Open View → Configuration Editors → Core Game → Localisation to edit the game's on-screen text. It opens in its own window, shown below, and doesn't need a level loaded — it works directly on the shared text files.

Nearly every piece of text the game shows you — objective text, terminal contents, audio log titles, UI labels, subtitles — is a localised string looked up by ID rather than written into the script. The Localisation Editor is where you edit those strings, and where you add new ones for your own content.

The editor works across all nine shipped languages at once: Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

The Localisation Editor: every string on the left, grouped by text file; the selected string's text in each language on the right.

Text lives in plain text files under DATA/TEXT/, one folder per language, with a matching set of files in each. A string is identified by two things:

• String ID — the name the game asks for the text by. Unique, and the same in every language.
• Text file — which file the string lives in. These are grouped roughly by mission, and the editor shows them as headings in the list.

Because the same ID has to exist in every language folder, the editor always operates on all nine at once. There is no way to have a string that exists in English but not in German — a missing entry is a text lookup the game can't resolve.

The list on the left holds every string in the game, grouped under a heading per text file (OBJECTIVES, M3401 and so on — the file name without .TXT). Each row shows the string ID and its English text; a string with no English value shows an em dash.

The Search (ID or English) box above the list filters as you type — a short delay after each keystroke, because the full string list is large. It matches on both the ID and the English text, so you can find a string either by its name or by something you saw on screen in game.

Searching 'looter' narrows the list to matches from seven different text files; the selection survives the filter.

In the example above the list has been narrowed to every string mentioning looter — all of them matched on their English text rather than their ID — and the group headings show which text files the matches came from. The selection is preserved across searches where possible, so refining a filter doesn't lose the row you were working on, and the language panel stays filled with the row you had selected.

Select a row and the panel on the right fills with one text box per language, each labelled with the language name. Edit whichever you need — you do not have to fill in all of them, and languages you leave alone are written back unchanged.

One box per language; Save all languages writes them all back at once.

Save all languages, the button along the bottom of the language panel, writes every box back to its language's file in one go and confirms with a Saved message. The list updates to show the new English text immediately.

The language panel scrolls — at a typical window height only the first six or so languages are in view, as in the figure, with the rest behind the scrollbar — and reflows with the window, so widen the editor if you're working with long text.

Add new string… opens a dialog for creating an ID that doesn't exist yet. The dialog, shown below, asks for three things.

Adding a string: pick the text file, name the ID, and fill in whichever languages you have.

• Text file (group) — which file the new string is appended to. Pick the one that matches where your content lives.
• String ID — the name your scripts will use. Both fields are required.
• The text itself, per language. Fill in the ones you have — any you leave blank are added with empty text, like Czech in the figure.

Press OK and the string is appended to all nine language files at once; the list reloads with your new entry selected so you can carry on editing it.

IDs can't contain [ or ]. If the ID already exists in any language's copy of the file, or a language is missing that file, the editor tells you and nothing is added — every check runs before anything is written, so a failure never leaves the string half-added.

Once a string exists, reference it by its ID from the entity parameters that take localised text — objectives, UI prompts, terminal content, and so on. The engine resolves the ID against whichever language the player is running, which is the whole point of going through this editor rather than typing text into a parameter directly.

If a string ID doesn't resolve at runtime you will usually see the raw ID on screen, which is a quick way to spot a typo.

• Keep IDs distinctive. Prefixing your own strings with something specific to your mod makes them easy to find later and avoids colliding with the game's own naming.
• Fill in English at minimum. It's the fallback most people will see, and it's what the string list displays.
• Text files are grouped by mission. Adding a string to a file that isn't loaded for your level means the game won't find it — put your strings somewhere your content is actually running. Which shared files a level loads is set in the Level Text DBs editor, which can also give a level a text database of its own; its Edit Selected Database Contents button opens this same editor scoped to just that database, with the scope shown in the title bar.
• Non-Latin languages need the right font. Russian and Czech in particular rely on the game's font configuration; text outside a font's character set won't render.

• Configurations — the other engine configuration editors
• Level Text DBs — which text databases each level loads; opens this editor on a single database
• Mission IDs — campaign mission IDs and codenames
• UI Editor — the UI archive that displays this text
• Backup Manager — snapshots and config resets