Our roots start in the beginning of 2012 when the open world was just starting to become a real thing, players were driven by the question of 'what is behind the melding?' This began the never ending quest to go beyond the walls and explore the uncharted world of Firefall. Eventually data mining began in late 2012 early 2013 and brought with it a wealth of information about the contents of the game and various ideas tried in the past and ideas to come. Around this time, players began creating 'Replay files' which allowed people to share their experiences with each other. Of course this also lead to some members of the community to find ways to edit these files and display different game assets, including never before seen ones, during the replays. Audio file converting was not far behind and members began listening to the many sounds of Firefall outside of the game and sometimes sharing them on places such as the forums.

In late 2013 early 2014 some members disliked the direction Firefall was going in and began researching the possibilities of bringing back an older version of Firefall. Over time more members of the community began researching the inner workings of Firefall for similar reasons. They wanted to explore the different proprietary file architectures and access older versions of the game as well. Around 2015 some of the members came together to form a small group dedicated to reverse engineering Firefall. This group wanted to be able to share their knowledge and efforts with each other to help further the overall progress. We have established a repository of information from our efforts and other information collected from Firefall community members that aren't directly part of our group but provided information that helps in the reverse engineering efforts.

We have made many strides of progress over the years. We have extensive documentation on select Firefall specific file formats, our own basic account and character server for the game, our own set of tools to help research, and more. We realize though that we may not be the best people for the job in all the areas of research and development required to reach our goals with Firefall. Due to this, we will open up some of our progress and efforts to the public in hopes some members of the Firefall community who love the game as much as we do will contribute to the project.

We mentioned the word 'goals' previously but haven't really told you anything about them. So what are some of these goals? We want to achieve a running world instance. We want to fully understand the packet structures used. These are just some of the goals we have for this project, all with different priorities to us. Are we able to reach these goals on our own? Possibly, but with the help of the community the chances of reaching these goals becomes much greater and the amount of time required to reach them lessens.

We do not just want to be a community ran Firefall server. We want to understand the file formats and systems employed by Firefall. It has taken us years of work (not continuous work since we have other things to take care of than just working on this project) to get to where we are today. It will take even more years of work to reach our end goals. While for specific reasons we will not make all of our work publicly available currently, with the help of the amazing dedicated Firefall community we think this project would have a much better chance of reaching some early milestones of completion.