I usually assume PCs did their mundane tasks that they should be used to, without needing the players to explicitly say so.
Unless the player says otherwise, they take the armor off to sleep (because the game poses a penalty if they sleep in armor) and they put it back again in the morning, in the same manner I’m assuming they drink water, stop to eat when they are traveling, and take care of their needs, without the players saying so.
That’s just not the focus of the game
Hot take: just use code.
Most data that you would store in some kind of encoding would be better as code. Code is fast, compact, versatile and easier to work with than a text, or even a binary encoding.
If the problem is that the data is large, and that would slow down the initial load, you can split it in dynamic linked modules, and lazy load them as needed