Hey TQ fam,
I've been lurking around the forum for a while, tinkering with saves and trying out every editor I could get my hands on. Like a lot of you, I wanted something that felt more like Hero Editor for D2—a visual tool where you could click an item in your inventory, see its stats, swap affixes with dropdowns, change colors, and save it back without ever touching a hex editor. Nothing really scratched that itch, so over the past month I ended up building my own.
The working title is TQ Hero Editor, and I'd love to find a handful of people willing to kick its tires and help me track down the rough edges before a proper release.
What it does right now (all offline, single-player focused)
Visual character & inventory browser – Opens your Player.chr and shows every equipped and bagged item in a DataGridView, including seed, prefix/suffix, and friendly names pulled from the game database.
Click-to-edit item stats – Select any item and an editing panel lights up with the stats you'd expect: level requirement, strength/dex/int, damage min/max for weapons, armor for shields/armor, stack size for potions, etc.
Seed editing – Change the seed value directly; the game handles the re-roll on next load.
Affix injection – Pick a prefix or suffix from a dropdown (populated by the actual game database) and inject it onto any common/rare/epic item. It writes the raw ID into the save and the game loads it without complaint.
Base item swapping – Turn a Crude Spear into a Short Sword or a Centaur Cuirass or whatever else the database knows about.
Relic & charm handling – View which relic/charm is socketed, see its completion level (Var1/Var2), and overwrite the relic ID if you want to swap it out.
Color/dye overlay – A basic ARGB field editor so you can tweak an item's tint.
Full read/write cycle for Player.chr – Open a save, edit anything in the grid or panel, hit Save As, and you get a working Modified.chr that loads in-game without corruption. I've been testing it on my own Anniversary Edition (all DLCs, current Steam build) for a few weeks and haven't nuked a save yet, but that's exactly why I want more eyes on it.
What's NOT done yet (honesty time)
3D preview – I have an OpenTK GLControl wired up with a basic cube renderer and camera controls, but I haven't hooked it up to the game's mesh/texture extraction yet. That's the next big push.
GUI is still rough – It's Windows Forms, functional but not pretty. If anyone here is good with UI design and wants to contribute ideas (or even mockups), I'm all ears.
Effect attachments (weapon glows, fire trails, etc.) – I can see the effect slots in the binary and have a working insertion method, but the UI for picking effects from the database isn't done.
Character-level editing – Attributes, skill points, masteries, gold, waypoint unlocks. The parsing is there, but the character tab in the editor is still bare.
Affix filtering – Right now the dropdowns show all affixes regardless of item type. I need to add proper validation so you don't accidentally put a shield-only prefix on a staff.
Steam Cloud safety – The tool doesn't auto-disable Steam Cloud, so testers will need to do that manually for now. I'll bake that in before a release build.
What I need from testers
People running Steam Anniversary Edition (all DLCs preferred, but base game + Ragnarok/Atlantis/Embers should work) on Windows 10/11.
Willingness to back up your save folder and test on a copy of a character you don't mind potentially corrupting (hasn't happened to me, but safety first).
The ability to describe bugs clearly: "I tried to swap the prefix on a Legendary item and got this error" is way more helpful than "it broke."
Bonus points if you're familiar with TQVaultAE or the Art Manager and can compare the tool's behavior to what you'd expect from those.
How I'll handle feedback
I'll keep a running changelog and prioritize issues on the GitHub repo. If you post bugs here in the thread, I'll try to reply within a day or two. I'm especially interested in:
Any item type that fails to parse (scrolls, artifacts, quest items—I've mainly tested weapons and armor).
Crashes when opening a save from a heavily-modded game (I've only tested with a clean install + Soulvizier).
Issues with non-English character names or save folder paths.
Performance on large stashes (the current parsing is pretty naive and might chug on a fully-loaded caravan).
I didn't start this thing to compete with TQVaultAE or anything—honestly, I just wanted a visual item editor that felt natural. If the community finds it useful, awesome. If not, I'll still use it myself and keep hacking on it.
If you're interested, drop a reply or DM me. I'll share the current build once I have a few testers lined up.
Cheers, and may all your drops be Legendary.
Quick note for mods: This is a save-file editor only, no memory hooks, no multiplayer bypasses. Let me know if I need to adjust anything in the post to comply with board rules.
