ROM Hack Tharsis Forge: an Etrian Odyssey IV Save Data Editor

[licalica13]

Yay!!!

It works perfectly now!! Thanks for this amazing work

 

[darksweet]

dude thanks for this editor it works perfectly... request dude can you make etrian odyssey untold 2 fafnir knights too?

 

[neofranky]

So when you edit a character's EXP, does this change the Experience needed to level up or the total experience a character has?

 

[xdaniel]

dude thanks for this editor it works perfectly... request dude can you make etrian odyssey untold 2 fafnir knights too?

I don't have either of the Untold games yet, so I can't really do that. Making Tharsis Forge compatible with all three - that is EO4, U and U2 - would be kinda cool, tho... We'll see, I guess.

So when you edit a character's EXP, does this change the Experience needed to level up or the total experience a character has?

It changes the total EXP the character has, as that's what's stored in the save data. That said, I am thinking of changing the EXP and level editing around a bit, so that it'll somehow use the game's experience data (extracted from the game, like the other stuff in the editor's Data directory) to be easier to use... like, have an option in the character editor to automatically set the total EXP to require 1 point to level up, depending on the character's level... something like that.

 

[Arikaido]

Each class has a fixed growth table, inside LevelUp\GrowthTable.tbl in the RomFS.

Hmm. I think it's time I learn to make ROM hacks. A modified growth table for HP/TP will make me rather... Happy.

Quick question: is there a set file for the skills? I'd like to have a go at increasing/reducing TP costs.

 

[xdaniel]

Hmm. I think it's time I learn to make ROM hacks. A modified growth table for HP/TP will make me rather... Happy.

Quick question: is there a set file for the skills? I'd like to have a go at increasing/reducing TP costs.

My hunch, based on the filenames, would be Skill\playerskilltable.tbl and/or Skill\SkillTreeTable.tbl. Haven't looked much further into this yet, tho; just figured out textures (*.stex), text files (*.mbm, the *.tbl's that are nametables), and the stats growth table so far.

 

[Arikaido]

My hunch, based on the filenames, would be Skill\playerskilltable.tbl and/or Skill\SkillTreeTable.tbl. Haven't looked much further into this yet, tho; just figured out textures (*.stex), text files (*.mbm, the *.tbl's that are nametables), and the stats growth table so far.

SAY WHAT?! If the skill trees are editable in a way that makes sense.... I AM EXCITED!

ADDED: So I finally got around to using your editor and, uh, IT ROCKS! But I've got a few questions, mostly harkening from my days of editing EO3.

For weapons and skills, I remember being able to edit them past their hard caps.
For skills, there may be no data existing past their caps, so it may be pointless to add more points. I vaguely remember things like modifiers having that data. Have you looked into any of that?
For weapons, I definitely remember being able to add more augments than there are slots. I don't know if 8 is the cap in the data, but it would be cool to take the best armors and add 8 augments to them instead of just 4.

 

[xdaniel]

For weapons and skills, I remember being able to edit them past their hard caps.
For skills, there may be no data existing past their caps, so it may be pointless to add more points. I vaguely remember things like modifiers having that data. Have you looked into any of that?
For weapons, I definitely remember being able to add more augments than there are slots. I don't know if 8 is the cap in the data, but it would be cool to take the best armors and add 8 augments to them instead of just 4.

Skills I haven't yet looked into very deeply, so that probably warrants investigation. As for weapons, all items do have 8 slots for effects/augments in the data (although I'd assume they'd be useless on something like a Medica ), but as I hadn't tested yet how the game behaves when there's more effects on a piece of equipment than what the game specifies - when in battle, when forging at Berund, etc. -, I have the editor only allow editing of that many slots. That's something else that might need further investigation, tho if it does turn out fruitful (i.e. if the game is fine with 8 effects, even if the item is meant for only, say, 2) I might hide this "override" behind some sort of "advanced mode" toggle in the editor. As in, you'll only be able to edit all slots if you specifically ask for it, just in case.

