Wuthering Waves Screenshot Directory

Okay, this is ridiculous.

I’ve just installed Wuthering Waves on my MacBook Pro - I was amazed that there was a macOS native version considering my usual game, Genshin, needs some wine trickery in order to work slightly.

One problem - where do the screenshots go?

In game, this folder is labelled as /Saved/ScreenShot, but where is that?

TL;DR after seraching for a while, it’s:

~/Library/Containers/com.kurogame.wutheringwaves.global/Data/Library/Client/Saved/ScreenShot

So to get there, open Finder, Command+Shift+G, paste it in, enter. There are your screenshots.

But why does this work?

Why?

It all comes down to a nifty little security feature that protects your data with apps you download from the App Store - called containers. I first encountered this when I jailbroke an iPhone 8 a while ago and was wondering where the user data for the Files app was.

Instead of giving the app access to your user data folders directly, macOS allocates the app its own special folder in the ~/Library/Containers folder with the app’s package name. From there, your documents folder and the like are symlinked so the app can access them if permissions allow. For all the data that can stay inside the app, it’s stored inside folders in this container so that other apps can’t just access them willy nilly.

Here’s the listing of the folder ~/Library/Containers/com.kurogame.wutheringwaves.global/Data/:

drwx------@ 13 usr  staff    416 31 Mar 22:33 .
drwx------@  5 usr  staff    160 31 Mar 22:33 ..
lrwxr-xr-x   1 usr  staff     31 31 Mar 20:40 .CFUserTextEncoding -> ../../../../.CFUserTextEncoding
-rw-r--r--@  1 usr  staff  10244 31 Mar 22:34 .DS_Store
lrwxr-xr-x   1 usr  staff     19 31 Mar 20:40 Desktop -> ../../../../Desktop
drwx------   2 usr  staff     64 31 Mar 20:40 Documents
lrwxr-xr-x   1 usr  staff     21 31 Mar 20:40 Downloads -> ../../../../Downloads
drwx------  44 usr  staff   1408 31 Mar 22:33 Library
lrwxr-xr-x   1 usr  staff     18 31 Mar 20:40 Movies -> ../../../../Movies
lrwxr-xr-x   1 usr  staff     17 31 Mar 20:40 Music -> ../../../../Music
lrwxr-xr-x   1 usr  staff     20 31 Mar 20:40 Pictures -> ../../../../Pictures
drwx------   2 usr  staff     64 31 Mar 20:40 SystemData
drwx------   6 usr  staff    192 31 Mar 22:33 tmp

You can see the symlinks on all the user folders pointing back in the directory tree to my home folder. In the Library folder, the Client folder is stored inside the container, not symlinked. So this data is only visible inside the app.

When I tried to list the directory structure via terminal, I got a popup from macOS asking whether Terminal should be able to read data from other apps - this is what the Containers system allows you to do. Finder, being a part of the OS, doesn’t need permission so you can just browse right on in, but any other app requires explicit permission from the user to touch other apps’ files.

This system reminds me very much of flatpak data folders which are stored in ~/.var/app/<package name> in Linux systems. These, however, only store data inside the app itself and instead of symlinking folders, some file browser jiggery-pokery (portals!!!) allows the files to be accessed from a different controlled path (or… something, idrk).

Anyway, that’s all my diatribe for today! Hope you enjoyed my suffering.