reverse-engineering-anything/docs/godot-pck.md

Godot PCK archives

inspect-artifact and extract-artifact read ordinary Godot PCK formats 2, 3 and 4 without running the game or requiring Godot. Official Godot 4.4.1, 4.6.1 and 4.7.1 produced these respective formats in verification; other engine releases have not been verified. Format 1 is unsupported.

Inspection retains the original header and directory facts, including engine version, flags, declared file count, source paths, offsets and declared MD5. Observed plaintext bytes receive content-addressed SHA-256 identities. MD5 is a container integrity claim, separate from the observed SHA-256. A mismatch fails by default; --integrity-policy record-and-continue retains the observed bytes and an explicit untrusted contradiction. An all-zero MD5 is an unknown claim, not a verified digest.

CLI

Start with a compact summary and keep the complete Evidence bundle:

rea inspect-artifact /artifacts/game.pck --detail summary \
  --evidence_output /evidence/game.json --json
rea extract-artifact /artifacts/game.pck --json

Summary delivery requires --evidence_output and never overwrites that file. The response contains summary Evidence and an evidence_bundle receipt. Without --detail summary, inspection keeps its complete inline delivery. Extraction creates a new temporary directory and returns its path. It rejects unsafe paths and verifies container identity before creating output.

The same CLI commands locate a PCK at the beginning of a file or through its 12-byte EOF trailer in an executable carrier. They do not scan arbitrary payloads or discover packs behind additional trailing signatures. The root content SHA-256 covers the whole carrier; its content classification remains native, while the inventory records the PCK role and exact pack bounds. An EOF marker is only a candidate: an invalid size or a pointed-to location without a GDPC header leaves native classification in place. Once the trailer points to a pack header, malformed or unsupported PCK content remains an error. This recognition boundary follows the Godot loader at pinned source revision 06d1e7a. Ordinary native open_binary detection remains unchanged.

MCP and selected facts

For a standalone pack, call open_binary with its absolute path, then inspect_artifact with {"detail":"summary"}. The complete inspection and its nested inventory stay in the session. Use the summary's normalized_result.parent_evidence_id as the source of subsequent views:

{
  "name": "inspect_analysis_view",
  "arguments": {
    "source": {
      "kind": "retained-evidence",
      "evidence_id": "<parent_evidence_id>"
    },
    "view": {
      "kind": "inventory",
      "collection": "occurrences",
      "logical_paths": ["scripts/main.gd", "project.binary"],
      "fields": [
        "logical_path",
        "declared_integrity",
        "hash_status",
        "format_metadata"
      ],
      "offset": 0,
      "limit": 32
    }
  }
}

Occurrences retain occurrence_id, artifact_id and parent_occurrence_id even when fields is empty. Batch occurrence IDs with occurrence_ids, or join returned content IDs to collection: "nodes", artifact_ids: [...] and fields: ["sha256", "size"]. Filters intersect; an omitted filter selects all available rows and an empty array selects none. Pagination follows the filtered canonical order. Multiple occurrences may share one content ID.

Views reuse authenticated immutable inventory facts and lazy lookup indexes; they do not reopen the source. These are historical observations, including after the source changes or disappears. Close the target with close_binary when finished. To read an exported bundle through the CLI, select its complete inspection record as source: {kind: "inline", evidence: ...} in a JSON request file for rea inspect-analysis-view request.json --json.

Coverage and limits

PCK summaries expose root format metadata, available graph counts, available_hash_status_counts, and source_coverage. Inventory pages preserve producer coverage alongside page coverage. source_complete means all declared retained graph rows are available; it does not establish that an encrypted or otherwise unknown directory was examined. Missing matches in unknown coverage are not evidence of absence.

Encrypted directories retain their header and declared file count with unknown entry coverage. Individually encrypted members retain directory metadata with unknown content identity; REA does not decrypt them. Sparse bundles likewise retain header facts with unknown member coverage. Extraction refuses an unreadable directory or encrypted member. This capability does not recover keys, decode Godot resources, decompile GDScript bytecode, analyze signals, apply patch/removal entries or execute targets.

Readable logical member bytes, including repeated physical ranges, share the ZIP archive expansion policy: at most the larger of 256 MiB or 500 times the PCK's encoded byte span. Embedded carrier bytes do not enlarge that budget. The full directory is checked before any member is yielded, hashed or extracted. Encrypted members are not read and do not consume this plaintext-work allowance. Small bounded aliases remain valid. This is a processing/output resource bound, separate from the directory metadata retention budget and format validity.