Piercing the secrets of Eye of Azshara

[spoutnik]

Hi everyone !

All the talks lately about the Eye of Azshara and its "illusions" made me interested in visiting it myself, and I thought that what I discovered deserved its own thread.
Warning : there are a LOT of screenshots.

I first wanted to have a look at the minimap to see if there was any kind of secrets. And damn, there was a secret :

There is an enormous chunk of land north of where the dungeon is. And the funniest part ? In the game file, the files related to this chunk of land are present, but in the map's WDT (WDT files specify exactly which map tiles are present in a world), they aren't there.
In short : the WDT looks like this :

Whereas it should be like this :


So, I changed the WDT, and went there. And I quickly found that the minimap was misleading : there are a LOT more things that expected.
For instance, there's the entrance to the Halls of Valor, floating in the air :




The normal Eye of Azshara dungeon is also there, but in a far less advanced state :



There's a ton of floating objects, like Dalaran and a statue :


A cave :


A "Please Delete Me" tree :



And, there's a large chunk of Suramar City :



As the city is so large, most of it is behind the end-game walls This can lead to some surprises, for example this waterfall :



I got stuck inside a building that was underwater


But still, there are parts of the city that can be explored :





I'll most likely get back there again with a flying mount to see if there's more to it

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From what I have seen in the minimaps of the other dungeons, this situation (a large chunk of land "hidden" in the game file) only appears in another dungeon : Black Rook Hold, but in that case, there's nothing to see there, because there isn't any textures or objects.

[OrcWiz]

I dunno what to say! This is awesome... thanks!!! love it!

[Koruun]

Wow! This is a very pleasant surprise! Could you explain WDT in layman's terms, or more specifically why this chunk of the map didn't show on the original chart? I was sad to find that the area I was so desperately trying to get to didn't exist, but this makes up for that


_Kor

[Dovah]

Wow! This is a very pleasant surprise! Could you explain WDT in layman's terms, or more specifically why this chunk of the map didn't show on the original chart? I was sad to find that the area I was so desperately trying to get to didn't exist, but this makes up for that


_Kor

There are ADTs and a WDT (and some other files but they aren't important here.) in every map. ADTs contain terrain and object data and the WDT tells the game which adts to load. Every brown square is 1 adt in Spoutnik's images.

Not sure why this chunk wasn't on the original one, but since it wasn't it isn't possible to reach this area at all unless you edit the wdt because this chunk of land won't be loaded.

However, if it was present in the original WDT you could use something like a CFP to reach it.

[Turkey11]

Is this illegal? Surely editing wow's files to cause huge chunks of land to load isn't allowed?

[Dovah]

Is this illegal? Surely editing wow's files to cause huge chunks of land to load isn't allowed?

Illegal as in breaking the tos? Yes. Just like exploring, exploiting, gold selling ect.

Illegal as in jail time, or being fined / sued? Nope, atleast not in most countries.

Even if it was, I doubt blizzard would waste their time going after you. This is the stuff dopefish was doing back in vanilla. Leaking outlands and other things before it was released and I think all that happened was his videos got taken down from WCM.

[Andros]

Fantastic work and very interesting pictures as always!

I am a bit uncertain about how the files work nowadays - are you still using Ladik's tools to edit the .wdt? Can you load older files into the game? Do you need to modify your launcher in order to bypass MD5-protection still?

Happy to see that you're finding finding stuff in the MPQ, this has always been my favourite kind of exploration.

[Dripperina]

To add smth here:

I went to Court of Stars and managed to get behind the invis walls there, seems like the whole instance is either a phase in Broken Isles or they added all the data. Would be nice if you could take a look into this one aswell.

Managed to walk up to highmountain and jump down to dalaran, which then exposed to be nothing but an illusion and when i hit the ocean i got an instant DC


Greets Dripper

[spoutnik]

I'll have a look at it as soon as possible