October 2025 - News archive

Many Blizzard games used MPQ archives to store their game data, StarCraft I and WarCraft II: Battle.net Edition included. The MPQ files can be compared to ZIP files; they contain many other files and compress them. The MPQ format has evolved over the years, with libraries and tools such as StormLib keeping up to the changes.

I've spent some time trying to make custom MPQs that run with StarCraft I on Linux using Wine. I am able to load up 20 year old MPQ files that I have laying around. However, when I attempt to create new MPQs and load them, the game crashes. I am unsure what the cause is. I have used tools both new and old without success. The investigation continues...

mpqcli, a command line tool to create, add, remove, list, extract, read, and verify MPQ archives has just released version 0.9.3. The tool makes it easy to work with MPQs from the command line, while powered by the well-maintained StormLib library under the hood.

Version 0.9.3 comes with two changes:

• Added support for add subcommand to have path inside MPQ archive.
• Fixed bug in add subcommand when exceeding max file count.

Thomas Laurenson, the author of the tool, is hard at work pushing the tool to version 1.0. To follow the progress, see the issues page on GitHub.