Your First: DBC Edit

For this tutorial, we will be using the WDBX editor to make a very simple DBC edit that just changes the name of the Fireball spell.

Grabbing our DBC files

To edit DBC files, we need to extract it from the clients MPQ archives and place it inside our custom patch under the directory DBFilesClient. You have two options for extracting DBC files:

  1. By opening your clients locale MPQs with the MPQ editor and extract files from the DBFilesClient subdirectory

  2. Copy already extracted DBCs from your servers dbc directory.

These files should be identical, so whichever method you choose doesn’t matter. For this tutorial, we are looking for the file Spell.dbc. We want to move this file into our client patch directory befor editing it, such that the file patch-4.MPQ/DBFilesClient/Spell.dbc exists (or any other patch number/letter we chose for our custom patch).

Setting up WDBX

Download the latest WDBX Editor from the GitHub Repository, the file you want is the zip file WDBX.Editor.zip. Extract this file somewhere on your computer and start the program. You will be faced with the following screen:

Let’s open our DBC file by navigating to File -> Open Files, then selecting our Spell.dbc

WDBX will now ask us to select what version of the game this DBC belongs to, and we’ll just select WoTLK here of course.

It will take the program a few seconds to open this file, as Spell.dbc is a very big DBC file. Once finished, we should have a screen like this:

If you try to scroll around a little, you’ll see that this is indeed a massive file. How do we navigate around it?

I will reveal for this tutorial that the spell id we are looking for is 133, and there are two methods we can use to locate this row in the file:

Go To ID

WDBX allows us to directly go to a row just by typing in its ID. We do this with the keyboard shortcut CTRL + g, which brings up a small box that allows us to type in the ID we want to go to:

If we don’t know the ID of the row we want to go to, an alternative is to search for it, which we can do by pressing the keyboard shortcut CTRL + f, which will bring up a small box like this:

However, a word of warning, in WoTLK spells of different ranks all have the same name and there are very often dummy spells with the same names as other spells, so it’s very easy to get the wrong spell if we just search for its name.

Finding the “name” column

The Spell table has a lot of different columns that takes some time to learn how to navigate, but since we’re looking for something like a name we can just scroll until we find it.

Now, changing the name of our spell is as easy as clicking the cell just like before and typing in something else.

Saving

To save the DBC, we can simply press the keyboard shortcut CTRL + s, or navigate to the File -> Save menu in the top bar.

With this done, we can restart our client, and if we create a new mage we should see that our fireball spell has the new name we gave it in the editor.

Updating Server DBC Tables

For purely cosmetic things like Spell names, it’s enough to just save our dbc file in the client patch and restart the client. However, many columns in the client DBCs are actually handled in the server, and we change things like numeric of damage values, it’s important to remember to copy our edited DBC files back into the servers dbc directory.