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Tools

This page catalogs the tools you are likely to use alongside JA2 1.13 — for tweaking your game, browsing item data, and building mods. For each tool it tells you what it does, where to get it, and whether it is still maintained. Everything listed here was verified to exist in July 2026; links were checked at that time.

Two of the most important tools — the XML Editor and the INI Editor — are already in your game folder if you installed a current all-in-one release, as is the Map Editor. Everything else is a separate download.

At a glance

Tool What it does Where Status
Text editor (Notepad++) Edit INI, XML and Lua files directly notepad-plus-plus.org Active, third-party
XML Editor GUI for editing Data-1.13\TableData XML files Bundled (XML Editor.exe); betas on GitHub Maintained (beta)
Map Editor Edit and create tactical sector maps Bundled with every all-in-one release Maintained
INI Editor GUI for Ja2_Options.INI Bundled (INI Editor.exe) Not recommended
STI-Edit & GRV Classic editors/viewers for STI graphics Forum mirror (thread) Abandoned, still used
JA2STI Adobe AIR-based STI editor suite by Tox Mirror in forum thread Abandoned
STI Image Editor Newer STI import/export and palette tool Forum thread Last release Dec 2020
FurloSK item reference Online sortable database of 1.13 items ja2.furlo.sk Online (2020-era data)
SVN tools folder EDT, NPC, Lua and export tools 1.13 SVN Legacy archive

A good text editor

The single most useful modding tool is a plain text editor. Nearly everything you can change in 1.13 lives in human-readable files: the INI files, the XML data in Data-1.13\TableData, VFS configuration, Lua scripts. The previous official documentation recommended Notepad++ — free, fast, and with syntax highlighting for INI, XML and Lua — and that advice still holds. Any capable editor works.

Start with Configuration files for what the files are and how to edit them safely.

XML Editor

The XML Editor is a GUI front-end for the game's XML data — items, weapons, magazines, merchants and the rest of Data-1.13\TableData — so you can edit entries in forms and tables instead of raw XML. How it fits into safe XML editing is covered on the XML files page.

  • Bundled copy: current installs ship XML Editor.exe in the game folder (next to its XMLEditorInit.xml and XMLEditorSettings.xml configuration files). This has been true for a long time — SVN-era single-click installers already included the then-newest XML Editor.
  • Development: since the 2022 move to GitHub, the editor is developed at github.com/1dot13/xml-editor, a continuation of the old SVN XML Editor project (based on revision 168 of that repository).
  • Downloads: the releases page carries beta builds. As of July 2026 the newest is 0.2.2-beta ("Updated to latest game build", last updated January 2026), published as XML-Editor-Release_beta_x86.7z. Its release notes list one known issue: Drugs.xml is not working.

Back up before you edit

Whether you use the XML Editor or a text editor, copy the file you are about to change first. A malformed XML file can prevent the game from starting. See XML files.

Map Editor

The Map Editor is the in-game sector editor: terrain, buildings, items, enemies, civilians, lighting. Every all-in-one release ships it as its own executable alongside the game, so there is nothing extra to download — but it does need a command-line switch (-EDITORAUTO) to actually start in editor mode.

Setup, workflow and the official manual and tutorial PDFs are all on the Map Editor page.

INI Editor

Your game folder also contains INI Editor.exe, a GUI for browsing and changing Ja2_Options.INI setting by setting, with description files (INIEditorJA2Options.xml and friends) shipped next to it. The comment block at the top of Ja2_Options.INI still points to it as an easy way to edit the file.

Do not use the bundled INI editor

The previous official 1.13 documentation is blunt about it: "Do not use the included INI editor. It is known to cause problems." Edit Ja2_Options.INI with a text editor such as Notepad++ instead. The Ja2_Options.INI tour walks through the settings people actually change, and the INI file's own comment blocks document every setting in place.

Why it causes problems. The old warning was never explained, but the mechanism is visible in the shipped files. The editor is not a generic INI tool — it is driven entirely by its hand-maintained schema (INIEditorJA2Options.xml), which lists every setting it knows with its type, range and default. That schema has fallen out of sync with the game: as currently shipped, the schema knows 807 settings while Ja2_Options.INI contains 809 — including 31 current settings the editor has never heard of (CHEAT_MODE, REBEL_COMMAND_ENABLED, the MINI_EVENTS_* block, the ASD_* robot settings, the merc growth modifiers and more) plus 29 stale entries for settings the game has since removed. And per the INI file's own header rule, any line missing from the file silently reverts to its default at startup — so a GUI that rewrites the file from an outdated schema can quietly reset your newest settings with no error shown. This gets worse with every release, since the editor has no public source repository through which the schema could be kept current. (Ironically, Ja2_Options.INI's own header still recommends the editor — trust the community warning instead.)

