I’ve read that PAK file are encrypted and can be unpacked with a key, what is the procedure to that? I had a version of an instanced environment, that I can’t retrieve and would like to get it from a build version.
I’m pretty sure .pak files are not encrypted unless specified when cooking the project. The bad news is, once the data is cooked into a .pak, it is not longer readable by the editor. You can unpack the .pak with unrealpak from the command line but the data is no longer usable by conventional means. If you google “ue viewer” there is a program that can read models and textures from Unreal Engine games but it cannot read maps and transforms of objects from a project, so it is pretty much impossible.
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When you say “by conventional means” can you be more specific? Can you view the elements in Unreal? I don’t care if the upper transforms of the elements are changed.
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To be honest, it sounds like you’re trying to illegally rip content out of a game that uses UE. I can think of no other situation where someone would need to manually decrypt a PAK file…
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There is no reason to get assumptions, I’ve asked a technical question, If you don’t have anything valuable to contribute, you are only generating noise to this thread.
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we get a thread like this every month or so, mostly with the same reasoning. (Honestly HOW does someone lose all their source art?). even if you do unpack it, you will only get the art. blueprints/levels/settings/WhatHaveYou, cant be reconstructed. i have played around with most of the tools that allow unpacking (was a TA for 2 years and we had to verify students were not using other peoples assets). nothing of the “Project” could be recovered, just the art.
The hex key for encrypted pak is inside the game.exe and takes just a few minutes to find.
I really wouldn’t promote that because it’s obvious that the OP is trying to rip assets from PAK files. I mean seriously, like ixicalibur said, who magically loses all of their source content…
Whatever… Let him extract intellectual property and have his *ss sued 
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Helping someone commit a crime with this excuse is just weird. Loudmouth.
OK, here is a reason I need to inspect a pak: I work in AEC and was given an unreal 4 file that lets me walk through the site. I’d like to map some of the textures for the context buildings in Rhino 6. The team member who generated this file is located in France, I am in Japan. So there a time zone issue that will delay my work if I go to him to procure the original assets. Also, it is the end of July, and anyone who has worked with European team members knows that this is vacation season, and it just so happens that this office is closed for the next few weeks. Oh yeah, we are the project lead, so contractually we have access to the source material. So the question remains: can a .pak file be inspected? Save the moralizing ■■■■■■■■/pithy remarks about file management and how your workflow has never once resulted in data loss issues among complex international teams.
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@Hamdoctor First reply -
From what I have gleamed from your post it would seem that you do not have in-editor source control setup.
This is an absolute must have for any sort of team, international otherwise.
See Source Control.
We personally use Perforce.
See Using Perforce as Source Control.
me personally I’d like to check to see the end result how the engine packed and compressed my content so i can balance my compression settings to hit my 100meg APK limit on google play
a tool that did what the size map tool does in engine would be awesome - put in a pak file and boom heres whats in here and heres its size relative to others
I read this post…obviously because I must have the same question.
I am only interested in playing with .pak files to make a hack on my own private server.
Which isn’t illegal nor even against this specific games terms of use…
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Should help you out:
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As a professional game developer I cant count on 1 hand the number of times we have had to inspect whats inside a package. Often to fix issues with the paclaging process. Discover missing files etc.
Anyone who thinks this is ONLY illegal is wrong. And most likely only on this thread because they are seeking some sort of ILLEGAL information.
UnrealPak.exe comes with everything you need to add files to the archive, remove files from the archive, list, extract, etc. It is essentially a distributed file system.
Using a file system is neither legal nor illegal. And I strongly agree that anyone who wants to continue that argument should do so on legal.com and stay the hell out of everyones way.
Wish I could remmebr the Command line, was wrong in thinking someone surely posted it in this thread.
Try this for a list of commands, Which should always be up to date: unrealpak.exe -help
UnrealPak <PakFilename> -Test
UnrealPak <PakFilename> -List -ExcludeDeleted]
UnrealPak <PakFilename> <GameUProjectName> <GameFolderName> -ExportDependencies=<OutputFileBase> -NoAssetRegistryCache -ForceDependsGathering
UnrealPak <PakFilename> -Extract <ExtractDir> -Filter=<filename>]
UnrealPak <PakFilename> -Create=<ResponseFile> [Options]
UnrealPak <PakFilename> -Dest=<MountPoint>
UnrealPak <PakFilename> -Repack -Output=Path] -ExcludeDeleted] [Options]
UnrealPak <PakFilename1> <PakFilename2> -diff
UnrealPak <PakFolder> -AuditFiles -OnlyDeleted] -CSV=<filename>] -order=<OrderingFile>] -SortByOrdering]
UnrealPak <PakFilename> -WhatsAtOffset [offset1] [offset2] [offset3] …]
UnrealPak <PakFolder> -GeneratePIXMappingFile -OutputPath=<Path>
Options:
-blocksize=<BlockSize>
-bitwindow=<BitWindow>
-compress
-encrypt
-order=<OrderingFile>
-diff (requires 2 filenames first)
-enginedir (specify engine dir for when using ini encryption configs)
-projectdir (specify project dir for when using ini encryption configs)
-encryptionini (specify ini base name to gather encryption settings from)
-extracttomountpoint (Extract to mount point path of pak file)
-encryptindex (encrypt the pak file index, making it unusable in unrealpak without supplying the key)
-compressionformat[s]=<Format,format2,…]> (set the format(s) to compress with, falling back on failures)
-encryptionkeyoverrideguid (override the encryption key guid used for encrypting data in this pak file)
-sign (generate a signature (.sig) file alongside the pak)
-fallbackOrderForNonUassetFiles (if order is not specified for ubulk/uexp files, figure out implicit order based on the uasset order. Generally applies only to the cooker order)
Happy Coding.
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I actually am trying to do the same to get the files from the very first game i made but i created it on a university computer and i only saved the .exe files to a usb drive, yeah stupid mistake by me and the computers are wiped every month so i cant get the files back so thats why i would need this information personally.
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how do I unpack the uassest files from pak file , the game I created using encrypt code , but all my project gone when pc been formatted , I still managed to create the all maps etc but my models and all sound was in the pak files , there is a way I can extract the data using the unrealpak?
I agree with DanHollingsworth I came here because we’re trying to debug why some feature does not work in packaged builds but does in PIE and, in order to check if the asset is correctly packed at its proper location, we try to extract the pak file. We wouldn’t rip anybody’s IP but our own if we succeeded
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Seriously, there’s plenty of reasons why someone would like to inspect their own .pak files.
I’m working on mod support for a game, and I need this information to be able to make sure I’m generating the files properly.
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