Overview

Tribes: Ascend uses unencrypted TCP sockets for the majority of client-server communications. This includes communications for the purposes of authentication, account data retrieval, account data updating, purchases, third-party data retrieval, and socket redirects. UDP is only used between the client and a game server in parallel with an existing TCP connection.

Note: This API and wiki will only cover the TCP side of things.

Once the client has been authenticated with the login server (see The Login Sequence), the server can be considered to be RESTful, as fetching any data from it henceforth only takes single commands from the client and does not require any additional information held solely by the client. Therefore, we can list the number of commands required to fetch any arbitrary piece of data:

Data	Includes	Commands to Fetch	Command
Account Details	Player Name, Clan Tag, Rank, XP, Gold, Boost Status, Keybinds, Loadouts, Friends List, Followers List.	0
Server List	All available game servers and individually, their: Name, MOTD, Passworded Status, Current Map, Current Gamemode, Rank Limit, In-Progress Status, Number of Players, Team Scores, Time Remaining.	1	1600D5000200280202000000E90000002B0000002D000000
Individual Game Server Details	Team Scores, Time Remaining, List of Connected Players.	2	1800C6010200C702--------280202000000330000002d000000