Unitypackage viewer

What is a .unitypackage file?

A .unitypackage file is a tar archive compressed with gzip, the same format as a .tar.gz file. Unity creates one when you export assets from a project, and Asset Store downloads arrive in the same format.

The archive does not mirror your project folders. It holds one folder per asset, named after the asset's GUID, a 32-character hexadecimal ID. Each folder contains up to four files:

• pathname: a short text file whose first line is the asset's path in the project, such as Assets/Desert/Textures/Sand.png.
• asset: the file itself. Folders have no asset file, only a path and a meta file.
• asset.meta: the meta file, a small YAML document with the GUID and the import settings.
• preview.png: an optional thumbnail that Unity saved during the export. Despite the name, some packages store a JPEG image in it.

This layout is why a general archive tool shows a long list of cryptic folders instead of your models and textures.

How to open or extract a unitypackage without Unity

The quickest way is the viewer on this page. Drop the file in, browse the folder tree, and download the files you need. Each download keeps its original file name.

You can also unpack the archive with standard tools. On Windows 10 and 11, macOS, and Linux, the command tar -xzf MyPackage.unitypackage extracts the GUID folders. 7-Zip works as well, in two steps: first the gzip layer, then the tar archive inside it. Afterwards you still have to rename every asset file according to its pathname, which is slow by hand but easy to script: read the first line of each pathname, create the folders, move asset to that path, and save asset.meta beside it under the same name plus .meta.

Why GUIDs and meta files matter

Unity does not track assets by file name. Every asset has a GUID, stored in its meta file, and every reference between assets uses that GUID. A material points to its textures by GUID, a prefab points to its meshes, materials, and scripts the same way, and a scene points to everything placed in it.

The rest of the meta file holds the import settings. A texture has a TextureImporter block with values such as the maximum size and compression, and a model has a ModelImporter block with its scale and animation clips. Reading it in the viewer shows how an asset will be imported before it enters your project.

When you import a package, Unity keeps the GUIDs from the archive. That keeps references intact, and it is also why importing a newer version of a package updates the existing files instead of creating duplicates.

If you copy extracted files into a project without their meta files, Unity creates new meta files with new GUIDs, and every reference to those files breaks. A single prefab can depend on dozens of files spread across the package, and the package does not list those dependencies anywhere. They are stored inside the asset data itself.

Where Unity stores Asset Store downloads

When you download a purchase in the Package Manager, Unity saves it as a .unitypackage file in the Asset Store cache folder in your user profile, sorted into subfolders by publisher and category. The files stay there after you import them, so over time the cache becomes a local archive of everything you have downloaded. Asset Store downloads also carry a .icon.png file at the archive root with the package icon, which the viewer shows next to the package name.

Opening a cached package here before you import it tells you whether it contains scripts or editor tools, how its folders are organized, and how large its textures and audio files are.

What a browser viewer cannot do

A viewer shows what a package contains. It does not run Unity, so it has clear limits:

• It cannot render prefabs, materials, models, scenes, or particle systems. You only see the previews that Unity stored at export time.
• It does not resolve dependencies. Downloading a prefab gives you the prefab file, not the meshes, materials, and textures it references.
• It works on one package at a time. Finding an asset across your whole collection means opening packages one by one.
• Gzip has no index, so every download reads the package from the beginning until it reaches the file. Files near the end of a large package take longer.

When you have hundreds of packages

This viewer is a free companion to Asset Inventory, my Unity extension for libraries that have outgrown opening packages one at a time. Asset Inventory indexes every package you own, along with your own folders and archives, and lets you search inside all of them at once. Because it runs inside Unity, it renders real previews for models, prefabs, materials, particles, and UI instead of relying on the thumbnails stored in each package. When you find what you need, it imports that single file together with its dependencies into your project, not the whole package.

Start with the Asset Inventory overview, see how to preview a unitypackage without importing it, or read how the options compare in unitypackage viewers compared.