Sources and methodology

Where artwork comes from

Two classes, kept separate because they are not equivalent:

Official channels

Material HoYoverse themselves published - the official site, community posts, official social accounts, press material and event pages.

The game client

Artwork the game displays, read from a legitimately installed copy. The tooling used to do that is deliberately not published, and no method or key is distributed.

Never collected

• Unreleased, beta or pre-release content of any kind.
• 3D models, audio, voice lines or video files.
• Game code, binaries or anything that would help someone else extract.
• Fan art, unless a creator has explicitly permitted it.
• Anything with an official watermark removed.

How a version is established

Game files carry no patch number, and file dates are actively misleading - an update repackages files holding much older content. Version is inferred from what an asset name encodes, in order of confidence: story chapter codes, avatar identifiers, an explicit version string, outfit or event names, then internal character codenames.

The chapter encoding was verified against which patch first shipped each file, and the identifier table was checked by confirming that the codenames it claims appear verbatim in real asset names. Where no signal exists, the artwork is shown as undated.

Verification status

Every artwork carries one, and it describes how confident the archive is about the item’s identity - not how good the image is. Unidentified is a real, published state: an artwork nobody has placed yet is still worth preserving, and showing it is how it gets recognised.

Found something wrong? Corrections are welcome.