Ongoing Arabic Text Reversal Issues – Kindly Requesting Klei’s Help

[DiNaSoR]

Hello everyone!

I’ve been working on improving Arabic support in Oxygen Not Included, especially around text reversal, placeholders, and numeric units (like kg/s, W, etc.). You might have seen our earlier discussion here:
Help Needed: Reversing Arabic Translations in Oxygen Not Included Mod

In that thread, we tried everything from Harmony patches on Localization.ReverseText to complex regex solutions that detect numbers and placeholders. We even tried forcibly skipping reversal for braces {...}. While these attempts partially helped, we’ve consistently run into stubborn issues:

• Placeholders (like {FlowRate}) still end up reversed.
• Numbers and units (e.g., 2000 W becomes W 0002 in some cases).
• Even bracket swapping (like ( to )) can behave oddly in certain UI elements.

We eventually concluded (thanks to the suggestions and code snippets from the community in that thread!) that these problems most likely need an official fix from Klei. The game’s built-in ArabicSupport.dll is already doing a basic right-to-left transformation, but it’s too “all-or-nothing.” It reverses everything without skipping placeholders or selectively handling digits. Even advanced modding solutions aren’t fully reliable because the final text is reversed after placeholders and other strings are merged together.

Could we kindly request that Klei look into allowing exceptions for content inside braces {...}, or at least introducing a more flexible approach to skipping numeric units? It would be amazing if ArabicSupport.dll had an official way to say, “Don’t reverse anything in curly braces” or “Keep numeric units intact.” That way, Arabic text can be displayed in the correct right-to-left order, without turning important game placeholders and units into scrambled text.

Many of us want to provide a smoother, more accurate Arabic localization for Oxygen Not Included. We’ve put in a ton of hours experimenting with manual patches and partial solutions, but it feels like we’re hitting engine-level limitations that only an official update can solve.

Thanks for hearing us out, and I really appreciate all the hard work Klei has already put into localization support. If there’s any chance to tweak ArabicSupport.dll or provide another built-in mechanism, it would make the Arabic experience in ONI so much more natural.

If anyone in the community or dev team has more insight or suggestions, please let us know! We’d love to collaborate and help test any potential solutions.

Much gratitude!
♥ A dedicated Arabic localization fan and modder ♥