Reversed Dracula: Warrior of the Carpathians save format and built an editor with Claude

The project provides a save-game editor for Dracula: Warrior of the Carpathians (SoftKey, 1997). The author reconstructed the game's data format by reading decompiled code and verifying the findings against a corpus of thirteen save files. The codec, implemented in tools/savefile.py, performs six structural checks to ensure data integrity, including a round-trip test that requires the re-emitted file to match the original byte-for-byte. Claude Opus 5 assisted in mapping unit fields and surfacing combat stances in the dump tool. The editor exposes game resources, unit statistics, and combat stances, allowing users to modify values such as unit posture. The format lacks headers or checksums, so the editor uses a stateless cycle that reloads files from disk for every request to prevent corruption. The documentation for the format is available in SAVEFORMAT.md. The author notes that the game saves only between turns, which ensures that unit destination and position data remain consistent across the corpus.