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Table of Contents
Highly interactive
Video Games
Entertainment medium of the future
Extraction
Helldivers 2
DEFCON (Game)
The Crew
Rebel Inc.
F1 Manager 2023
Stop Killing Games
Video Games/Assets/Extraction
Unity Extraction
Scared? Return to overview.
What You Need
I have good news and good news for you. Unity games are by far the easiest games to extract from. Unlike Unreal Engine games which have only recently become easier to extract from, Unity games always have been and probably will continue to be easier to extract from. All you need is one tool:
Step 1 - Setting up Asset Studio
Asset Studio comes with a AssetStudioModGUI.exe file. This is the file used to start Asset Studio. If it is your first time opening Asset Studio and you haven't already installed it, the program may prompt you to “install or update .NET”. Click “Download now” and let it do its thing. When complete, you may have to try launching Asset Studio again. If you did it right, it should no longer give you that prompt and instead you should be seeing the glory of what is the uninitialized Asset Studio.
Step 2 - Loading the Game Folder
Every Unity game has a folder called Gamename_Data (ie. in the case of Air Defender, it's called Air Defender_Data). This folder contains files with the extension .assets, .resS and .resource. Maybe not all at once, but at least some.
In Asset Studio, you will find a menu “File” at the top left - click it, then “Load Folder”. Select the Gamename_Data folder. Asset Studio should then start pulling assets from the files in the Gamename_Data folder.
By using “Load Folder” as described in this tutorial, you will need 16GB of RAM to open a 16GB game. If a game's total file size exceeds your available RAM, you may consider loading the game's archives individually by using “Load File” instead. For a variety of reasons, this is a lot less convenient and I would generally encourage you to avoid that practice unless you don't have a choice.
Step 3 - Extracting
When done, you should be seeing a file tree with the game's archives on the left, called the “Scene Hierarchy”. This lets you browse the assets by archive. Personally, I prefer to switch to list view (“Asset List”) which shows me every single asset in a complete list. If you are looking for a particular type of asset (in my case that's usually Audio), you can sort the list by “Type”. If you are looking for one specific asset you can use the search bar above the list to filter the list by search term. Since you don't know what name was given to a particular asset, you might have to experiment around until you find what you are looking for. Sound is “AudioClip”.
Once you have what you are looking for you can right click the asset (or select multiple assets and then right click) and click on Export. Specify where to export the asset to and hit Enter.
Profit
That's it! I encourage you to just click around a bit in Asset Studio and see what each of the asset types are and do. Unity's nomenclature for different types of assets may deviate from what you expect. Select an asset on the left and preview it using the preview feature on the right to confirm that it is what you are looking for.