fmodel-mcp

The driver was internal: I was making 30+ FModel queries per session for the Aline boss fight and the manual GUI loop was wrecking pace. The MCP exposes the operations Claude actually needs — browse, search, export by class, dump materials — and turns “5 minutes per query” into one tool call.

The architecture choice that paid off was splitting the work in two: a standalone .NET CLI that links CUE4Parse and prints JSON, and a thin Python MCP server that invokes the CLI as a subprocess. CUE4Parse is .NET-only; the Python MCP ecosystem (FastMCP) is far more mature than the .NET one — neither side had to bend to host the other. As a side effect the CLI is useful on its own for ad-hoc scripting.

What I’d do differently: ship config.json.example from day one instead of baking my PC’s paths into Config.Load defaults. That’s now done, but it’s the kind of thing that should be obvious before going public.