unp4k

unp4k

These tools allow users to open, decrypt, and extract data from Star Citizen .p4k files.

Installation:

1. Download unp4k-suite-v3.3.x.zip
2. Right click the zip and select Properties
3. Under the General tab, check the Unblock checkbox at the bottom if it exists, and click ok
4. Extract the selected zip to your desired installation directory

NOTE: unforge currently requires .Net Framework 4.6.2 or greater to run. If you receive the error Method not found: '!!0[] System.Array.Empty()'. you will need to install this framework.

Quickstart:

1. Drag Data.p4k from the Starcitizen\LIVE folder, directly onto unp4k.exe

Advanced Command Line Usage:

1. Launch a command line, and navigate to the unp4k directory
2. Execute unp4k.exe c:\path\to\data.p4k [filter] where filter is a keyword used to filter the results (the default filter is *.*)

NOTE: The filter does not fully support wildcards. To extract files of a certain type, you may use *.ext as the filter, but no further wildcard functionality exists.

unp4k.fs - Virtual Filesystem

unp4k.fs mounts a .p4k or .dcb file as a read-only virtual drive using Dokan, letting you browse and read Star Citizen game assets directly in Windows Explorer without extracting anything to disk.

Prerequisites: Dokan must be installed.

Usage:

unp4k.fs.exe [path-to-file] [mount-point]

• path-to-file — path to a .p4k or .dcb file. Defaults to Data.p4k in the current directory.
• mount-point — drive letter or empty directory to mount to (e.g. S: or C:\sc-data). Defaults to <filename>.unp4k next to the input file.

Examples:

unp4k.fs.exe
unp4k.fs.exe "D:\Roberts Space Industries\StarCitizen\LIVE\Data.p4k"
unp4k.fs.exe "D:\Roberts Space Industries\StarCitizen\LIVE\Data.p4k" S:
unp4k.fs.exe game.dcb X:\virtual

Once mounted, CryXML files are served as standard XML and DataForge records are extracted as XML on demand. Press Q or Esc to unmount and exit.

Interactive options (while mounted):

Key	Option	Default	Range
1	Max reference depth — how deeply nested DataForge references are followed	1	1–1000
2	Max pointer depth — recursion safety limit for DataForge structures	library default	10–1000
3	Max nodes — node count safety limit per DataForge record	library default	1000–1000000

File Format Overview:

The p4k files used by Star Citizen are Zip archives.

Star Citizen supports data in multiple modes inside the archive, including STORE, DEFLATE, and custom support for ZSTD.

Star Citizen also implements bespoke encryption over some of the data inside the archive - this can all be decrypted with the same public key that is utilized by CryEngine based games for various encryption routines within the engine.

Inside the p4k file, XML files are often stored as CryXML rather than raw XML.

CryXML is a basic serialized XML format which unforge.exe is able to deserialize.

Inside the p4k file, there is also a game.dcb file, which is a bespoke database format, with similarities to CryXML.

This is the product of what is known internally as “DataForge”, and is also able to be converted/extracted using the unforge.exe tool.