STI graphics tools

Almost all of JA2's 2D graphics — portraits, item pictures, interface art, tiles — are stored in STI files, an indexed-color format with a maximum of 256 colors per palette. To edit them you convert to a normal image format (BMP/PNG), work in any paint program, and convert back. The workflow for portraits is described on Creating faces.

None of the STI tools below are actively developed, but they are what the community still uses.

STI-Edit and GRV

The two classic programs for STI work, and the ones the faces guide calls essential: STI-Edit (open an STI, export to BMP, re-import) and GRV, used alongside it for creating and editing STI images and animations. Both struggle with images that have more than 256 colors, so reduce colors in your paint program before converting.

Their original home, Kermi's kermi.pp.fi tool archive, is offline. The forum thread JA2 Editors can be found here! is the long-running collection point: its first post carries a moderator-updated mirror link (working in July 2026) hosting STI-Edit, GRV and a few dozen other vanilla-era editors — tileset editors, palette editors, SLF unpackers and more. The same thread also recommends Dragon UnPACKer for unpacking the game's .slf archive files.

JA2STI and companion tools

JA2STI by Tox is a newer (2016) STI editor built on Adobe AIR, released for beta testing with a set of companion tools: STI Converter, JA2 Single Page STI Creator, JA2STI Creator and JA2 Tile Generator. Development stopped and the original download links are dead; a user-provided mirror (containing among others DotNetStiEditor and STI-Edit) is posted later in the Downloads (JA2STI and other tools) thread. Expect installation friction — the thread documents Adobe AIR certificate problems and crashes with large batches of files.

STI Image Editor

STI Image Editor 1.0 (2020) was written for Wizardry 8, which uses the same STI format, and works for JA2 files — a 1.13 modder confirms as much in the thread. It imports images of any format (or from the clipboard), exports to STI/BMP/PNG, and can display, edit and optimize 256-color palettes, which removes the fiddliest step of the classic workflow. Interface in Russian, English and German; download links are in the first post. Last updated December 2020.

FurloSK's item reference

ja2.furlo.sk is an online, sortable and filterable database of 1.13's items: weapons, armor, LBE gear, grenades and rockets, and ammunition, with the detailed 1.13 stats (ammo types, battle stats, range, action points and more). Column filters support substring, numeric (>:30), exact and regex matching, which makes it a quick way to compare guns without opening the XMLs.

It offers data tables for several game versions — builds 7609, 8670, 8796 and 8891 (GameDir 2562, August 2020). The site was online and working in July 2026, but note that its newest data set predates the GitHub-era releases, so items added or rebalanced since 2020 are not reflected.

Save-game editors

There is no working save-game editor for 1.13. JAPE, the classic editor for vanilla JA2 saves, does not work with 1.13 saves, and when the question came up on the forum (Savegame Editor), the answer — including from 1.13 developer Flugente — was to use one of these routes instead:

  • use the in-game cheats to give mercs stats or equipment, or
  • edit MercProfiles.xml and MercStartingGear.xml before starting the campaign.

The same thread notes there is also no editor that can modify an IMP merc after creation — if the point allocation went wrong, recreate the IMP.

The SVN tools folder

The old development server still hosts a small archive of modder tools at Documents/1.13 Modding/Tools in the 1.13 SVN repository. These are SVN-era tools, preserved as-is.

Certificate warning

ja2svn.mooo.com uses a self-signed certificate, so your browser will show a security warning before letting you through.

What is actually there:

  • EDT Editors/EdtMegaEditor — a batch editor for the game's .edt files, the format JA2 uses for stored in-game text (the Briefing Room mission texts, for example). It ships with format-definition files for German, English, Polish and Russian; the tool itself is Russian-made and its documentation is in Russian.
  • JA2 1.13 Export/ja2export.exe — a command-line tool that exports JA2 file formats (STI, JSD, …) to modern formats (PNG, 7z, XML), with a ja2export Help.txt next to it. It was built for an SVN-era experiment in loading PNG item images and XML tilesets; the Ja2.ini switches its help file refers to (such as USE_PNG_ITEM_IMAGES) are not present in the current Ja2.ini, so treat the game-side integration as historical.
  • LUA Scripting — bundled installers for Decoda and LuaEdit 3.0.3, two general-purpose Lua editors/debuggers, included for working on 1.13's Lua scripts. Any modern editor with Lua support does the job today; see Lua scripting.
  • NPC Editors — two small editors for NPC script data: NPC.exe and an "NPC scripter" (npc.exe with npc_scripter.ini and a sample Data-Mini-Mod). Both come without documentation; ask on the Bear's Pit if you want to script NPCs (see Links & community).

The 1dot13/tools repository

The GitHub organization has a repository named tools, created during the 2022 move to GitHub and described as the "Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13 project tool collection for modding and editing". As of July 2026 it contains only a README — nothing to download yet. The tools that did make the move live in their own repositories (notably xml-editor).

Sources