Quake PAK

File Format
Name	Quake PAK
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Game data files Quake PAK
Extension(s)	.pak
Magic Bytes	PACK
Kaitai Struct Spec	quake_pak.ksy

Quake .pak is the container file format for storing game assets in versions 1 and 2 of ID Tech game engine and some derivatives of it, including following games:

• Quake
• Quake 2
• Hexen II
• Half-Life

Later Id Tech games (starting from Quake 3/ID Tech 3) switched to ZIP format with .pk3 extension.

Description

This file format is very simple. File starts with PACK magic string (4 octets), then 4-byte offset to file table and 4-byte length (measured in bytes) of it.

File table consists of entries consisting of:

• file name, including path: 56-byte null-terminated string. No leading slash.
• file contents offset (from beginning of .pak file), 4 bytes
• file contents length, 4 bytes

All numbers are little-endian. Since each file entry of the table consists of 64 bytes, the header's file table length (offset 8 to 11) must always be a multiple of 64, and most likely never 0. If the 4 bytes for the file table offset (offset 4 to 7) would be 0x02 0x00 0x00 0x00 or 0x03 0x00 0x00 0x00 it would also match Git's .pack files. If the first byte is 0x00 it would also match Packdir.

Software

• Game Extractor
• Open-source library in Free Pascal

Sample files

• dexvert samples — archive/quakePAK

Links

• .pak — Quake Wiki
• Quake PAK Format (from archive.org)