PAQ archive format¶

PAQ is the simple container format used by Crimsonland. It is a flat stream with no central directory; entries are read sequentially until EOF.

Layout¶

u8[4]  magic      = "paq\\0"
repeat until EOF:
  cstring name    (NUL-terminated UTF-8 path)
  u32     size    (little-endian)
  u8[size] payload

Notes¶

• name is a relative path (often with backslashes in the original files).
• There is no checksum or footer.
• The extractor normalizes path separators and rejects ./.. segments to avoid directory traversal.
• Native grim_lookup_blob_find starts at strlen("paq") + 1, compares each path exactly, returns name + strlen(name) + 5 on a match, and otherwise advances by the encoded payload size plus the path and header lengths.