Hello everyone. I’ve seen quite a few requests for skybox swaps or how to do it. So I decided to share the method to do it!
Yes I am aware that schlumpf has a similar guide but it’s quite old and not as beginner-friendly.
You need a few programs:
MyWarcraftStudio:
Filebeam - Beam up that File Scottie!
Lightmapper:
MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service (credits to ~sInX)
DBC Editor:
Filebeam - Beam up that File Scottie!
The first thing you need to do is to find the id of the sky you want to change and the id of the sky you’re going to change TO.
To find the ID of the skies we need the program LightMapper
For this tutorial I’m going to change the sky of Stranglethorn Vale to the sky in Hellfire Peninsula.
Open Lightmapper and select the place where your sky is. Mine is in Azeroth (Eastern Kingdoms). Let it load and then navigate to the zone that you want to swap. Hover over one of the red buttons and a large circle should appear. The bigger the circle, the bigger area the swap will change.
At the bottom of the screen is the ID. Write it down.
Now just browse to the other area and write down the ID.
Now what you want to do is to extract the DBC file Light.dbc from your wow data files.
Open MyWarcraftStudio and then open locale-enGB/US which is located in WOWDir\Data\enGB/US
Make sure the file type is set to “All file (*.*)” at the bottom of MyWarcraftStudio.
Open the folder DBFilesClient and scroll down to Light.dbc. Right click and extract it to wherever.
Close MyWarcraftStudio. We don’t need it more at the moment.
Open the DBC Editor which you downloaded earlier. IF you didn’t, go do it already.
Open Light.dbc and a bunch of numbers should pop up. Fear not! I’ll guide you to where you need to edit.
The first column is the ID of all the skyboxes. Did you write down the IDs from lightmapper? I sure hope you did. Browse to the ID of the sky that you want to change TO. In my case it’s ID 520, Hellfire Peninsula. The only fields you need to worry about are #7, #8, #9, #10 and #11. Write these down as we will need them later.
Scroll to the ID of the skybox you want to change, in my case ID#9, Stranglethorn Vale.
Here’s where you need to insert the numbers from the other sky that you just copied.
Save and close DBC Editor. Congratulations! You’ve successfully swapped a sky. But we’re not quite done yet, because you need to see the effects in-game as well.
So go ahead and open up MyWarcraftStudio again and create a new MPQ archive. It’s under the Pack(P) tab. Name it patch-X.MPQ. X can be any number or letter which is not used i.e. 4-9 or a-z.
Make sure patch is not capitalized but MPQ is.
Go to Pack(P) again and add a new file. Click the “…” sign and browse to the edited Light.dbc
DO NOT click OK yet! We need to add the correct path to the file. Remember where we extracted the dbc file from? From DBFilesClient. So we need add this here as well. It should now say:
DBFilesClient\Light.dbc
Pay attention to the capitalized letters! It’s vital.
Save the archive and then close MyWarcraftStudio. Move the patch file to WOWDIR\Data and then you’re all set
You can now view it in-game!
I hope you liked this guide.
Thanks zantas92 for helping me out