ACAT – All Creatures Are Traitors – an April Fool's mod from 2022.

Added 1 hour 35 minutes ago
I found the characteristics, edited them, and when I click save, it asks me to save it to a specific folder. I don't understand how to save the modified data.

This is some kind of game protection. You always have to save files from the data folder to your desktop first, and the extension of your file might change to txt (but you can easily fix this in the archive).

When I'm too lazy to resave anything, I take an xdb file from a mod and paste the contents of the original file into it.

Added 10 minutes ago

In general, I'll chime in. You need to create an exact copy of the folder structure and put the corrected file in it, and then pack it.
The easiest way is to copy the file from the archive to a convenient location, edit it, then create the folder structure (pay close attention to the names and nesting), and pack it. Important: it's better to pack using 7zip, as you need to select settings in WinRAR for it to work, and I don't remember which ones.

By the way, yes, 7zip rarely corrupts files.

I use WinRAR myself, but when I need to combine all the small mods into one large file, I do it through 7zip.

WinRAR corrupts files; I only encountered this once when I uploaded the RTF mod in a WinRAR archive. Then I received a lot of messages about bugs; the strangest bug was with the giant – the texture of his helmet disappeared from the mod! WinRAR ate it!

Regarding recreating the paths, I haven't worried about it for a long time. I take folders from mods; for example, you can extract the path to the characteristics from any ncf mod, but you will need to delete all folders in GameMechanics except creature, and rename the Faction folder