Universal Tree Format

Binary format used by most content assets in Freelancer. Stores hierarchical structure with named nodes (called entries) and arbitrary fixed length binary content. Not too dissimilar to XML but significantly simpler.

Header is at least 56 bytes.

Offset	Type	Name	Description
0x00	uint32	Signature	FourCC signature. Must always be 0x20465455 (UTF ).
0x04	uint32	Version	UTF version. Must always be 0x101.
0x08	uint32	Tree offset	Typically 56 as tree follows right after header.
0x0C	uint32	Tree size	Bytes used by tree. Divide by entry size to get number of entries in tree.
0x10	uint32	Unused entry offset	Skip reading entries to offset, usually is 0.
0x14	uint32	Entry size	Byte length of single entry record in tree.
0x18	uint32	Names offset	Location of entry names dictionary.
0x1C	uint32	Names allocated size	Bytes pre-allocated for names.
0x20	uint32	Names used size	Bytes actually used by dictionary.
0x24	uint32	Data start offset	Entry values start offset

Entry size value must be 44, otherwise Freelancer will not process the file and in some cases crash.
Unused offset and size are non-zero in few Freelancer files where the nodes seem were removed yet entry data remained. An example of such are several fighter ships shield .3db files.

Entry

Usually 44 bytes

Offset	Type	Name	Description
0x00	uint32	Next sibling offset
0x04	uint32	Dictionary name offset
0x08	uint32	Entry type	Directory (0x10) or file (0x80) (see: Win32 API dwFileAttributes)
0x0C	uint32	Sharing attributes	Ignored - Set to zero
0x10	uint32	Child or data offset	Offset to child entry if type is 0x80 or to data if type is 0x10
0x14	uint32	Allocated data size	Allocated data byte length.
0x18	uint32	Used data size	Actually used data byte length.
0x1C	uint32	Uncompressed data size(?)	Should always be equal to `Used data size`.
0x20	uint32	Creation time
0x24	uint32	Last access time
0x28	uint32	Last write time

In theory timestamps can be cut to save some space for UTFs with a lot of entries. The game doesn’t mind.

Names

Dictionary of names is simply a sequence of NUL terminated C-strings. Characters are limited to ASCII range.

In Freelancer UTFs first byte is always 0. Entries present in tree but no longer referenced (marked for deletion?) have their name offsets at 0 as well.

Alignment

Freelancer UTFs do 32-bit alignment by adding padding to names dictionary and to each data if necessary. The game however does not require alignment and can work with non-aligned UTFs. Creating non-aligned UTFs will cause certain community-made modding tools to fail