ME3 TOCFix

A modern C++ tool that regenerates the PCConsoleTOC.bin lookup tables shipped with the original Mass Effect 3 and the three Mass Effect Legendary Edition games. Recomputing these is what allows file-replacement mods (DLC mods, DLC_MOD_*, etc.) to take effect -- the games won't load files they don't see in the TOC.

The tool supports four games:

Argument	Game
ME3	Mass Effect 3 (original 2012 release)
LE1	Mass Effect Legendary Edition — ME1
LE2	Mass Effect Legendary Edition — ME2
LE3	Mass Effect Legendary Edition — ME3

Download

GitHub) Head over to Releases and download the latest release matching your platform.

GitLab) Head over to Releases and download the latest release matching your platform.

Building

Requires a C++20 compiler (GCC 11+, Clang 13+, or MSVC 2019 16.10+) and Meson or CMake 3.20+.

meson setup _build -Ddefault_library=static
meson compile -C _build

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release

On Linux you can also build directly without CMake:

g++ -std=c++20 -O2 -pthread \
    src/main.cpp src/ini_parser.cpp src/toc_bin_file.cpp src/toc_creator.cpp \
    -o me3tocfix

Usage

me3tocfix <path-to-game-exe>
me3tocfix -r <ME3|LE1|LE2|LE3> (Windows/Wine only registry lookup)

For example via providing the absolute path:

me3tocfix "D:\Origin Games\Mass Effect Legendary Edition\Game\ME3\Binaries\Win64\MassEffect3.exe"

Or via the Windows registry:

me3tocfix -r LE3

me3tocfix will write a fresh PCConsoleTOC.bin to the BioGame directory and to every DLC subfolder (or, for LE1, only to BioGame, since LE1 folds all DLC content into a single basegame TOC by mount priority).

Notable changes vs. the C# project

• CRC table built at compile time. Original lazy-init had a non-atomic null-check race when called from Task.WhenAll. Now it's constexpr, baked into the binary, and trivially thread-safe.
• std::async instead of Task.WhenAll. Same fan-out parallelism for basegame + per-DLC jobs.
• Prime-rounded hash-table sizes. hash % T distributes badly when T shares factors with patterns in the input — powers of 2 are pathological, and round numbers like 100 cluster too. We snap the chosen T down to the nearest prime, which costs a few primality trials at build time and gives tighter chains for free. The C# project uses T = N directly and gets lucky or unlucky depending on N's factorization.
• Defensive name-length check. Each TOC entry stores its serialized length in an int16, capping name length at ~32 KiB. Real ME / LE filenames are nowhere near that, but we now reject names that would overflow the field rather than silently producing a corrupt TOC.
• 2-GiB warning. The C# version silently casts file sizes to int, which produces a corrupt TOC for files ≥ 2 GiB. We warn loudly when this happens.
• Cross-platform core, including version detection. The TOC algorithm itself runs on Linux/macOS, which is convenient for headless build pipelines. The C# project version's MassEffect3.exe → ME3 vs LE3 disambiguation relied on the Win32 GetFileVersionInfo API, leaving non-Windows callers blind; we now parse the PE format directly to read the FileVersion resource, so detection works the same on every platform. Only the registry fallback (-r flag) remains Windows-only.
• Trimmed-down INI parser. AutoTOC only ever reads one value out of a DLC autoload.ini (the ModMount priority); we ship a minimal read-only parser instead of porting the full DuplicatingIni and its supporting types.
• Correct file write semantics. Original DuplicatingIni.WriteToFile never disposed/flushed its StreamWriter, which can produce truncated INI files. We don't write INIs at all here, but the TOC writer uses RAII to guarantee proper flush + close.
• Cleaner serialiser. No MemoryStream.Seek games — we build the TOC into a std::vector<uint8_t> and patch the hash-table slots in place once each bucket's offset is known, which makes the on-disk layout much easier to audit against the format.
• Better error messages. The C# project CreateDLCTOC swallows every exception as "may just be packed DLC". We still don't fail the whole run on one bad DLC, but we surface the actual error so genuine bugs aren't hidden.
• Robust missing-directory handling. Directory.GetFiles throws on missing input; std::filesystem::directory_iterator with error_code doesn't, so we degrade gracefully when, say, BIOGame/Movies doesn't exist.

Credits

• AutoTOC from the ME3Tweaks project.

This project is not affiliated in any way with any of the above mentioned projects other than to acknowledge its source of inspiration.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only