# January 2026 - News archive
{{begin-newsitem |time=2026-01-14T00:32:51Z |title=mpqcli PRs |author=Ojan |categories=StarCraft I, WarCraft II, modding, tools |summary=I made several PRs to mpqcli over the past few days}}

I have on several occations mentioned {{highlight |text=mpqcli}}, a wonderful little command line tool to create, add, remove, list, extract, read, and verify MPQ archives using the StormLib library.

Over the course of the past few days, I have made several big and small [PRs to mpqcli](https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli/pulls):

- [PR 1](https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli/pull/133) - Small improvement to make it list details if properties are requested.
- [PR 2](https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli/pull/134) - Big PR that adds built in support for all games using MPQs up until Diablo III.
- [PR 3](https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli/pull/135) - Small improvements to the Readme file.
- [PR 4](https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli/pull/136) - Fairly big PR, mainly adding support for unfamiliar locales.
- [PR 5](https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli/pull/137) - Improvements to the `remove`, `extract` and `read` subcommands of {{highlight |text=mpqcli}} - they will now respect locales, not halt on errors and return error codes to the shell.
- [PR 6](https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli/pull/138) - Small PR to fix memory leaks by closing the MPQ archives properly after reading.

Especially PR 2 is a big deal for those of us who want our MPQs compatible with older games. Previously, {{highlight |text=mpqcli}} always used Zlib compression, which meant older games could not read the files. With this PR, the user simply specifies what game they target and {{highlight |text=mpqcli}} will choose the appropriate compression algorithm based on the files the user wants to add. I mentioned this back in [early December](../archive/december_2025.html#newsitem_2025-12-01T16:30:43Z), and now we have what is hopefully a pretty solid implementation.

The maintainer of {{highlight |text=mpqcli}}, {{highlight |text=Thomas Lausenson}}, seems to have been fairly busy as of late, but hopefully he can give feedback on the PRs or merge them fairly quickly.
{{end-newsitem}}



{{begin-newsitem |time=2026-01-01T13:10:36Z |title=MPQDraft 2026-01-01 released |resources=mpqdraft.png |author=Ojan |categories=StarCraft I, WarCraft II, modding, tools |summary=MPQDraft 2026-01-01 released - the culmination of two months work}}

The calendar now shows 2026. I hope your previous year was splendid and that the new one will be even better!

To kick the year off, I'm releasing {{highlight |text=MPQDraft}} 2026-01-01. Compared to the beta releases I have previously made, it does not contain much worth mentioning, but it is the culmination of what I have done to modernise the code base during the past two months.

[Download page](../common/software/mpqdraft.html)

Overview of the changes:

- Completely rewritten GUI in Qt. It has a few more features than the old and is more structured.
- More help for the user, with texts that explain what things do.
- Ability to patch games without built-in support.
- CLI that can do all that the GUI can (except configure plugins, which for technical reasons is not feasible from the terminal in a pretty way {{dash}} if you want to configure a plugin, use the GUI once and then the plugins in the CLI should have the same settings)
- Support for adding custom icons to SEMPQs.
- Cross-compilation is now possible. Using MinGW-w64, one can now compile the code from a Linux machine (Mac too presumably). All [MFC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Foundation_Class_Library) code has been removed. {{highlight |text=MPQDraft}} itself is still very much a Windows 32-bit only program though, but at least you no longer need a Windows machine to build it.

The title screen by {{highlight |text=Joel Steudler}} remains the same as it always has:

{{img |file=mpqdraft.png |title=MPQDraft title screen, graphics by Joel Steudler}}

The first public release of {{highlight |text=MPQDraft}} by {{highlight |text=Quantam}} (Justin Olbrantz) was on 2002-01-01. Given the date, I figured that today, exactly 24 years later, was a good date to release this revamp. [Let me know](../who.html) if you experience any issues.

[Download page](../common/software/mpqdraft.html)
{{end-newsitem}}