I made a few games in college and only have the game.exe file for my game Asylum17 as a group project, and have been unable to restore it.
When using unrealpak.exe there are no pak files, just a uproject.
I dont know if it is possible to restore this tho.
It’s not illegal unless you use the assets commercially, or try to sell them.
Unpacking games is also something you would have to do for modding. Modding games are not illegal, so you need to understand the difference between “ripping” and getting access to.
Me for instance are also trying to Unpack certain games to be able to mod them for fun.
I would really much like to be able to mod a map for some games to change the foliage and trees, as well as some other landscape details.
And upgrade textures and materials on meshes, and perhaps also change them.
There is lot’s of fun to mod a SP games. So it would be really useful with a guide on how to unpack and make the assets show up in the project contents after opening the project. And how to repack your changes back into the same .pak files again…
If the .Pak files are named only .Pak they can be unpacked using CMD.
“C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.3 (or 5.4)\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealPak.exe” “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common*GAME*\Content\Paks*FILE*.pak” -extract “Unpack location”
! Include the " and do net remove them!
If there is a different name to the .pak other then just.pak you might need to add the encryping key to the unpack command. Either before or after “-extract”
Beware that some games might come with the .uproject if all .pak files are unpacked, and could be a c++ project. And there is most likely plugins that will give you a error.
So you need to edit the uproject file and remove the modules part if you can’t rebuild to restore the modules that are missing. Then set plugins missing to false, or remove the lines for them.
Then delete the plugins in the folder.
Also, you might need to edit the config files and remove anything there that is giving a engine crash.