Archive Lists allow KIF Archives of the same type to be split up into multiple files. These files are then referenced by name in an Archive List file of that type.

The file extension is .lst, and the format is a plaintext newline-separated list of archive file names.

There's still some testing to be done on how these files function. It's likely the extension change is a necessity (as "lst" is present in the assembly), but it's possible that CatSystem2 will automatically fallback after failing to detect the "KIF" file signature.

Like many other CatSystem2 games, NEKOPARA Vol.3 splits up the image.int archive due to its massive size. Below is the text content of the list file.

image\bgimage/image_bg.int
image\evimage/image_ev.int
image\fgimage/image_fg.int
image\system/image_sys.int

To support Archive Lists, they must be registered in config/startup.xml. Below is how image.lst (shown above) is registered:

  <INT>
    <!-- ... -->
    <int00>
      <name>image</name>
      <int>image.lst</int>
      <ext>hg3</ext>
      <dir>image</dir>
    </int00> 

All that needs to be changed here is the extension: <int>image.int</int> is changed to <int>image.lst</int>.

As seen above, there are directory paths prefixing each .int archive in image.lst. These likely specify the path to load "loose files" (unarchived files) when debugging. It is unknown whether these are required.

Because of how these paths are used, it's likely impossible to change the directory where archives are loaded from. However, the ability to change the name allows us to make use of symbolic or hard links (both of which CatSystem2 supports without issue).