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File Access
A method has been found to access HDC's internal files:
By Gestahlt
[!] Important Note! The .asar file is auto-generated by GDScript/Electron to produce the executable. It is not intended to be human readable and not written by Sleeper Games directly. Complaints about it being difficult to use or questions about its contents are not the focus here. We are reverse engineering it to develop a formal modloader. [!]
- Windows 10/11
- Visual Studio Code (or equivalent editor, though Notepad++ has been producing strange results)
- Node.js
- (Optional) 7Zip and this .asar extension
Open Visual Studio Code in or navigate to the 'resources' directory of the location of your install of HDC (if you're not in the resources directory already, you can use ‘cd [directory/folder name]' to move to a directory inside the directory you're currently in and 'cd ..' to move to the directory your current directory is inside of) Use "asar extract app.asar [subdirectory name]" to extract app.asar into a subdirectory called whatever you choose to replace [directory name] with Naming the subdirectory 'app.asar' makes it so that you don't need to repack, the game runs just fine off of a folder pretending to be a .asar file (you may first need to run "Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted" in windows powershell as an administrator, I am not sure if this is necessary)
Using 7-zip with the asar plugin, it's possible to extract the file without using Visual Studio or even Node.js, simply navigate to the app.asar in your file explorer and use 7-zip to extract it to your desired folder This method unfortunately doesn't work for repacking app.asar, but since that isn't necessary you can use this method to avoid interacting with console commands
Ensure that you are still within the 'resources' directory and that everything you want to repack is in a subdirectory of 'resources' Use "asar pack [subdirectory name] app.asar" to repack everything contained within the subdirectory back into an asar file.
The Linux method is comparatively simple. This has been performed on Ubuntu 24.04.3, but should work on most systems. You will need the native Linux build in AppImage form (unavailable through Steam at time of writing, but purchaseable through itch.io here)
Open a terminal and enter the following command: [absolute path to AppImage] --appimage-extract. For example, /home/user/Downloads/Hyperspace\ Deck\ Command/Hyperspace\ Deck\ Command.AppImage --appimage-extract. This will appear to list a series of files in the appimage then exit without doing anything, but it has extracted the files elsewhere. Look for a new folder, squashfs-root, in your Home directory. The app.asar is inside the resources folder.
Ensure you have npm installed. On Ubuntu, this can be done with sudo apt install -y nodejs npm to install natively (the -y flag confirms you approve the installation and can be omitted if you'd like to check first), then nodejs -v and npm -v to verify they have installed correctly. Once secure, create a new folder in /squashfs-root/resources/ next to the app.asar and extract into it. For example, after making a folder called HDC_unpack, change the terminal dirctory to /home/squashfs-root/resources/ and run npx @electron/asar extract app.asar HDC_unpack. The .asar is now extracted, with files available in /HDC_unpack/app/. Once this is done, you can replace the app.asar file with your folder (renamed to app.asar) to run the AppImage without repacking.