Cataclysm Browser Module (cata-bm)

Terminal User Interface (TUI) browser for (mainly) Cataclysm: Bright Nights JSON data.

A sister project to Cataclysm:BN Guide and CBN data.

Features

• Filter entities as you type.
• Downloads game data directly.
• Can be used locally if you have a copy of the game data.
• Simple search syntax:
  • id:zombie or i:zombie - Filter by ID;
  • type:MONSTER or t:MONSTER - Filter by record type;
  • category:weapon or c:weapon - Filter by category;
  • bash.str_min:10 - Deep field search using dot-notation;
  • term1 term2 - Combine multiple terms (AND logic);
• Click on a property value to filter by it. Ctrl-click filters by that object's ID.
• Switch between game versions in the app.

Installation

Go to releases and download the latest binary for your platform.

Install from Rust crates: cargo install cata-bm --bin cata-bm

Controls

Global

Key	Action
Tab / Shift+Tab	Cycle focus
Ctrl+G	Version Switcher
Ctrl+R	Reload Local Source (In-source mode)
?	Help Overlay
q	Quit

Filter Input

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Search history
Ctrl+U	Clear filter
Ctrl+W	Delete last word
Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E	Move to start / end of line
Enter	Confirm search and focus List

Usage

Automatic Data Download

Launch the application and specify a game version. It will automatically download and cache the data for you:

cata-bm --game nightly

Or

cata-bm --file path/to/your/data.json
cata-bm --source path/to/cataclysm-data/

Other Options

• List available game versions: cata-bm --game-versions
• Force refresh cached data: cata-bm --game stable --force

History

When I started writing code for Cataclysm:BN guide, I found myself constantly trying to query the data files with simple search. Then — with jq. The jq syntax was hard to remember, and I wrote a bunch of typical scripts to automate the process. My final version of the jq script had complicated logic for copy-from resolving, fuzzy search, and filtering. You can try this monstrosity yourself — just adjust the path to the JSON files and flatten.jq:

find Cataclysm-BN/data/json -name '*.json' -exec cat {} + | \
jq -s '{data: [ .[] | if type=="array" then .[] else . end ]}' | \
jq -f flatten.jq | \ 
jq -c '.[] | select(.type=="GUNMOD" and has("aim_speed"))' | \
fzf --preview 'echo {} | jq -C .'

flatten.jq is a "simple" jq script that flattens game data. And I still had to change select(.type=="GUNMOD" and has("aim_speed")) every time.

And then I had had enough.

📄 License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.