Data Mining Dragon Nest PAK/DNT Files

Sometimes in Dragon Nest it is hard to make sense of exactly how things work. For example what is the enemy elemental resistance? How can someone work out critical% from critical amount? What is the cap for final damage?

These questions and more can be answered by extracting DNT files from the PAK files found in the dragon nest folder. Each DNT file is a table of data that explains some aspect of the game.

Before you continue you should know that data mining is against the terms of service. It is however common place. At least once a month data is posted on various official forums that was obtained through data mining. There are also been several simulators that work using data mined values. The author of one such simulator made contact with a publisher who publicly said his use of the data was OK but they would not comment on other use.
 
There are other data files in the PAKs that may be useful for certain purposes but this guide will not focus on those. One in particular is uistrings.xml this file contains names of all things and will be in the local language for your version of the game. It will be useful to extract so that you can make sense of the data.

Extracting DNT files:

The method I use is one that was shown to me by another player. It was a little confusing at first but works well with the help of a few scripts.

• First download the quickbms tool that can be found here: http://aluigi.altervista.org/quickbms.htm
• Now you need a BMS script that specifies the format of dragon nest files. Create a file call script.txt in the same folder as the bms tool and paste in the following:

IDString "EyedentityGames Packing File 0.1"
goto 0x104
get Files long
get noffset long 
goto noffset 
for i = 0 < FILES
getdstring NAME 0x100
get ZSIZE long
get SIZE long
get ZSIZE1 long
get OFFSET long
get UNK3 long
getdstring NULL1 0x28
clog NAME OFFSET ZSIZE SIZE
next i

• Finally you need to run QuickBMS from the command line. Here is the command line I use to extract dnt files from a pak file:

quickbms -f "\*.dnt" script.txt C:\games\DragonNest\Resource00.pak extracted_files

Repeat the above command on each of the PAK files and you will extract all the files. Note that sometimes the PAK files contains a zero byte version of a DNT file. Just be careful when you extract not to overwrite with these.

Viewing DNT files:

• Open this viewer in your browser: http://spacem.github.io/dntviewer 
• Use the browse button to find a DNT file to view
• If you want you can also open the uistrings.xml (with the browse button on the right side) then click auto-translate to apply strings to some columns
• Use the provided grid or export the file as CSV to view in excel or import into google docs, etc.

Other Tools for Extracting/Viewing:

Dragon-Nest-Resource-Inspector:
https://github.com/Aelphaeis/Dragon-Nest-Resource-Inspector
This software allows you to directly open a pak file and browse for dnt files. I believe if you download the source code you will find a zip that contains the executable.

dncli:
https://github.com/ben-lei/dn-maze
This is a tool used to convert files for this simulator but I believe it can be used for extracting for other purposes.

Some Interesting DNT Files

itemtable_reboot.dnt, itemtable_equipment.dnt, itemtable_cash.dnt, etc
- these tables contain lists of items from the game

monstertable_nest.dnt
- contains stats of the bosses from nests

jobtable.dnt
- contains the classes and their specializations

 appellationtable.dnt
- contains titles

dailymissiontable.dnt
- scheduled achievements