Archive

The Archive is the game's record of what a player has met. It is seven sections, each one a codex table of the game: Equipment, Living Beings, Tutorials, Geography, Travel Log, Books and Materials. An entry is locked until its thing is first met, so the Archive is the player's journey written down. The world reads the codex tables into its own slices, opens an entry when a bag's item is first held, and lists every section on its screen with the names of what is open and a "?" for what is not.

How it works

flowchart TD
  DUMP["The dump, outside the repository: the codex tables and the name tables they point at"] --> WRITE["genshin:assets archive"]
  WRITE --> SLICES["generated/archive: one slice per section"]
  WRITE --> WORDS["generated/archiveText: each name in each language"]
  BAG["A bag change: a drop picked up, a gathering point, a wish"] --> SET["setInventory in the world screen"]
  SET --> OPEN["openArchiveEntries: a weapon opens Equipment, any other item Materials"]
  PICK["A drop picked up that is a volume's material"] --> BOOK["openArchiveBook: the volume goes into the Archive, not the bag"]
  OPEN --> PROGRESS["Archive progress: the opened ids of each section"]
  BOOK --> PROGRESS
  SLICES --> SCREEN["Archive screen: sections, their entries, a name or a ?"]
  WORDS --> SCREEN
  PROGRESS --> SCREEN
  SCREEN -->|"an opened volume"| READER["Book reader: title and text, its body read from the hosted game data"]
  BODIES["hosted game data: one bookBody index a language, each volume's text by its body id"] --> READER
  DONE["Main quest 353 finished"] --> UNLOCK{"Unlocked the first time?"}
  UNLOCK -->|"yes"| LOAD["Slices and names read on demand"]
  LOAD --> MENU["Paimon menu's Archive entry enabled"]
  MENU --> SCREEN

The sections

The genshin:assets archive writer reads each section's codex table from the dump, names each entry by the game's English text, and keeps only the entries whose name the English text holds. Each section is written compact as its own slice, and the names of every kept entry go into the world's own chunk per language, as the achievements do.

The codex's own order is kept: each section's entries are sorted by the table's sort order, and the Equipment section lists its weapons before its sets. A codex row the game has left out is not kept.

Opening entries

openArchiveEntries takes the progress and the bag's items and returns the progress with every item's entry opened. A weapon opens its Equipment entry by its id, a material opens its Materials entry by the same id, and an artifact opens none (its set is opened by openArchiveArtifactSets, see Notes). An entry already open stays open, and the progress given is not changed. The world screen's setInventory is the one way the bag changes, so a drop picked up, a gathering point taken and a wish's weapon all open their entries through it.

A defeated enemy opens its Living Beings entry and counts one more kill under it (openArchiveEntry, countArchiveDefeat). Each enemy kind carries its codex entry's id as archiveEntryId, so the count is kept by the entry, and the Living Beings entry shows it as "×N" once open.

Books

A volume's entry is its codex row, and its body is the readable text its document names. BooksCodexExcelConfigData joins to the material's name, to DocumentExcelConfigData's quest text id for the body, and to LocalizationExcelConfigData's readable file for each language; toBookCandidates keeps a row only when all of them resolve. genshin:assets archive writes two things: the Books slice, each volume with its materialId and bodyId, and publishes every body to the hosted game data, one index a language that maps each body's id to its text. Opening a volume fetches its one record in its game language, about 3.5 KB raw on average, through hosted game data; the 267 volumes come to about 14 MB in all, of which a reader takes one language's.

The wiki's rule is that a collected volume goes straight into the Archive rather than the bag, so pickUpWorldDrop opens the volume's entry through openArchiveBook and drops the item. The volume's entry is opened by its id, and the reader opens from the Books tab: the title and the body in the reader's language, on one page, through the GameScreen pattern of components/Archive/BookReader.

The unlock

The Archive opens once its quest is done, the Archon Quest Unexpected Power, main quest 353 in the dump. The Paimon menu's Archive entry is enabled only once that quest's completion is known to the world, so its slices and names are read the first time it unlocks, not with the world. A main quest finished on the quests page is what would complete it, but the world carries only quests 351 and 352, so the Archive stays locked until quest 353 is carried.

The screen

components/Archive/Screen lists the seven sections down the left, each with how many of its entries are open over how many it has, and the selected section's entries on the right in the codex's order. Q and E step between the sections as the quest and achievement tabs do. An entry reads its name once open, and a "?" until then. The section titles are the game's own, its manual text ids for each codex tab.

Notes

• A monster is named by its description. A monster row's own name hash resolves to no text in any language; its name sits under the monster description table, which the dump lacks and which is fetched from AnimeGameData beside the others.
• Only the world's enemies are counted. A monster the world places opens and counts its entry. The living beings of the wildlife are not struck yet, so their entries stay locked.
• An artifact set opens from the artifacts held. openArchiveArtifactSets opens a set's Equipment entry once the artifacts given cover as many distinct slots as the set has pieces, read from reliquarySets.json. It is handed the Equipment entries' ids, so a set with no entry opens nothing, and an opened set stays open once its pieces are gone. Nothing calls it yet: the world keeps no artifacts in the bag until the first artifact drop, and that drop is its caller.
• A tutorial is named by its push tip's title. The push tips codex joins the push tips table, which the dump lacks and which is fetched from AnimeGameData; only the tutorial kind is written, not the monsters' tips.
• Entries show a name only. Descriptions and the pictures of viewpoints wait for their own pages, since they are not part of the names chunk.
• A book's body is not a text map entry. The readable text lives in AnimeGameData's Readable/ folder, one file a volume a language, named by the localization table; the dump keeps the readable folder beside its tables, fetched by pnpm -C scripts genshin:text fetch and never committed. Its volumes are the codex rows that resolve to a body in all fifteen languages: 267 of the codex's 285 rows. The other 18 are the rows the codex marks disused (isDisuse), which the game does not list; none is dropped for a missing name, document or body text.
• A volume picked up before the Archive opens is not kept yet. The books' index is read with the Archive's slices, once the unlock fires. No world drop is a volume's material yet, so nothing is lost today; a book drop needs the index loaded with the world.
• The reader's layout is provisional. No recording or wiki screenshot of the English client's book reader was found on the wiki's Book page or the Archive page, so the reader takes the Handbook's book proportions until the book-reader.mkv recording the roadmap owes is measured from.
• The unlock quest is the wiki's. The Archive waits on Unexpected Power as the Archive's wiki page describes, and the dump's main quest table names that quest under id 353.

Parity

The Archive screen has no parity measure yet. Its places follow the achievements' grid rather than the English client's, and its look waits on the archive-screen.mkv recording the roadmap still owes.

Key files

Sources

• Archive, Genshin Impact Wiki: the Archive's unlock after Unexpected Power, its sections, and entries opened when first obtained or defeated.
• AnimeGameData, the community's per-patch dump: the weapon, reliquary, animal, animal describe, books, material, view, quest and push tip codex tables, and the weapon, material, equip affix, reliquary set and main quest tables their names come from; the monster describe and push tips tables, which the dump lacks and which are fetched beside it; and the document and localization tables and the Readable/ folder, which the books' bodies are read from and which are fetched beside it.