Farctool 2 is an exciting program for loading and extracting LittleBigPlanet 1/2/3 game data files. This program isn't very good, but it holds an interesting history, which I figure is more worth an explanation than the program has usage in the current year, which as of writing is 2026.
I started reverse engineering and studying LittleBigPlanet's game data in 2010-2011, when I met my best friend at the time. He introduced me to the concept of game datamining, and more especially 3D model extraction/conversion for the sake of porting models to other games. I would have been eleven or twelve years old.
LittleBigPlanet was a game we both had in common and met through as a medium. Naturally, for a very long time, I had a deep interest in extracting the game's content, so the gamedata could be used elsewhere. Probably in Garry's Mod or Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. The other part that made reverse engineering LittleBigPlanet enticing was discovering and reinstating unused/prototype content, of which LittleBigPlanet has a treasure trove of.
In 2012 or so, there was a public wikispaces site called PS23Dformat. The owner of that site, albinoleopard, was a very charitable and passionate man who enjoyed simply reverse engineering and converting 3D models of all sorts. My friend and I harassed this man to no end, for probably about 2 years or so. He probably took the time to write hundreds of scripts for us for hundreds of games. One of those scripts was for LittleBigPlanet. At the time, both of us were pretty stupid when it came to data forensics, and so the only file we'd sent him was data.farc. He wrote several scripts for LittleBigPlanet. You can find those here.
This was the very first seed that was planted for reverse engineering, and eventually modding, the LittleBigPlanet franchise. For a good long while, these scripts were the only means of extracting game data from the LBP games. At the time, it was a pretty huge deal. We'd bombarded him with requests to do LBP2, as well, but he'd never been able to figure out the mesh format that game used, so we were only ever able to extract LBP1 meshes for years.
LittleBigPlanet 3 released on November 18, 2014. A ginormous pile of mystery shrouded in a hacked-together Black Friday release, my friend and I were more intrigued than ever in the reverse engineering aspect because clearly LittleBigPlanet 3 had more going on behind the scenes than what was available to players.
We'd very quickly picked up on the inconsistencies between the LBP3 Private Beta and the final game, and spent a good amount of time copying data through glitches between those builds and releasing what we found to the community. I developed a bit of a following from this, and met some really cool people on Twitter that I still speak to, who saw something in this content and shared that desire to see something cool.
PS23Dformat had given up on LBP, so we decided to harass someone else smarter somewhere else to help us look at LBP3/Beta's contents, because that's all we knew how to do. Thus, we discovered an equally charitable man named Luigi Auriemma, who created the QuickBMS language that albinoleopard had been using. Together with him, the two geniuses were really the pioneers of reverse engineering LittleBigPlanet in the early days. Luigi was able to identify that there must have been a file table somewhere else in the game data and led us to discovering the purpose of blurayguids.map.
Luigi helped us write a script in his QuickBMS language that would tap into data.farc and extract its contents to a directory of your choosing. So, funnily enough, we were able to extract textures and models from LittleBigPlanet before being able to extract the entire game's contents.
I'd announced on my Twitter profile that I was intending to learn to mod LittleBigPlanet to revitalize some of the bizarre content we discovered. I talked about this with some pretty big names in the community at the time. I wanted to restore the Ice Hazard, spawn in models from the background as objects, custom materials, stickers... Who knew what would be possible with this game's engine? I had a few of the developers from LBP3 and the community manager Steven Isbell following me. I was playing with fire.
On Christmas of 2014, I was sent an email from an anonymous user who created a throwaway email address and "wished to remain in the shadow" - I respect their wishes to this day. This email contained a work-in-progress writeup of the work that this person had done with reverse engineering LBP. Clearly they knew of me via my Twitter account, that's the only medium I could imagine they would have found me. But they saw my intrigue, and wanted to help, so they sent me everything they knew at the time. We shot some emails back and forth sharing what we knew about the game. These were further roots in what was the process of reverse engineering the LittleBigPlanet franchise.
After many emails back and forth with this figure, at 16 years old I began understanding data forensics in a much deeper way, and felt confident enough to purchase a PlayStation 3 on a moddable firmware and begin modding the game. I purchased a PlayStation 3 on firmware 3.55 that January, not even two months after LittleBigPlanet 3 released, with the intentions of learning how to mod the game.
I was promptly banned from the PSN during the following January 2015, as I logged in with custom firmware without disabling my syscalls, rookie mistake... I was pretty pissed off at Sony from that point forward for refusing to change their stance on this after I'd spent well over $1k on their platform.
Angrily, I continued playing online using CIDs I would purchase on Ebay, with the new alias HFMiles, as I was trying to diffentiate myself from my previous PSN HellFire2345. I felt more of a desire to mod the game than ever, partly out of spite.