 

[Arikaido]

Skills I haven't yet looked into very deeply, so that probably warrants investigation. As for weapons, all items do have 8 slots for effects/augments in the data (although I'd assume they'd be useless on something like a Medica ), but as I hadn't tested yet how the game behaves when there's more effects on a piece of equipment than what the game specifies - when in battle, when forging at Berund, etc. -, I have the editor only allow editing of that many slots. That's something else that might need further investigation, tho if it does turn out fruitful (i.e. if the game is fine with 8 effects, even if the item is meant for only, say, 2) I might hide this "override" behind some sort of "advanced mode" toggle in the editor. As in, you'll only be able to edit all slots if you specifically ask for it, just in case.

GIVE ME THE POWER TO TEST THIS! In all seriousness, I'll test this, like, right now. I have no idea where to start with looking at the hex in this save, so this editor is a serious blessing.

How hard would it be to add the equipment info to the selector? There are lots of items you found that aren't listed in the Wikia, so I'm curious to see what brokenness we can discover.

 

[xdaniel]

GIVE ME THE POWER TO TEST THIS! In all seriousness, I'll test this, like, right now. I have no idea where to start with looking at the hex in this save, so this editor is a serious blessing.

How hard would it be to add the equipment info to the selector? There are lots of items you found that aren't listed in the Wikia, so I'm curious to see what brokenness we can discover.

If you want to mess around with effects on equipment, I can give you some pointers as to how to change ex. the equipment in storage at the Inn. These are stored starting at offset 0x3300 in mori4game.sav in the English versions and follow this format - a total of 12 bytes per item, two bytes for the item ID (byte-swapped, so ID 0x0014 is stored as 0x1400 in the save), then one byte for the number of player-forgeable slots, then 8 bytes for the effects and one final null byte (presumably padding for alignment purposes). The effects are listed in the editor's code some 50 lines before the line I linked to, as the ForgeEffect enumeration. As an example, the data for the first item in my storage is "1400 00 1A 1A 1A 1A 00 00 00 00 00", which means it's a King Slicer (ID 0x0014), which has 0 effect slots forgeable by the player, has the Death effect 4x, has nothing in the last 4 slots, and has the presumed padding byte set to 0 (as all items do).

Game- or RomFS-wise, all equipment data is stored in the files beginning with "equipitem" in the Item folder, with equipitemtable.tbl in particular containing the stats of all the equipment, including what the item's effects are by default. Each item's data is 0x40 bytes in size there. I do actually have at least part of this data documented (kinda forgot about it), but it's still rather incomplete and the dumper-thingy I hacked together for it is kinda ugly... I kinda feel like opening an Etrian Odyssey ROM hacking thread here, at least for EO1 and 4, which are the only ones I've played, and hacked, so far.

Adding equipment infos to the editor would require figuring out the rest of the unknown data in these "equipitem" files, dumping all of it out into XML files for it to use, like the others in the editor's Data folder, and then placing the most important information in the UI somehow. I'd kinda favor ex. having a separate HTML file with all the stats etc. be included with the editor for reference.

As for discoveries and documentation, I started doing just that when I first got my hands on the game's RomFS, figuring out the formats I mentioned before (stex, mbm), etc., and put any findings I made on The Cutting Room Floor wiki - there's some unused items on there, for example, although I still need help with this as I can't always tell what's unused and what's not, not least because I still haven't finished the game... *cough*

 

[Arikaido]

If you want to mess around with effects on equipment, I can give you some pointers as to how to change ex. the equipment in storage at the Inn. These are stored starting at offset 0x3300 in mori4game.sav in the English versions and follow this format - a total of 12 bytes per item, two bytes for the item ID (byte-swapped, so ID 0x0014 is stored as 0x1400 in the save), then one byte for the number of player-forgeable slots, then 8 bytes for the effects and one final null byte (presumably padding for alignment purposes). The effects are listed in the editor's code some 50 lines before the line I linked to, as the ForgeEffect enumeration. As an example, the data for the first item in my storage is "1400 00 1A 1A 1A 1A 00 00 00 00 00", which means it's a King Slicer (ID 0x0014), which has 0 effect slots forgeable by the player, has the Death effect 4x, has nothing in the last 4 slots, and has the presumed padding byte set to 0 (as all items do).

