DS Anim Studio edits the animation event files the Souls games run on

What a TAE file actually controls

The About section explains that DS Anim Studio edits the TimeAct Editor files of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro, and that these files control everything that happens on a specific frame of an animation. The list is long and specific enough to show what the tool is for.

Activating invulnerability frames. Parry windows. Applying an SpEffect, which is a special temporary status such as a ring effect, poisoning, a buff or an AI trigger. Allowing animation cancelling. Setting the flag for the death and respawn sequence. Creating SFX and FFX entries, which the README notes refer to the exact same files. Playing sound effects such as footsteps and sword swooshes. Invoking an attack behaviour, a bullet behaviour and a common behaviour, each of which drains stamina or does damage as a single event. Creating motion blur on weapon swings. Setting the opacity of a character, which the game uses for being summoned into other worlds or for dying. Setting the attack aim tracking speed. Playing a RumbleCam file for relative screen movement. Playing additional animation layers, such as the clothes blowing in the wind animation layered over another animation. Adjusting model render masks to show or hide parts of a character.

And then the honest last line: many more that the maintainers have not even figured out yet.

That list is the value proposition. A model, a texture or a frame rate can be changed with other tools, but these event files are where the behaviour of a fight lives, and they are in a binary format that was never meant to be edited by hand.

A graph of boxes instead of a hex editor

The editor's central idea is visual: it shows an actual physical graph full of events represented as boxes, and it snaps to 30-fps increments just like the vanilla files do.

That snapping detail is the one that tells you the author has read the format. Frame numbers in these files are quantised, and an editor that let you place an event at frame 37.5 would produce a file the game interprets differently from what you see. Matching the game's own increment is a small decision that removes a whole class of confusing bugs.

The editing operations are direct. You can add new events to animations by right-clicking, if a template is loaded. You can delete events by highlighting them and pressing the Delete key. You can modify the parameters passed to each event by clicking an event to highlight it, after which the parameters appear in the pane on the right side of the window. An animation ID is selected from the left pane, and there is a model and animation viewer pane in the top right for checking the result.

Undo and redo are complete, with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, and copy and paste has three forms. Ctrl+C copies, Ctrl+V pastes at the mouse cursor, and Ctrl+Shift+V pastes in place, keeping the original start and end times. That third mode is the one that matters for real work, since it is what you want when moving an event from one animation to another while preserving its timing.

For someone who has been hex editing these files, the whole point is that the tool makes the graph legible. For someone who has never seen one, the graph teaches what the format contains.

Editing the archives directly, with no BND rebuilder

The technical claim in the feature list is that the tool edits the .anibnd or .anibnd.dcx files of the games directly, and that there is no need to use BND rebuilders.

That matters because of how the workflow goes. For an unpacked game, you run the application, open the file through File and Open, load an .anibnd or .anibnd.dcx, enter the information required such as the game executable and the ModEngine folder if applicable, choose where the unpacked ANIBND should be saved as the project directory, pick an animation ID, edit, and save with Ctrl+S.

For a packed game, the File menu has an Open From Packed Game Data Archives entry, and you then select which ANIBND or CHRBND you want to use before choosing the project directory. The difference is only in where the bytes come from, and the rest of the flow is identical.

The last step of both flows is outside the tool, and the README says so plainly: you have to make sure your game is set up to load the edited loose ANIBND file, and that is more of a general Souls modding thing which is too specific to cover here.

So the boundary is clear. DS Anim Studio produces a modified archive and hands it to you. What your mod loader does with that file is the modding setup's job, and the tool deliberately does not try to be a mod manager as well.

The Dark Souls games store some of this data in DCX-compressed containers, and the tool reads and writes both flavours, which is why the two extensions appear together in the instructions.

Which games the tool can actually open

The support table is the most useful thing in the README for anyone deciding whether to download it, and it is more precise than a headline feature list.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition has edit support, a lot of events mapped or identified, and animation viewer support. Dark Souls Remastered has edit support and a lot of events mapped, but the viewer support is described as sort of, with a footnote. Dark Souls III, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Elden Ring all have edit support, a lot of events mapped and viewer support.