I began studying the existing QuickBMS scripts and the information "shadow" sent me, and on Monday, April 6, 2015 at 4:56 PM, I made the first LittleBigPlanet mod.
This was done by replacing the hash and size of pod.mol with the hash and size of radio_tower.mol. I had no idea what GUIDs meant or anything like that, yet. So for a while, the only mods were simply local asset replacements, which honestly still unlocked a lot of potential. For instance, replacing a level template with planets.bin allowed us to capture the Earth, which allowed users on LBP2 and 3 to add custom stickers to their earths as well as playing music on their earths via a glitch. I began releasing these objects to the community piecemeal as I was too nervous to consider what these objects might do in the wrong hands, and there was always something I wasn't expecting, probably about the same as the developers would feel whenever patching the game with new content, except I had no QA team to verify anything I was publishing.
...which was an issue with Sumo Digital. I got into some hot waters with them, while I was trying to appease a growing audience of people who were suddenly interested in mods, the devs suddenly had to catch up with some 16 year old tossing weird, buggy, untested nonsense into the community and watching it spread like wildfire. Not fun for them, and put me in a weird position. I was terrified of the monster that was a ginormous game dev studio, and wouldn't want to anger them or put them in a hard position, soooooo I proceeded to learn what GUIDs were and how to make more serious mods by using NetCheat and released hundreds of 'decorations' into the community which could be placed in various ways and allowed people to make some extremely awesome visual art in the LBP engine, sparking the #LBPiCandy hash tag on Twitter and an interesting new subcategory of creators.
The following few months I gained a decent following of about 10k hearts ingame and probably around 1k Twitter followers, which to a 16 year old was pretty awesome. I had a lot of long conversations with the devs and community manager regarding the mods and would respect when they'd ask me to take them down. Not that that would really change anything if they'd already been released, because people would just reupload it all. I spent a lot of time elaborating on what I was doing and any strange issues/bugs I found while doing so alongside some community members that were technically likeminded and received a Prize Crown in 2016 for those efforts.
So, let's circle back, those QuickBMS scripts sucked. The language is fantastic for 'quick' things, but when you're using it on tons of different builds of the game, Beta builds, datamining each content update, etc... it's really frustrating to have to utilize a commandline repeatedly. So, in comes Farctool 1, which was a program I wrote in YoYo Games' Game Maker 8.0 Pro in December 2015. It was a front-end for the QuickBMS scripts written by Luigi and albinoleopard and served as an easier method of extracting and converting content.
Lots happened between December 2015 and September 2017, I graduated high school, got into music, etc. I had a few fits trying to get away from the LBP community while I was having hormonal teenage moments. I probably made some enemies, said some evil shit on Twitter, who knows. I changed my name to auxfox around this time.
Now, we're finally at the point where we're talking about this program in particular. Farctool 2 is a program I wrote in 2017 during the CIS course at Bristol Community College. I already knew a bit of Java, so I ignored my professor's lectures, worked on this program for the class period, then went to him with my questions after class. A large chunk of it was written in a single afternoon with him, but it was carried out over a few separate days - all extracurricular, not for any project. He spent hours after classes ended to sit down with me and help this program become a reality. I owe a lot of my programming prowess, confidence, and approaches to him.
Lots happened beyond this. To name a few things, the LBP3 alpha ending up in my hands through a gentleman's agreement, getting doxxed over having it and not releasing it despite that agreement, lots of outlashes and moodiness and relationships and username changes and private Twitters and Skype calls and Discord launching and blah, blah, blah... Those who know, know well. Unfortunately, most of this information and this story has been lost to time, hence why I've wanted to document it all somewhere. This seemed like the most appropriate place to put it.
This program has evolved into Toolkit. It is quite literally based on this program, but has evolved greatly to the point where very little of my code exists in that project now. I think the only thing that persists is the layout of the program and the comically bad hex editor I stuffed in the middle of it. Plus textures being stuck in a box without a zoom function. I had some pretty big ideas for Farctool, and a lot of them ended up being properly realized in Toolkit. Most of that development happened when I was being moody and probably didn't want anything to do with the community, so for a while I refused to use it. Now, it's clearly the superior program. Ennuo, I believe, is singlehandedly holding up the reverse engineering side of LBP nowadays and has for years now. Their research is undeniably some of the most crucial this community has seen and has spawned lots of way better software.
These are the things that are keeping LBP alive. Whether the servers are up or not, whether Sony wants to keep the IP alive or not, whether the community I once knew exists in the way it did or not, there will always be an active audience for this franchise, and it means more than anything to keep it alive through community support such as this. A game as important as LBP deserves the preservation, and tools like Toolkit mean that my kids will be able to play and enjoy LBP, and hopefully share some new memories with their generation.