Data sources & licences

ForeverDiff ships data from three places: the game client's own database tables, a community-maintained world layer under the MIT licence, and observations contributed by players. Each is named below with the licence it carries and, where one exists, the exact commit the shipped data was built from.

Blizzard client database tables

Every item, spell, talent, item set, enchantment, faction, achievement, class, race, skill, zone and dungeon record on this site is read out of the game client's own database tables for the build being browsed, and rendered into the tooltips you see. Nothing is transcribed from patch notes and nothing is guessed. The builds themselves are fetched from Blizzard's public content-distribution network by version.

One known limit: where a build hides a record's name behind a hash, every page and list shows it as Unnamed <Type> #<id> rather than the hash, but a search entry carries the name and no flag to say it was hashed, so the search box would show it — no build published here ships hashed names today.

What a pre-release client does not state

A build under development does not hand over everything it will ship, in two different ways, and from outside they look identical. Some of its tables are partially encrypted: those rows cannot be read at all, not their values and not even their ids. And some of its table layouts simply have fewer columns. Forever Beta 1.60.1.70532's item layout carries no minimum damage, maximum damage, durability, resistance or stat-bonus column, and its spell effect layout carries no base-points or die-sides column, so every value read out of them comes back empty.

Because the two are indistinguishable from here, no page on this site claims which one it met. A record the newer build has no row for is withheld, never removed; a value it carries no column for reads “Forever Beta 1.60.1.70532 does not state this value.”, never zero. Withheld entries are counted apart from removed ones on the front page and in every change report, they are never painted as a change, and the page shows the last build that could state the value instead. Encryption is named only where a whole record is missing from a table this build ships encrypted, which is the one case the data can point at. Which tables those are, and how many sections of each, is listed per build on the Builds page.

ForeverDiff is an unofficial fan site. World of Warcraft, Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Game data, names and icons belong to Blizzard Entertainment and are shown for reference. A rights holder's request is acted on promptly: hello@foreverdiff.gg.

pfQuest — the world layer (MIT)

Quest text and objectives, creature and object names, where things spawn, who sells what and what drops from whom are not in the client's tables. They come from pfQuest, a community database released under the MIT licence, read at a pinned commit and rebuilt only when that pin is moved deliberately.

Only the derived records inside each build folder are published, together with a provenance.json naming the source, its licence and the commit above. The intermediate tables, which are close to a verbatim copy of the upstream database, are built locally and are not uploaded.

What a drop number means

pfQuest records two different things and the site has to keep them apart. Some rows are a per-kill chance: the layer watched a creature and recorded how often it handed an item over, which is what Hogger's Linen Cloth at 23.33% means. Others come through a shared loot table — the layer's refloot, a list of [table, chance] pairs — where the number says which item of a group the kill hands over, not how often the kill hands anything over. That is why a boss's four pieces add to exactly 100%.

Those are labelled Share, and each one reads 40% of table, wherever the site shows one: a dungeon's loot table, a creature's drops, an item's Dropped by and Contained in tabs. Only a directly recorded per-kill rate is shown as a plain percentage. A row the reference table lists without any number at all reads ref, and a contributed sighting under the five kills a percentage needs reads seen.

The MIT licence, in full

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2017-2021 Eric Mauser (Shagu)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Contributed observations

Players running the ForeverDiff Collector addon record what they see in the world — quest text, creature and object names, vendor stock, loot — and upload it. No account, character or player name is collected. Contributed observations are published under the same terms as the rest of the site's data.

Community preview: talent trees

Until a Forever beta client can be datamined, the talent calculator offers a clearly labelled preview source read from BlizzCon 2026 footage by wowforevertalents.com. It is a person's reading of a video, it is attributed on every screen that shows it, and it is replaced by the real trees the day the client ships them.

Tooling

These are how the client's files are opened. None of them is a source of game facts.

• TACTSharp — reads Blizzard's content-distribution archives, so a build can be fetched by version rather than installed.
• DBCD — decodes the client's DB2 database tables.
• WoWDBDefs — the community column definitions that give those tables their field names.

What is not a source

ForeverDiff does not read, copy or derive anything from other database sites, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them. Server-emulation database dumps are excluded by design: what the pipeline reads is the MIT-licensed redistribution named above, never a database released under terms this site cannot honour.

The same notices ship in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md in the repository, which is the copy of record.