Tiger pounces on bugs. Checks Crusader Kings 3, Victoria 3, or Imperator: Rome user mod files for mistakes and warns about them. For example: missing localizations, or using a faith trigger on a character.

These games are grand strategy games made by Paradox Interactive, and user mods are made by the players to enhance or change their game experience. This tool is for the people who make the mods.

Tiger is mature but will still warn about some things that are actually correct. It will also often take a few days or even weeks to catch up with the latest updates to the games it supports.

Support for Hearts of Iron IV (hoi4-tiger) is in the works but it is unfinished and in its current state will produce thousands of false positives.

ck3-tiger / vic3-tiger / imperator-tiger will read the relevant vanilla files and your mod's files, and it will complain about everything in your mod that looks wrong. Where possible, it will tell you why it thinks the thing is wrong.

• Syntax validation: are you using the right key = value pairs? No misspellings?
• Missing items: is every game object that you refer to actually defined somewhere?
• Missing localizations: do you have all the localizations you need for your mod?
• Scope consistency checking: are you using culture effects on cultures and character effects on characters, etc.?
• History (for CK3): Are spouses, employers, and lieges alive on the relevant dates? Is no one their own grandfather?
• Special: rivers.png check

Tiger can also be configured to validate submods, by loading the parent mods first.

Download a release package from GitHub. Unpack it somewhere.

On Windows, if everything works out, you can then just double-click on ck3-tiger-auto / vic3-tiger-auto / imperator-tiger-auto and it will try its best.

Otherwise, run the tool from the command prompt:

# CK3
path/to/ck3-tiger path/to/your/descriptor.mod
path/to/ck3-tiger "path/to/Paradox Interactive/Crusader Kings III/mod/YourMod.mod"

# VIC3
path/to/vic3-tiger path/to/your/mod
path/to/vic3-tiger "path/to/Paradox Interactive/Victoria 3/mod/YourMod/"

# I:R
path/to/imperator-tiger path/to/your/descriptor.mod
path/to/vic3-tiger "path/to/Paradox Interactive/ImperatorRome/mod/YourMod.mod"

# Add command-line options as needed, e.g.
path/to/ck3-tiger --no-color path/to/your/descriptor.mod

# For output redirection to a new file, append `> filename` to the command, e.g.
path/to/ck3-tiger path/to/your/descriptor.mod > output.txt

(Note that the quote marks around the path are important because of the spaces in it.)

You can place a file ck3-tiger.conf (or vic3-tiger.conf or imperator.conf) in your mod's directory. You can use it to select which languages to check localizations for, and to suppress messages about things you don't want to fix.

There is a sample ck3-tiger.conf file, vic3-tiger.conf file, and imperator-tiger.conf file in the release, with an explanation of what goes in it. There is also a guide.

If you want to build it yourself, you will have to install the Rust programming language. You can either get the source archive from one of the releases (preferably the latest) or clone the git repository.

To build and run the tool, add any options and the modpath after the -- as shown below:

cargo run --release -p <ck3-tiger|vic3-tiger|imperator-tiger> -- [OPTIONS] <MODPATH>

# Example:
cargo run --release -p ck3-tiger -- --no-color path/to/your/descriptor.mod

User unLomTrois has made a VS Code extension for Tiger. It enables you to view the reports directly in the Problems tab.

User Bahmut has made a GitHub Action for Tiger. It allows running Tiger validation in GitHub Workflows.

You can tell tiger to suppress reports that were shown in a previous run. This can be helpful when you only want to see what changed, for example after updating your mod. First you have to generate a "baseline" to compare future runs to:

ck3-tiger --json path/to/your/mod > baseline.json

You can use any filename in place of baseline.json. Then when you run tiger again, you can tell it to exclude reports from the baseline:

ck3-tiger --suppress baseline.json path/to/your/mod

It works with vic3-tiger and imperator-tiger too.

Sometimes tiger is mistaken, or you just don't want to deal with certain warnings. You can remove those reports from the output in either of two ways:

• The filter config in the .conf file: a guide.
• Leaving special comments in your mod: a guide.

The various path options are only needed if Tiger can't find the paths on its own.

      --game <GAME>          Path to game main directory
      --paradox <PARADOX>    Path to paradox directory
      --config <CONFIG>      Path to custom .conf file
      --show-vanilla         Show errors in the base game script code as well
      --show-mods            Show errors in other loaded mods as well
      --json                 Output the reports in JSON format
  -c, --consolidate          Consolidate certain repeated errors
      --unused               Warn about items that are defined but unused
      --pod                  Do checks specific to the Princes of Darkness mod
      --no-color             Omit color from the output. False by default. Can also be configured in the config file
      --suppress <SUPPRESS>  Load a JSON file of reports to remove from the output
  -h, --help                 Print help
  -V, --version              Print version

I welcome contributions and collaborations! Some forms that contributions can take:

• Suggestions and ideas about what things tiger should check
• Telling me which of the output messages are confusing or hard to understand
• Reporting cases where tiger complains about a problem that's not real (false positives)
• Filing an issue on GitHub about a problem you have, or sending me email directly
• Starting up the game to verify something that's marked "TODO: verify" in the code

Contributions in the form of code are also welcome. They should be made as GitHub pull requests, and you should read and understand the project's copyright license before doing so. It may help to file a GitHub issue before starting to code, though, since I may prefer to solve the problem in a different way.

Some ideas for code contributions:

• Adding a new check and its error report
• Adding a validator for a new item type
• Updating a validator to a new game version
• Solving one of the hundreds of TODO comments in the code
• Solving one of the issues marked in the TODO or IDEAS wiki pages
• Speed or memory use improvements; opportunities are all over the place

See DEVELOPMENT.md for tips and the CODING wiki page for an overview of the code and coding style.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the LICENSE file for more details.