Alkahest is a proxy server for TERA. At its core, it's simply a server that relays communication between the game client and server. Its main usefulness lies in its extensibility; you can write plugins that can inspect packets, modify them, and send newly constructed packets. This opens up a lot of possibilities for integrating the game with other software, as well as adding entirely new features to the game, so long as you can do so within the framework of the game's network protocol.
This project was started out of a need to have a program similar to tera-proxy, but written in a .NET language so that it could easily use the Windows Presentation Foundation libraries for the purpose of making a UI overlay for the game. It has since grown to be a more general-purpose framework for TERA modding, featuring tools and APIs for accessing data stored with the game client.
- .NET plugins: Plugins can be written in any .NET language, including C#, F#, Nemerle, etc.
- Client analysis tools: Data mining tools allow extraction of opcodes, system messages, and data center keys, as well as decryption of the client's data center files.
- Complete region support: All TERA regions are supported: EU, JP, KR, NA, RU, and TW.
- Fast packet serialization: Specialized serialization functions are automatically generated and compiled at runtime, making packet serialization fast and painless.
- Packet editing: Packets can easily be intercepted, modified, or even constructed from scratch, in either raw or typed form.
- Packet logging: Compressed packet logs can be saved for later parsing and analysis.
- Packet parser: An offline packet parsing tool can generate text dumps of packet logs and analyze raw packet structures to find arrays and strings.
- Python scripting: One of the default plugins implements Python scripting support using IronPython.
- Reusable core library: The Alkahest server is only a wrapper around the
Alkahest.Corelibrary which can be embedded in any .NET application.
Installers and archives are available from the releases page.
If you want to build Alkahest from source, you will need Visual Studio 2017
(any edition) and .NET Framework 4.6.1. Simply open Alkahest.sln and build
it with the Debug + Any CPU configuration. All build artifacts will end up
in the Build directory.
After you've built Alkahest, you will need to configure it. This is done in the
alkahest-server.exe.config file. You can find that file in the Build
directory if you've built Alkahest from source, or in the directory you
installed Alkahest to.
The most important configuration values you'll need to change are:
logLevel: Most users should set this tobasic. You can set it higher if you don't mind some extra output. Developers should probably leave this atdebug.loggers: If you don't care much about keeping logs around, remove thefilelogger from this list to save disk space.disablePlugins: Remove any core plugins from this list that you want to use. You can also add plugins here that you want to temporarily disable, such as thepacket-loggerplugin which is only useful to developers.region: Set this toeu,jp,kr,na,ru, ortw, or if you're playing in EU,de,fr, oruk.
There are many other configuration values that you can play with, but you don't need to change them if all you want is to use Alkahest for a single TERA client on your local machine.
If you want to run Alkahest with tera-proxy, see this wiki page.
Once you've configured Alkahest, run alkahest-server.exe to start it. Once
Alkahest finishes initializing, and if everything went fine, you should be able
to just start TERA and play.
For some regions, you may need to log into TERA first, then start Alkahest just before actually launching the game. This is necessary because some regions use the same host name for logging in and for retrieving the server list, the latter of which gets redirected by Alkahest. For KR specifically, you need to start Alkahest right after launching the game, during the splash screen.
Note that, by default, Alkahest will adjust your hosts file so that the
host name that the TERA launcher fetches the official server list from will be
redirected to wherever Alkahest is configured to be listening. This is
necessary so that Alkahest can give the client a modified server list where all
IP addresses point to where Alkahest is listening for each server. Modifying
the hosts file requires administrative privileges, so you must run Alkahest
as administrator.
The plugin system in Alkahest is what adds actual functionality to the proxy
server. Plugins are installed by dropping them into the Plugins directory.
A list of known plugins is maintained on this wiki page. If you're interested in plugin development, see this wiki page.
Technically, using Alkahest could be considered a violation of the terms of service for all TERA regions. Historically, most publishers have chosen to tolerate programs such as Shinra Meter, tera-proxy, Alkahest, etc as long as they're not used for malicious purposes. You'll almost certainly be fine as long as you don't do anything really stupid. That said, I take absolutely no responsibility if you do manage to get yourself banned.
Also, Alkahest is meant to enable players to write useful plugins that can enhance the TERA experience. It is not meant to enable cheating of any sort. It may or may not be the case that some aspects of TERA's network protocol can be exploited due to poor design (mainly trusting the client too much). Either way, I do not condone using Alkahest for this, and I certainly won't support such usage. I'd encourage people to report such exploits to the TERA developers (usually through whichever publisher your server is at).
Please see ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md.
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Please see LICENSE.md.