Stratsims HC Platform Editor

A native desktop editor for the Harpoon Classic platform database — the 16 annexes that become commondb.res — for Windows and Linux, replacing the Windows-only MS-Access Platform Editor.

The editor showing the surface-ship annex: a table of classes with
their type, country and displacement, and a toolbar above it. — The surface-ship annex, one row per class.

Status: alpha, current version v2026.027. The editor is in the hands of a small group of testers, not a general release. See the documentation for what it does today, or the releases guide for how a build turns into something worth announcing.

What it is

It opens a commondb.res (or a project file it saved earlier), lets you find and edit any of the 16 annexes, ships, subs, aircraft, guns, missiles, sensors, and the rest, and exports a commondb.res directly. A JSON project file sits in between as the thing you actually save and reopen; the binary container is what you import from and export to, not an intermediate step you manage by hand. It reads every generation of the database file, including the database inside a classic battleset, and can write a database back into a battleset.

Who it is for

Battleset and mod maintainers, and anyone maintaining the stock database itself: anyone who currently opens pfBuild2005.mdb or hand-edits annex data and wants a tool built for the job instead of a database frontend pressed into service as one.

What makes it different

Native on Windows and Linux

A desktop program for Windows and Linux, with nothing to install first and no Access runtime. Unzip it and run it; later versions arrive through its own update check. The old Access editor ran on Windows only.

Ships no game content

You bring the database. The editor itself carries none of Harpoon's data.

Refuses a bad export

Export runs the same checks the game would fail on first, and refuses to write a .res the game would reject.

Every edit is logged and undoable

Every edit lands in Change history, and any of them can be reverted from there.

See it working

About one minute, narrated and captioned: find a ship and change it, follow its references, fix a problem Check finds, tidy duplicates, then export and read the release notes.

A walk through the whole editor. If the clip does not play, download it directly.

Download

The editor is in alpha: builds go directly to a small group of testers, not to a public download page. If you are one of them, you already have a way to get the current build. If you are not, the documentation describes what the tool does today and how it works, and is the best way to judge whether it is worth asking about.