summon.dat / readef.DAT streaming slots Confirmed

At a glance

In the game

Every Seru summon and every Art's mid-cast textures; the seven big summons' bespoke creatures

Where

summon.dat = extraction PROT 893 (raw TOC 0x37F); readef.DAT = extraction PROT 894 (raw TOC 0x380); CDNAME block bat_back_dat

Size / stride

Fixed 0x10800-byte slots: 103 in summon.dat, 78 in readef.DAT, both tiling their entry exactly. No magic; texture slots start with a u32 mode, art archives with 'M' 'E'

Parser

legaia_actor_formats::summon_readef (+ summon_creatures, me_archive); CLI asset summon-readef

Confidence

Confirmed - slot math read from the battle-action state machine; a mid-cast save state's stream buffer and VRAM byte-match the disc (how we know)

Used by

battle action SM, Seru magic & summons, Arts

How a cast reaches the disc

Both files live inside PROT.DAT like everything else. The dev path strings are ignored - the retail file-open shim is a stub, and the fourth argument goes straight to the PROT reader as a raw TOC index. The in-RAM TOC keeps PROT.DAT's 8-byte header while the extraction strips it, so raw index = extraction entry + 2 (CDNAME numbering).

Action id to slot

The cast sequence computes a base slot byte from the actor's action id. Bit 7 selects the file (set = summon.dat, clear = readef.DAT); base & 0x7F is the first slot of the group.

The bands tile both files exactly. Group 0 of summon.dat (spell id 0x81, Gimard) carries the "Burning Attack" record, matching the spell table's player Seru-magic block.

One summon group; every slot is 0x10800 bytes (33 sectors). VRAM targets are positional: the group's first and second texture slots always land on the same rows and pages. readef.DAT groups stop after base + 1.

Slot formats

Texture slot

mode is 0, 1 or 2. Mode 1 carries two CLUT rows (page at +0x404), modes 0 and 2 one (page at +0x204). Mode 0's page is 64 halfwords wide, modes 1 and 2 are 128.

A summon module's parts sample those pages, so the page in VRAM has to be the cast's own. PROT 0903's fire tunnel draws one of its two additive layers from a single texel of the (512, 0) page through CLUT row 488: with the cast's summon.dat page there the tunnel is orange, with the last monster turn's readef.DAT page left there it draws grey. The port streams a player cast's two texture slots when its stager arms (battle_sideband_textures::record_cast_sideband_textures), and the formation's monster groups at battle entry.

Actor-record slot

Consumed in place, slot-relative offsets. The TMD and texture pool route through the same installer the monster archive uses, and the creature is staged as a battle actor.

• The name is a NUL-terminated attack-name string; the TMD is a Legaia TMD; the texture pool is a monster-style CLUT region + page.
• The stat head uses the monster record's offsets: +0x0C “HP” is the attack's power feeding the summon damage roll, +0x18 INT, and so on.
• The stat head is the summon body for every player cast. The installer copies it into actor slot 7 with FUN_80054CB0(record, 4) (the monster record → actor copy, seat 4 = slot 3 + 4), boosting four stats by the fight's profile exactly as for a monster seat, and slot 7 is the attacker every summon module names in its damage roll. The battle_data twin is a mesh source only: its stats are the enemy's (Gimard the enemy is HP 99 / INT 16, the Burning Attack body HP 192 / INT 48), and the flutes and big summons have no twin at all. Parser summon_readef::cast_record_stats; the engine seats these stats on DiscTables::summon_creatures at scene entry (monster_catalog::apply_cast_record).
• +0x1D is the element of the cast (0 earth, 1 water, 2 fire, 3 wind, 4 thunder, 5 light, 6 dark, 7 none). The installer parks the record at battle slot 7, every summon module calls the damage roll with a hard-coded attacker slot 7, and the element kernels read record + 0x1D for any slot >= 3 - so a cast's element is this byte, never the caster's and never a spell-table field. The Evil Seru Magic record carries 7, which is why its damage matches no elemental guard.
• Per-part offsets index animation entries; their base differs by band (below).

Every slot is read whole

The transfer always reads the full 0x10800 bytes, never “the content length”. A slot's content ends where its own format says - a page's width times 256 rows, an actor record's part pool, an ME archive's last entry - and the rest is fill that arrives in the buffer and is never read. Every slot in both files ends in such a run.

Big-summon raw slot

The third slot of the four-slot groups is headerless; three regions tile it exactly (0x1E0 + 0x8000 + 0x8620): a 240-entry CLUT to VRAM (0, 486), a 64×256-halfword page to (448, 256), and a part pool for the creature's animation. Those targets are monster battle slot 2's, so a big summon installs over slot 2 and the ordinary relocation reproduces its placement.

Creature meshes and animation

• Base and evolved-Seru summons (0x81..=0x95) reuse an enemy: the actor-record TMD is byte-identical to a record in the monster archive (extraction 867), which recovers the spell → creature map (Gimard 0x81 → archive id 10). Map in legaia_actor_formats::summon_creatures.
• Big summons (0x9A..=0xA0) carry a bespoke mesh matching no archive record; their texture pool and animation entries live in the group's raw slot.
• Each per-part entry is a monster-animation record: a packed keyframe stream at entry +0x8C, [u8 parts][u8 frames] then nine-byte TRS records, playback rate at +0x78. No decoder of its own is needed.
• Offsets are relative to the actor-record slot for three-slot groups and to the raw slot's part pool (+0x81E0) for four-slot groups; in both cases the streams tile contiguously.

The seven big summons

Each id is pinned by two independent reads of its own record - the inline attack-name string and the element byte - both agreeing with the curated summon table.

All seven play in the browser on the Seru magic & summons page, decoded from your own disc.

Art "ME" archives

The aux slots of readef.DAT groups 0..3 (slots 3×char + 1 / + 2 for Vahn / Noa / Gala / Terra) hold the player art-animation archives:

The low 15 bits of each size sum to the body offsets. Each decompresses through the channel-delta codec into the same packed TRS stream (see player battle files). Parser legaia_actor_formats::me_archive. The consumer is FUN_8002B28C, called once on the disc — from 0x8004BCA8 in FUN_8004AD80, which expands the selected entry into the scratch at gp[0xA24] and installs that pointer as the art entry’s +0x88 keyframe stream. The streamed buffer *0x8007BD74 has twelve references disc-wide and that is the only content read outside the applier, so the consumer set is closed. The read is gated to party seats 0..2, so a fourth character’s group is decoded only when that character sits in a seat below 3 - which happens (a Terra-in-party battle puts her at seat 1), so readef group 3 is not a dead lane.

How we know

CLI: asset summon-readef <entry.BIN> lists every slot's class and attack name; --texture-png-dir decodes pages to PNG; --action-id resolves an id to its stream target. Source of record: docs/formats/summon-readef.md.

See also