The single most requested feature—copying and pasting focuses—has finally been implemented robustly.
From a survey of 20 HOI4 modders (2024): hoi4 focus tree maker upd
| Feature | Usefulness (1-5) | Time saved (est.) | |---------|----------------|-------------------| | Visual node editor | 4.8 | 70% | | Auto-layout (x,y) | 4.2 | 50% | | Updater (patch migration) | 4.9 | 90% | | Localisation sync | 4.0 | 40% | For team mods, this is a nightmare
Key Quote: “The updater alone is worth it—I spent 6 hours manually converting a large tree to the new add_xp format. A tool could do it in 2 seconds.” For team mods
| Feature | Early Text (2017) | Web Tool (2018) | Irony (2020) | Nebula (2025) | |---------|------------------|----------------|--------------|---------------| | Visual drag-and-drop | ❌ | ✅ (basic) | ✅ (full) | ✅ (full) | | Localisation integration | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | | Import existing trees | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | | Custom icon support | Manual | Limited | Yes | Yes + preview | | Modifier validation | ❌ | ❌ | Partial | Full (live) | | Git-friendly export | ✅ (text) | ✅ (text) | ❌ (proprietary) | ✅ (JSON+txt) | | Shared tree support | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ (1.12+) | | Linux/Mac support | Partial (text) | ✅ (web) | ❌ (Windows only) | ✅ (Electron) |
Irony and Nebula store projects in custom binary or complex JSON structures that are difficult to merge using Git. For team mods, this is a nightmare. Many large mods (e.g., Kaiserreich) still hand-edit text files or use custom Python scripts to convert from a proprietary internal format—they never adopted the Focus Tree Maker for core work.