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 (the Alkahest.Plugins.Overlay project in this repository).

A significant portion of the protocol knowledge in Alkahest is based on research done by the developers of the tera-data and Shinra Meter projects. The encryption code is based on the defunct TERA emulator project.

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).

Binary releases of Alkahest are not yet available as the project is still in heavy development. If you want to build it, you will need Visual Studio 2017 (any edition) and .NET Framework version 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. Run alkahest-server.exe to start the proxy server (but see below for configuration).

After you've built Alkahest, you will need to configure it. This is done in the alkahest-server.exe.config file in the Build directory.

The most important configuration values you'll need to change are:

• logLevel: Most users should set this to basic. You can set it higher if you don't mind some extra output. Developers should probably leave this at debug.
• loggers: If you don't care much about keeping logs around, remove the file logger from this list to save disk space.
• enablePacketLogs: Unless you're a developer, you should set this to false. Packet logs can get quite big and aren't useful to most users.
• disablePlugins: Remove any plugins from this list that you want to use. You can also add plugins here that you don't want to use.
• region: Set this to na or eu depending on which region you're playing in.

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.

You should also check configuration files in the Plugins directory. Some plugins may require extra configuration.

Note that rebuilding any project in the solution may overwrite configuration files in the Build directory. Make backups if needed.

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.

Note that, by default, Alkahest will adjust your hosts file so that the hostname 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.

To close the Alkahest process properly, press Ctrl-C while the console window is in focus. Don't terminate it in any other way as that will not give Alkahest a chance to undo its changes to your hosts file.