VDFS virtual file system
VDFS is the virtual file system used by ZenGin to distribute and store many, but not all, game assets.
Learn more
If you want a more technical documentation of the VDFS format, you can find it on ZenKit site.
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VDF
.vdf
files can usually be found in the Data/
directory of Gothic installations and the game loads them automatically.
Volumes are loaded based on the timestamp specified inside the .vdf
file. The volumes with the latest timestamp are loaded first.
MOD
.mod
files are stored in the Data/ModVDF/
directory and loaded when they are specified in the current game .ini
.
Warning
Notice that two spaces are used as a separator between the .mod
files.
Tools
The community created variety of different modding tools for work with VDFS volumes over the times, such as:
GothicVDFS
Most popular tool for working with VDFS volumes. Allows viewing, extracting and building .vdf
and .mod
archives, and has CLI interface.
VDFS Tool
New tool for working with VDFS volumes, created to support features introduced by Union. Apart from viewing, extracting and building .vdf
and .mod
archives, it also supports optimizing and compressing them.
Comparison
Features | GothicVDFS | VDFS Tool |
---|---|---|
Viewing | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Extracting | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Building | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Compression | ❌ | ✔️ |
CLI | ✔️ | ❌ |