CASC Gateway

What is CASC?

Blizzard stores World of Warcraft game data (images, sounds, music, models, interface code, items, spells, achievements, etc) in archives on player computers. These archives are in a file system format called CASC. There are a variety of tools made by the community for extracting data from these archives.

What is the CASC Gateway?

This tool allows you to extract individual files from World of Warcraft data archives with a simple HTTP web request. There's no need to download and run a CASC tool on your local machine.

How do I use it?

First, you should be aware of what files are available. We recommend a community-maintained list of filenames from WoW.tools.

You can fetch files by their numeric ID, or by the file name when available. Just add that on to the root of this domain, and load it in your browser or send an HTTP GET request from a script.

Anything fancy going on?

You'll get the latest version of the file returned to you. If you try to load a BLP file (Blizzard's typical image format) from your browser, we'll auto-convert it to a PNG. If you fetch a BLP file via a script, however, you'll get the file unmodified.

Got some examples?

Any limitations?

So if you need to extract a lot of files or something, you should get a proper CASC extractor elsewhere. It will have caching benefits and be able to reference WoW game data on your hard drive for improved performance. This tool needs to download the data from Blizzard upon first request, decode it, then serve it back to you, which adds some lag.

Also, this is hosted on a cheap VPS and can get overloaded with many requests, so please don't abuse it. Please don't hotlink images from here, even though it'll work. Your page will load slower than if you had just downloaded and hosted the images yourself.

Why?

This project came about because I wanted to see it exist: some tool where you can HTTP GET any CASC file path and it just comes back. It annoys me that there are so many hoops to jump through to access the WoW game data file system. I'm not saying an HTTP gateway was a great idea, I just had to see how it would turn out. ;)

Whose fault is this?

CASC Gateway was created by Erorus, a developer who's also behind The Undermine Journal, Booty Bay Gazette, and Does the API Work. You can browse a list of other projects on everynothing.net.