Game- or RomFS-wise, all equipment data is stored in the files beginning with "equipitem" in the Item folder, with equipitemtable.tbl in particular containing the stats of all the equipment, including what the item's effects are by default. Each item's data is 0x40 bytes in size there. I do actually have at least part of this data documented (kinda forgot about it), but it's still rather incomplete and the dumper-thingy I hacked together for it is kinda ugly... I kinda feel like opening an Etrian Odyssey ROM hacking thread here, at least for EO1 and 4, which are the only ones I've played, and hacked, so far.

Adding equipment infos to the editor would require figuring out the rest of the unknown data in these "equipitem" files, dumping all of it out into XML files for it to use, like the others in the editor's Data folder, and then placing the most important information in the UI somehow. I'd kinda favor ex. having a separate HTML file with all the stats etc. be included with the editor for reference.

As for discoveries and documentation, I started doing just that when I first got my hands on the game's RomFS, figuring out the formats I mentioned before (stex, mbm), etc., and put any findings I made on The Cutting Room Floor wiki - there's some unused items on there, for example, although I still need help with this as I can't always tell what's unused and what's not, not least because I still haven't finished the game... *cough*

If you want me to do any testing, let me know what needs to be done and I'll report back on it; probably not tonight as I'll be driving. Dem dummy equips, tho...

If you threw something together for EO:U, I'd love you. I just hate the grimoire system and its randomness.

 

[xdaniel]

If you want me to do any testing, let me know what needs to be done and I'll report back on it; probably not tonight as I'll be driving. Dem dummy equips, tho...

If you threw something together for EO:U, I'd love you. I just hate the grimoire system and its randomness.

For the editor, I guess the most important thing to test right now would be, through hex-editing the main save file, if the game is okay with an equipment item (say, a Shortsword) having more and/or different effects on it than it's supposed to (say, 8x Poison) - if these work correctly in battles, if the effects don't all reset or the game otherwise breaks when you try to reforge them at Berund Atelier, things like that. If that works out, I'll see about adding the "use at your own risk" option to the editor, allowing you to freely change all 8 slots on a given piece of equipment, regardless of the normal limits.

The editor aside, figuring out and documenting which of the items in the game are actually unused would be nice. I had started doing that with the most obvious ones, at the TCRF wiki page I mentioned, where I also linked to a dump of the equipment data in the game, with all values labeled as far as I understand them so far (so there's still a bunch of unknowns in there).

Skills - that is, their data in the RomFS and the like - I'll probably look into over the next week or so, tho I'm not sure if I really get to it then, as I might be a bit busy with other stuff... not sure about that yet.

EOU I don't have yet, so I can't really do much there. Although I do have the demo, so I can at the very least look into how different the save data formats are between EO4 and U.

 

[Arikaido]

For the editor, I guess the most important thing to test right now would be, through hex-editing the main save file, if the game is okay with an equipment item (say, a Shortsword) having more and/or different effects on it than it's supposed to (say, 8x Poison) - if these work correctly in battles, if the effects don't all reset or the game otherwise breaks when you try to reforge them at Berund Atelier, things like that. If that works out, I'll see about adding the "use at your own risk" option to the editor, allowing you to freely change all 8 slots on a given piece of equipment, regardless of the normal limits.

The editor aside, figuring out and documenting which of the items in the game are actually unused would be nice. I had started doing that with the most obvious ones, at the TCRF wiki page I mentioned, where I also linked to a dump of the equipment data in the game, with all values labeled as far as I understand them so far (so there's still a bunch of unknowns in there).

