Can I unpack stuff...?

[GiantMonkeyMan]

unpacking shouldn't ruin you game as long as you don't change anything but screw it up and then leave it there it could screw up if you try battling the screwed up unit... if you know what i mean
but it should be fine

[Kull]

The safest thing is to put a copy of patch_1.pak into a new folder elsewhere on your hard drive, and then unpak that. If HD space is a problem, just delete all the files you don't need after you've unpaked everything.

[Cheexsta]

Unpacking them should not have any effect on your game whatsoever. Doing so does not delete the file you unpacked, rather it copies the files that were inside the .pak and places them in a new folder using its root directory as the base of where it unpacks (ie if you unpack patch_1.pak in the data\packs folder, XPAK will place all the files in the appropriate subfolders under data\packs\data). Even if you were to unpack the files into the proper folders it still wouldn't make any difference, since the game doesn't really care about files within normal folders when there's a file of the same name in one of the .pak files.

In short: it shouldn't make any difference at all But if you want to be on the safe side, you can always copy the .pak to a temporary folder, though this shouldn't be necessary.

[Kull]

Unpacking them should not have any effect on your game whatsoever. Doing so does not delete the file you unpacked, rather it copies the files that were inside the .pak and places them in a new folder using its root directory as the base of where it unpacks (ie if you unpack patch_1.pak in the data\packs folder, XPAK will place all the files in the appropriate subfolders under data\packs\data). Even if you were to unpack the files into the proper folders it still wouldn't make any difference, since the game doesn't really care about files within normal folders when there's a file of the same name in one of the .pak files.

In short: it shouldn't make any difference at all But if you want to be on the safe side, you can always copy the .pak to a temporary folder, though this shouldn't be necessary.

You are technically correct, but I personally find that it's "safer" to do all your file editing and messing around in a folder outside of the main game folder. It completely eliminates the chance that you might accidentally delete the wrong thing or somehow screw up in myriad unforseen ways. Because when THAT happens, we wind up with weird bug reports in this forum, and that's something I also prefer to minimize.