PAZ Unpacker

Executable can be found here Releases A Windows GUI tool for unpacking and extracting files from Black Desert Online (BDO) .PAZ archive files.

This is a community-maintained fork of kukdh1/PAZ-Unpacker.
Full credit for the original work goes to kukdh1. See CREDITS for details.

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Features

• Browse the virtual filesystem inside BDO PAZ archives
• Extract individual files, folders, or entire archives
• Dark mode UI — full dark theme across all controls and windows
• Settings dialog — configure your PAZ folder and extract path once; no dialogs after that
• Load button — one-click load from your saved PAZ folder path
• Extract button — extracts directly to your saved path, no browse dialog if already configured
• Search window — fast non-blocking search across all 800k+ files with live filtering
• Check for Updates — checks GitHub releases for new versions
• File preview — inline DDS/PNG/BMP texture preview panel
• Cache — binary cache (v2) for fast startup; embeds folder path for multi-installation support
• Multi-language support (English, Japanese, Korean)
• Displays file metadata: size, PAZ source, internal path

What's new in this fork

The original project was last updated in 2015. This fork modernises the codebase while keeping full compatibility with the original PAZ format.

Foundation

Area	Change
Platform	Upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit (x64) — handles large archives correctly
Compiler	VS2015 (v140) → VS2025 (v145) with /std:c++latest (C++26)
Memory	Raw pointers / calloc/free → std::unique_ptr, std::vector
Strings	Fixed-size WCHAR[4096] buffers → std::wstring throughout
Paths	Manual CreateDirectory loop → std::filesystem::create_directories
Error handling	Silent failures → std::runtime_error with descriptive messages
Thread safety	Added std::atomic<bool> busy flag guarding all thread spawns
Assertions	assert() precondition checks on all critical parsing functions
Code quality	nullptr throughout, const-correct getters, range-based for loops

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
• Visual Studio 2025 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• Windows SDK 10.0

Build

1. Open PAZ-Unpacker.sln in Visual Studio 2025
2. Select Release | x64
3. Build → Build Solution (Ctrl+Shift+B)
4. Copy the four Setting*.xml files alongside the built .exe

Usage

1. Launch PAZ-Unpacker.exe
2. Go to Settings → Configure Paths and set your PAZ folder (the folder containing pad00000.meta) and your preferred extract output folder
3. Click Load to load the PAZ archive — subsequent launches just press Load
4. Browse the file tree on the left
5. Select a file, folder, or the root node, then click Extract
6. Use Search in the menu bar to search across all files by name or extension (e.g. .dds, ui_texture)

Format notes (from original README)

• Tested on KR client. The meta file format changed on KR client since 2016.05 (decrypt key changed).
• If an extracted file begins with 0x6E, the first 9 bytes are a compression header:

  0x6E       : Header magic
  DWORD      : Original file size
  DWORD      : Compressed file size
  

• BDO client (and XIGNCODE3) does not check CRC codes on packed files.

License

The original source code has no license — all original rights belong to kukdh1.
Modifications made in this fork are © the contributors of this repository.
See CREDITS for full attribution.