The two exceptions are Dark Souls II, which has no edit support, no mapped events and, in the viewer's case, Never, and Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, which is marked no edit support with the parenthetical that it may change in the future, no events mapped, and Never for the viewer.

The footnote explains the partial case: for DS1R, Sekiro and Elden Ring, an animation downgrade process is no longer needed.

That is a specific and useful piece of information. A downgrade step is what a modder would otherwise have to run to bring an animation file from a newer format back to what the game expects, and it disappearing for three of the five supported games means the workflow for those games is shorter.

The vocabulary in the table is also a useful guide to how complete the tool is. A game marked with lots of events mapped has most of the event types recognised and named in the interface, and a game with no events mapped would show you boxes with no meaning attached to them.

Windows, .NET 6 and DirectX 11

The system requirements are short and they narrow the audience sharply.

For end users: Windows 7 SP1, 8.1, 10 or 11, 64-bit only, the .NET Desktop Runtime 6.0 for x64, and a DirectX 11 compatible graphics device, even if you are just modding the first Dark Souls. The README adds a note that even though Elden Ring uses DirectX 12, DS Anim Studio still uses DirectX 11.

For developers the list is the same operating systems with Visual Studio 2022 and the .NET 6.0 SDK for Windows x64. The build instructions are to clone the repository using git clone --recursive, ensure that all NuGet packages are installed, which the README says should in theory happen on its own now, and then build the solution.

The --recursive flag is not decoration. The repository listing shows .gitmodules, a MonoGame directory, a SoulsAssetPipeline directory, a Lib directory and a DSASContentSource directory, so the project pulls in submodules, and a shallow or non-recursive clone will not produce a buildable tree.

The DirectX 11 requirement is the one most likely to surprise. This is a 3D application with a model and animation viewer, built on the MonoGame framework, and it needs a graphics device even for the games that do not use one. On a headless build server or a virtual machine without GPU passthrough, the viewer is the part that will not work, and the editing part may not either.

The reverse-engineering lineage and the licence

The special thanks section is really a provenance document, and it is worth reading as one.

TKGP is credited with making some discoveries about the TAE format and with making SoulsFormats, which the application depends on. Pav is credited with a very large number of TAE events mapped across all the games. Katalash helped with understanding animation files. PredatorCZ reverse engineered the Havok spline-compressed animation format entirely. Horkrux reverse engineered the header and swizzling used on non-PC platform textures. StaydMcButtermuffin is credited with hours of help writing and debugging shaders, and with reversing some basic Dark Souls 3 shaders.

Every one of those is a reverse-engineering effort on a proprietary game format, and the tool is built on them. That is the honest context for a project like this: the file formats are undocumented, the formats are understood because individuals reverse engineered them, and the result is a tool the community could not have had otherwise.

The licence is GPL-3.0, with a LICENSE file at the repository root. For an end user, that means you can run the tool and use its output on the game files however you like. For someone who wants to extend the tool or build on its libraries, GPL-3.0 is a copyleft obligation, and because the tool itself depends on SoulsFormats, the obligation reaches into anything you ship that links it.

The release history is where the project is right now. The recent tags are ver5.0-rc6.1, titled as a Beta, on 2026-05-20, ver5.0-rc6 on 2026-05-19 and ver5.0-rc5.4 on 2026-05-12. The last push was on 2026-05-20, and the repository is not archived.

So the tool is in a release candidate phase on the 5.0 line, with builds tagged as betas, and the last change to the repository was in May 2026. For a modding tool that is a normal place to be, and for anyone building a pipeline on it, it is the fact to plan around.

Editorial conclusion

DS Anim Studio suits a modder who has already got a working ModEngine setup and wants to change what an animation does rather than what it looks like, since it edits the event graph directly and writes the archives without a separate repacking step. It is the wrong tool on anything but 64-bit Windows, for Dark Souls II, or for a designer who wants a general purpose animation editor rather than a format specific one. Verify first that the game you care about is in the support table, that the events you intend to change are among those mapped, and that your copy of the game plus your mod loader can load the edited loose ANIBND file, since the README is explicit that the final step is outside its scope.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. Meowmaritus/DSAnimStudio on GitHub
4. README
5. Releases