What it is
Ported 1:1
The rules are Daggerfall's: the file formats, the world assembly, the combat and skill math, quests, items, magic, guilds, the calendar and the courts, translated line by line from Daggerfall Unity's C# with the constants kept byte-exact, quirks and all.
Rebuilt
The presentation is new: a hand-rolled WebGL2 renderer with no engine underneath it, a procedural sky, a touch layer for phones, and two interfaces - the classic screens laid out from the original art to the pixel, or an enhanced one drawn as pixel art of its own.
In progress
Daggerfall Unity is a decade of work and this is a port of it, arc by arc. What has landed and what hasn't is written down. Read the ledger before you expect a finished game.
What it looks like
The enhanced interface with no game files loaded - the only pictures this site can show, because the classic screens are the original art, which you bring.
What's in it
As of 27 August 2026. Every line here is something you can walk up to and use; the ledger keeps the finer print.
- The world
- The whole Iliac Bay, streamed as you walk it: its towns, its wilderness, the weather and the seasons, day and night on the game's own calendar with its holidays. The travel map for the long way round.
- Towns and people
- Streets with people in them who answer questions, give directions, trade rumours and take offence. Shops, taverns, banks, temples, guild halls with their services, and a city watch that arrests you and a court that tries you.
- Dungeons
- The classic dungeons with their doors, locks, teleporters and traps, an automap that fills in as you go, and every monster from the rat to the ancient lich on the same combat rules as the classes that hunt you.
- Combat
- The classic first-person weapons with Daggerfall's own hit and damage formulas: bows both ways, knockback, armour that wears, poisons and diseases that take days, and enemies that shoot, cast, open doors, fight each other and give up.
- Magic
- The spellbook and click-to-cast, the spell maker, the potion maker and the item maker, magic items and the Daedric artifacts, and the spell effects themselves: ninety of the game's ninety-one.
- Your character
- Character creation with the class questions, the custom class builder and the biography, then levelling, skills, reputation with every faction, and an inventory with a wagon behind it.
- Quests
- Quests run on the game's own scripts, 265 of them, offered by questgivers, argued about in the talk window, tracked in the journal and kept across saves.
- The screens
- Every classic window laid out from the original art, and an enhanced set beside it: the menu, the journal, the pack, the character sheet, the world map, the compass rose, and a settings catalog with every key rebindable.
- Sound and music
- The game's sounds and ambience, footsteps that know what floor you are on, and the music: Daggerfall's own MIDI, played by a synth written for this port, or your own tracks in its place.
Not yet: riding a horse or cart, importing save games from classic Daggerfall or Daggerfall Unity, and mods. Saves made here are the port's own.
How to play
Four steps, and the first three only happen once.
Get Daggerfall.
It has been free since 2009. Any of these gives you the files; the zip is the same patched set Daggerfall Unity uses.
Find the ARENA2 folder.
It's inside the game folder. From Steam, look under DF/DAGGER/ARENA2. In DaggerfallGameFiles.zip it's arena2/, and on a phone you can hand the game the whole zip instead.
Press Play and pick it.
On a desktop, choose the folder or drop it on the page. On a phone, choose the zip. That is the last time you are asked.
Then play.
You wake in Privateer's Hold, as everyone does. The keys are below; on a phone a stick, a look pad, an attack button and a row of buttons appear on their own.
Controls
Daggerfall Unity's defaults, and every one of them can be changed in Settings.
Moving
| Move | WASD |
| Look | Mouse |
| Run | Shift |
| Sneak | Alt |
| Jump | Space |
| Crouch | C |
| Rest | R |
| Travel map | V |
Fighting
| Draw weapon | Z |
| Swing | Right mouse, drag |
| Switch hand | H |
| Cast a spell | Backspace |
| Recast | Q |
| Use magic item | U |
Around you
| Use what you're looking at | Left mouse |
| Steal / Grab / Info / Talk | F1F2F3F4 |
| Character sheet | F5 |
| Inventory | F6 |
| Compass rose | Tab |
| Journal / Notebook | LN |
| Map | M |
| Quick save / load | F9F11 |
| Pause | Esc |
Good to know
- Which browsers?
- Any current one with WebGL2: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari. On a phone, Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android; the touch controls appear on their own.
- Where do my files and saves go?
- Into your browser's storage for this site, on your device; there is no account and no server. Clearing the site's data removes the game files and your saves together, so you would pick the folder again.
- Classic or enhanced?
- Enhanced by default: the same game with its menus, journal, character sheet and inventory drawn as pixel art of their own. The classic screens are all there too - the switch sits at the foot of the menu, one press either way.
- Is this Daggerfall Unity?
- No, a port of it. Daggerfall Unity is the reference, and it has years more polish, a mod scene and a community. This is the same rules in a browser tab, on a phone if you like.
- Does it work offline?
- The page has to load from the network. After that the game reads everything from your device.
- Something's wrong.
- Reload first: the site is rebuilt several times a day and a page held open across a rebuild can lose its footing. If it is a real bug, the issue tracker wants it, with what you did and what happened.
Credits
- Daggerfall Unity
- Interkarma and contributors, MIT licence. The C# this port was translated from, and the quest scripts are its own; without it there would be nothing to port.
- The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
- Bethesda Softworks, 1996. Daggerfall JavaScript is a fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Bethesda or ZeniMax.
- Daggerfall Workshop and UESP
- The documentation of Daggerfall's file formats that the readers were checked against.
- Ko-fi
- The port is free and always will be, and it takes no money to run - it is a static site and your own game files. If you would like to put something in the hat anyway, it goes to the time this takes.
- Lattymoy
- Built the port. Source, docs and the ledger are on GitHub.