Skills - that is, their data in the RomFS and the like - I'll probably look into over the next week or so, tho I'm not sure if I really get to it then, as I might be a bit busy with other stuff... not sure about that yet.

EOU I don't have yet, so I can't really do much there. Although I do have the demo, so I can at the very least look into how different the save data formats are between EO4 and U.

Ah. When you said EO1, I assumed you meant EOU.

I'll see about doing some hex editing tomorrow morning. I won't have access to my computer for most of the week, so I won't be able to do much more than the basic testing. I'll report back once I have the results.

That text dump is perfect. Just link that to the original post and I think that'll do.
Looking through it, I've got a hunch... Some of those unknowns probably dictate which classes can equip or the skills useable when that item is equipped. How to test this... Well, copy-paste the unknowns from one item to something of a different class, ie, take the unknowns of a sword and put them on, say, a bow. See if that changes anything. Of course, this is probably hard-coded into the items, but it's just a hunch.

I look forward to learning more about skills! Thanks for all your hard work on this.

Added: Testing the forging now. I'm using a Knight Armor with 8 forgeable slots, 8 HP forges as my sample. It seems to increase HP properly; comparing it to a Knight Armor (KA henceforth) with 4 HP forges on a lv 1 Fort, it gives 11 more HP than the 4-forged KA (73 vs 62).
In battle, everything seems fine. I even leveled my Fort a few times and the changes seem to be keeping up. There's only one thing to note: changing the forgeable slots actually adds forgeable slots (you can see the edge of a 9th slot on the right side of the screen). So, since the KA already has 4 slots, I think this is giving it a total of 12; whether you can use them or not, I wouldn't try because of how the data is set up.

I don't have anymore time to test right now, but it looks like it should work just fine if you just add the forges manually and don't try to mess with it in-game.

 

[xdaniel]

Ah. When you said EO1, I assumed you meant EOU.

I'll see about doing some hex editing tomorrow morning. I won't have access to my computer for most of the week, so I won't be able to do much more than the basic testing. I'll report back once I have the results.

That text dump is perfect. Just link that to the original post and I think that'll do.
Looking through it, I've got a hunch... Some of those unknowns probably dictate which classes can equip or the skills useable when that item is equipped. How to test this... Well, copy-paste the unknowns from one item to something of a different class, ie, take the unknowns of a sword and put them on, say, a bow. See if that changes anything. Of course, this is probably hard-coded into the items, but it's just a hunch.

I look forward to learning more about skills! Thanks for all your hard work on this.

Yeah, I meant the original DS EO1 by that, sorry. I started working on an editor for its data (that is, not save data) about a year ago, called Yggdrasil. Very original name, huh? Not much about skills in this one, either, tho.

As for the unknowns in the dump, compatible classes and skills are already covered, tho the dump doesn't contain the skill's names, just the IDs - see at the end of the first line (with name, ATK, etc.) and the whole fourth line.

Added: Testing the forging now. I'm using a Knight Armor with 8 forgeable slots, 8 HP forges as my sample. It seems to increase HP properly; comparing it to a Knight Armor (KA henceforth) with 4 HP forges on a lv 1 Fort, it gives 11 more HP than the 4-forged KA (73 vs 62).
In battle, everything seems fine. I even leveled my Fort a few times and the changes seem to be keeping up. There's only one thing to note: changing the forgeable slots actually adds forgeable slots (you can see the edge of a 9th slot on the right side of the screen). So, since the KA already has 4 slots, I think this is giving it a total of 12; whether you can use them or not, I wouldn't try because of how the data is set up.

I don't have anymore time to test right now, but it looks like it should work just fine if you just add the forges manually and don't try to mess with it in-game.

That sounds promising already, thanks for testing! I'll have another look too, especially regarding the total number of slots and if they're all useable, tho it might be next week until I get to that.

 

[Arikaido]

As for the unknowns in the dump, compatible classes and skills are already covered, tho the dump doesn't contain the skill's names, just the IDs - see at the end of the first line (with name, ATK, etc.) and the whole fourth line.

