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From a technical perspective, an XCI is essentially a raw dump of the Switch’s internal game partition, wrapped in a container that includes the required ticket and certificate files for verification. The format is widely documented in the home‑brew community, which has enabled tools for backup, verification, and, more controversially, for creating derived formats such as NSZ.
Since early 2023, several community hubs have sprung up around the compression of Switch titles: pokémon violet xci nsz