Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your ESF file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert ESF to another file type
To convert ESF data files to another format, you need Total War or other Game software.
Convert a file to ESF
To convert other file formats to the "Game Save and Configuration File" file type, you need software like Total War or a similar tool.
About ESF files
An .esf file usually contains campaign and game data, most commonly associated with Total War video games developed by Creative Assembly. These proprietary files store campaign states, save games, character statistics, and faction variables. Modders often use community-built tools like ESF Editor to modify these values. Another significant use case is the Eos Show File for ETC lighting consoles, which stores stage lighting cues and hardware configurations. The .esf extension is highly fragmented. Depending on its source, it could also be an encrypted XML document, a Romanian Forexebug public financial report, a data logger export from Elitech, or even a renamed PDF exported from CSI ETABS structural analysis software. The primary disadvantage of the .esf format is its closed, binary nature. Most .esf files are completely unreadable in standard text editors, appearing as scrambled characters. Furthermore, editing game data directly without specialized tools frequently causes game crashes and file corruption. ETC lighting files require expensive proprietary software to open and read. Because of this fragmentation and reliance on proprietary encoding, standard online file converters almost always fail to process .ESF files properly. Game data might sometimes be parsed into XML or TXT for easier modding, but converting an entire save file into a standard document format is impossible. However, if the file is an archived ZIP (like those from Weaver e-cology) or a renamed document, restoring its true extension restores access. Our tool inspects the internal structure of the file. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format like PDF, JSON, or XML, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your ESF file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert ESF file to PDF, BASE64, HEX, BIN, ENC, CRYPT, AES, DES, RSA, PGP, GPG or ASC, you can use Total War or similar software from the "Game Data and Console Settings" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert CER, BIN, PEM, DER, KEY, P7S, PFX, ENC, P12, BASE64, P7B or HEX files to ESF, try Total War or another comparable tool in the "Game Data and Console Settings" category.
The ESF Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our ESF converter.