest have been copied over to their respective folders, you need to extract the contained script files to actually start modding them. Get a copy of GGST-BBS-Unpacker and select the corresponding UEXP and UASSET files for the script you want to extract. Hit save and it will prompt you to save the script file, I would suggest saving it as CharacterName.bbscript in some scripts folder for organization.

To easily read and modify the script files you just saved, you will need to use BBScript. Place bbscript.exe and the static_db folder inside your modding folder and open up CMD inside that folder. To parse the script into a readable format you just need to enter this command:

bbscript parse ggst <path_to_script> <path_to_save_file_as>

To rebuild that script into something you can reinject into the UEXP/UASSETs you just enter this:

bbscript rebuild ggst <path_to_parsed_script> <path_to_save_file_as>

Note: Type bbscript -h for more info on commands.

Now that you have the modified scripts rebuilt, you can inject them with GGST-BBS-Unpacker. If you left the program open, you should be able to just select the rebuilt bbscript file and click “inject”, it should show the operation was successful.

Finishing up

After correctly setting up the folders, extracting, parsing, and rebuilding scripts, reinjecting them into the UEXP/UASSETS, you should now be able to drag the config.u4pak onto u4pak.exe and get a rebuilt Mod.pak file back.

If you want to make this slightly easier, I personally like to use a build.bat file which rebuilds the mod and copies the file into the ~mods folder, like this:

u4pak.exe config.u4pak
move /y Mod.pak <STRIVE_~mods_FOLDER_PATH>

To install these mod files, go to your Strive installation folder and navigate to

GUILTY GEAR STRIVE\RED\Content\Paks

and create a folder called ~mods inside Paks, this is where you will place the Mod.pak. UE4 also demands that you add a Mod.sig file into the ~mods folder for some reason, so copy over the pakchunk0-WindowsNoEditor.sig file in Paks and rename it to Mod.sig, this should allow the mod to correctly load!

Note: The Mod.pak and Mod.sig files dont need to be named anything in particular. You can rename them to anything and as long as they share the same name it will load fine.

Tools Used in This Article