That's not quite what I meant, at least not for skills. I meant which skills they enable when equipped; like how Bushi has differing skills based on equipping Katana or Mace. I think one of those unknowns might dictate that. It's only a hunch, but since it's in the ROM, there's no simple way to test it. Well, I guess you could, but whatevs.

That sounds promising already, thanks for testing! I'll have another look too, especially regarding the total number of slots and if they're all useable, tho it might be next week until I get to tha

I wouldn't try messing with the slots past #8. Something tells me that it could corrupt saves, which is what we don't wanna do. The simplest way to avoid any visual anomalies is to, in the editor, set slots to 8,make your edits, then put it back to 0. It'll keep the forges and they'll behave as planned in-game, just with no wierd extra slots that can't be forged- or shouldn't be.

Anyways. Tiny bit of interesting stuff: if playing as something with Imperial, you can manually set your Drive Blade as your subweapon and then swap a main weapon like normal. I'm doing a solo run as Imperial/Bushi and wanted access to both sets of skills in battle, and it works perfectly. You can probably add a third weapon and have access to ALL DAS SKILLZ.

 

[litewait]

I can't manage to export the save file using Gateway and Savedatafiler. I have no mori4game.sav file and the other 3. When I export the save, I only get a user1 file. Am I doing something wrong? Does the game has to be a .cia file or can I just use a normal .3ds file? I would really like to use this editor.

 

[xdaniel]

Oh boy, I need to get back to this project. Got distracted by some other things, as well as some real life stuff... The editor's not dead and ex. improvements to effect slot editing are planned - more research into the ROM's data itself is as well -, but I'm not sure when that'll happen.

I can't manage to export the save file using Gateway and Savedatafiler. I have no mori4game.sav file and the other 3. When I export the save, I only get a user1 file. Am I doing something wrong? Does the game has to be a .cia file or can I just use a normal .3ds file? I would really like to use this editor.

First of all, you are playing Etrian Odyssey IV, right...? Just asking because googling "SaveDataFiler" and "user1" gives me some results for Monster Hunter 4...

If it's definitely EO4, I can only assume the Gateway does something to the save data that renders it incompatible with Tharsis Forge. I don't have a Gateway, so I can't really check that myself. I guess my only advice for you right now would be to look up if there's anything else you need to do (ex. convert the files somehow) to use SaveDataFiler with a Gateway.

 

[Princess Emily]

Quick Questions:

Can I use Save Manager to extract the save for this game?
And does this editor work for digital copies? (There's a sale in eShop for $9.99, but this won't last long, deadline is Jan. 4)

 

[Arikaido]

Quick Questions:

Can I use Save Manager to extract the save for this game?
And does this editor work for digital copies? (There's a sale in eShop for $9.99, but this won't last long, deadline is Jan. 4)

Yes and yes. MAKE THE PURCHASE NAU!
Err, sorry. Just select the game from the list in whatever save manager/extractor you prefer. Drop all 5(4?) files onto your comp and edit away.

In related news, is any work still being done here? Last I posted, I think you said you still had some stuff to do. I'd be willing to test the "limit releases" on forges and skills, if you wanna upload a version of the editor that has those failsafes removed.

 

[xdaniel]

In related news, is any work still being done here? Last I posted, I think you said you still had some stuff to do. I'd be willing to test the "limit releases" on forges and skills, if you wanna upload a version of the editor that has those failsafes removed.

November and December have been a bit rough in terms of real life things going on (health, family, Christmas, other projects), so development has been really slow. As I said in my last post, the editor is not dead, I'm still working with EO4 in general (both on the save data side and the "RomFS side", so to speak) and will make an effort to get back to this project in January, probably next week.

(Edit: I also recently got a PS Vita and played a lot of that instead of really working on anything substantial, period; you know, "got a new toy!" and all *cough*)

In the meantime, if anyone else out there has programming knowledge in C# and some familiarity with the game's and/or its save data's internals, feel free to submit pull requests on GitHub and such.