Files - Tkachov/ALERT GitHub Wiki

• toc — lists all archives and assets, storing where to find those assets in those archives. DAT1 format, sometimes zlib-compressed. In modding, is tweaked to include mods archives.

• dag — defines dependency graph for assets. DAT1 format, sometimes zlib-compressed. Includes assets' names, thus is useful when making 'hashes.txt'. Assets are not required to be listed here, so it usually stays unchanged in modding. IIRC there was some confirmation that it's used only to increase assets lookup speed.

• archives — different files that are listed in toc, typically from asset_archive (or d) directory. Can be uncompressed stream of different assets concatenated together, or the same stream in DSAR format. Games can work with both just fine. In modding, typically those archives stay unchanged, with new archives added to toc via mod manager.

As "talk is cheap", pages for the files start by linking the code that works with them. It works, so it's the most precise documentation there is.