Question on extractors & such

Well, I will assume that this may have been asked, and if so, where could I find the answer. So here's the question.

I understand you can extract the info from the patch data while the game is down and such. However, how would someone go about searching through the data and finding out and verifying that a monster drops a certain item? Or just game information in general?

Thanks for all those that can help. Sorry if I am treading on hot coals here. If this can't be discussed here, then I understand.

Monster drops are server side (probably for good reason, wouldn't want client hackers dropping Ilbis from snails). You can however extract the Monster Book list of drops, which is generally pretty good (but only applies to some monsters).

In general it just depends whether the information is in the client or not, and if you can interpret it.

So I would most likely have to search through each patch that had Monster Book updates in it so that I could find out the info?

The patch files themselves are not in general usable for any purposes (they're just a diff from the previous version, along with updating the encryption).

What happens is you apply the patch, then read the up to date .wz file it creates.

So a current version of the .wz should have everything you need.

Yes, and the monster book data is not guaranteed to be fully inline with the data on the server. It's data with drawbacks, but it's better than what we had before - nothing.