Compactor VS 7-Zip-zstd

You can already do the very basic version of that by using Compactor. Essentially it uses Windows 10's compression algorithms to make your games smaller. A lot of variance between games based on what their files consist of, but I generally get ~25% more space on my drives. Of course, a single update to the game might mean that you have to pack them again, but it's still a pretty good upside with practically no performance loss.

This will also help.

ARK practically needs its own 500GB SSD, specially if you start installing mods on top of having all of the DLCs. However, it's possible to bring down its size massively if you use this software, it works exceptionally well in ARK, being able to reduce it to about half its size. For example, my ARK installation went from like 320 GB to 175 I believe, which is still huge, but only about as much as any modern AAA game.

You can chuck compact.exe at it by hand (use the /exe option), or if you'd prefer to avoid the command line there's my Compactor tool, or the venerable CompactGUI.

They actually don't compress it. Using a simple compressor like this one for instance, the size decreases by half, if not a bit more than it. Tested it with the base game and it went from 200GB to 100GB.

I should press on and finish my Compactor rewrite, I guess.

7zip, microsoft powertoys (useful utilities n stuff), hyper-v (VM stuff), OBS, optimizer (https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer) (privacy stuff + system tweaks), compactor (https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor) (uses windows compact.exe and provides a GUI for a otherwise cmd based tool) also qbittorrent

Do you consider rar a standard? It's a pretty good format, even though there aren't any good open-source implementations. But if you're willing to pay for your software, WinRAR command line versions are available for most platforms.

7zip is the most obvious free alternative. There is also a 7zip fork that offers zstd [1]. The command line experience for 7zip isn't very good however.

1: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

Check out https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

There's also this fork which supports additional compressions: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

7-zip is actually not a bad option, but I'd strongly advise using the fast-lzma2 codec, because, well, it is waay faster, and might even give you better ratios, depending on how you use it. You can find an implementation here, and it is compatible with traditional 7-zip (you can decompress it on any computer with any newish version of 7z)

Hi, PeaZip can use McMilk's additional compression codecs for 7z format (Zstandard, Brotli, Lizard, etc), https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

You can extract the files yourself with 7Zip. You can install 7Zip from here and then install this plugin to extract ZStandard files, or you can directly install the modified 7Zip with the plugin already from that plugin page. Then simply open the zst file you downloaded with 7Zip and extract it.