How can I change village items (FE8)?

[dondon151]

I understand that there is no Nightmare module for village editing and that I have to do it via hex editing. Where can I find the location for this in the code?

I'm a novice at ROM hacking and I haven't explored past the Nightmare modules so... please bear with me.

[Nintenlord]

The items are specified in Event coding, which is something quite hard to learn.

[Starwolf_UK]

Thing is due to it being gerneric data patterns you don't need to know any event editing to do it. It helps if you know where to look and how the generic pattern works.

Using the updated chest editors the ones which have all the maps and mention "Event Title Editor" you can find the locations where the house and village related events are kept. Using chapter 2 as an example the very first thing you see in the module is this:

The bit of information we want is 9F0650 (it comes from the pointer and the end of the pointer remove the 0x8 part of the pointer and stick the 50 onto the end). This contains the events for that house which include a special conversation is Erika sets foot in the house (basically a lot of text pointers and stuff we don't want to be playing with). It also contains the item gotten (the only thing we want to change). You'll see a bit that goes:

40 1F 59 08 40 05 03 00 76 00 00 00 23 37 FF FF 

Man these codeboxes are...not what I expected

The 76 is the Red Gem. Changing that 76 works in-game :

If we are to turn this into a gerneric pattern we get:

40 1F 59 08 40 05 03 00 XX 00 00 00 23 37 FF FF

Where XX is the item. Problem is the data before the XX is very common while i'm not sure about after so its probably best to grab the offsets (locations) from the chest modules then look for the pattern within the boundaries (mainly know what the village contains beforehand then go to the offset, )

tl;dr summary. Learn some hex editing skills, some common sense. And last but not least. I know nothing about editing event data ;) Just the fact that gerneric patterns don't morph and you can ignore the forest if you're looking for one type of tree.

And before anyone goes "Can't you make a Nightmare module?" the answer is I could but it would be even more of a hex editor on training wheels (and due to the village data being a non-fixed length and all over the place I'd have to make a module for every single village!) so I would be better off giving you the offsets if you want can't be bothered to find them yourself.

Edit: Now that this data is out in the open I expect every FE8 hack to be giving players S-rank weapons in every single village!

Edited November 25, 2008 by Starwolf_UK

[dondon151]

Those 23 37's should be 20 37's. But yeah, this works, and it's surprisingly easy. Thanks Starwolf!

On an unrelated note, how are ballistae loaded onto a map? They're evidently not done through the CUE, and I want to change their number and positions.

Edit: Now that this data is out in the open I expect every FE8 hack to be giving players S-rank weapons in every single village!

Yes... that is exactly what I'll do...