ROM Hack Animal Crossing: New Leaf ROM Hacking

[Blundermann]

Animal Crossing: New Leaf has absolutely no ROM hacks, only save hacks. Which makes sense, but we need to go deeper! Let's have a thread.

However, I've ran into a problem.
A lot of the 3DS tools that exist don't play nice with ACNL.

Another problem being that I can't convert any of the textures from the game into another format, and back, for example PNG or TGA. The existing png2bclim tool doesn't work.

I can extract the .arc archives in the romfs using Every File Explorer, but I can't place files back into said archives after I modify them.

The only thing I've been able to successfully accomplish is font editing, which is very easy to do with ctr_FontConverter. I imported 8bitoperator.

I tried getting some BCSTM files from brawlcustommusic and putting them into the game, but they just result in a crash. I'm guessing it's too high a sample rate? Which is odd considering all the BCSTM files from there work wonderfully as a custom theme.

This may seem like a long shot, but is there any possible way to remove the map checks to the game? You know, the lines of code that prevent the game from checking if important things are removed or changed, and closing if it finds such an oddity? Probably not, but just curious.

I also really want to try model exporting and importing, so we can create completely custom villagers. That would be neat.

Thanks so much for any and all answers and let's get this party train rollin'.

 

[SaraTravelo]

I tried to modify some sound files / BCSTM too and I the game freezes when is about to show up the Animal Crossing logo. After this I tested to load with hans a romfs without any modifications and it seems to crash too so I think it can be a problem with hans or AC:NL itself.
I hope this to be fixed, modding Animal Crossing would be so amazing!

 

[troa11]

I just started looking into this myself as I wanted to create a custom villager for my wife. My goal in the end is to make a custom install of it on her 3DS, but not having luck yet. I did manage to export/import textures using a tool called Ohana3DS and somewhere I hex edited a file that had villager names, but I have no way to know if what I did worked, since my recompiles of the rom don't work yet.

 

[Blundermann]

I did manage to export/import textures using a tool called Ohana3DS

I somehow forgot to try using Ohana3DS for Animal Crossing.
It opens the archives, and it can even import and export files from them! Thanks so much for pointing this out.

 

[troa11]

You're welcome! Ideally, I'd even like to replace some of the music/sfx with the NGC originals, but that's more of a dream. Right now I'll settle for being able to add this custom bear cub.

 

[NeoKamek]

I also get a game freeze after unpacking and repacking the romfs and using it with HANS.

 

[MasterLel]

What if you encrypt back the romfs and/or exefs then use it with HANS ? Or disable customized exefs ?
Anyways I hope a solution will be found because I only want HANS for ACNL rom hacking.

 

[TidusWulf]

Someone bring back NES Games!

Don't tell me it can't be done! I don't want to hear it! lalalalalala Imnotlistening lalalalalalala

 

[ShrineFox]

You're welcome! Ideally, I'd even like to replace some of the music/sfx with the NGC originals, but that's more of a dream. Right now I'll settle for being able to add this custom bear cub.

I'm glad I'm not the only person with the goal to reinput the old music. It's not that the new music is bad but I'm a sucker for nostalgia.

Problem is, I can't find the music tracks. I also can't find any of the dialog files, or NPC/player models.
Something doesn't seem right. My romFS.bin is 723mb but my extracted directory is only 147mb.
This is what it looks like--

Kind of odd that there's no more folders after the letter "i" unless that's how it's supposed to be and I'm just not looking hard enough?
Did ctrtools just not extract it correctly? Are there any alternatives I should use? Am I getting ahead of myself? (probably)

 

[DesuIsSparta]

I'm glad I'm not the only person with the goal to reinput the old music. It's not that the new music is bad but I'm a sucker for nostalgia.

Problem is, I can't find the music tracks. I also can't find any of the dialog files, or NPC/player models.
Something doesn't seem right. My romFS.bin is 723mb but my extracted directory is only 147mb.
This is what it looks like--

Kind of odd that there's no more folders after the letter "i" unless that's how it's supposed to be and I'm just not looking hard enough?
Did ctrtools just not extract it correctly? Are there any alternatives I should use? Am I getting ahead of myself? (probably)

Looks like your romf didn't extract properly. Further down there's a 'scripts' folder, not sure about the others. I'd guess maybe 30 folders total? I deleted my dump (accidentally) so I can't check for you

 

[ShrineFox]

I see... Well, I tried again and this ended up happening:

And this is what I entered in the command prompt. I used braindump so the romfs should be intact, so I wonder what I should do differently...?

"C:\Users\User\Desktop\New Leaf Hax\3DSRomTools\0004000000086300\ctrtool.exe" --intype=romfs --romfsdir=romfsdir "C:\Users\User\Desktop\New Leaf Hax\3DSRomTools\0004000000086300\romfs.bin"

 

[DesuIsSparta]

I see... Well, I tried again and this ended up happening:

And this is what I entered in the command prompt. I used braindump so the romfs should be intact, so I wonder what I should do differently...?

"C:\Users\User\Desktop\New Leaf Hax\3DSRomTools\0004000000086300\ctrtool.exe" --intype=romfs --romfsdir=romfsdir "C:\Users\User\Desktop\New Leaf Hax\3DSRomTools\0004000000086300\romfs.bin"

I didn't use ctrltool so I'm not sure if that makes a difference.I used the tools provided here

 

[troa11]

Yeah same here, sucker for nostalgia. Anyway, if you get it to extract properly, further down there's a folder called "sound" and within that is the "stream" folder that has all the music in it. I'm assuming the file "gardensound.bscar" in the main sound directory has all the regular sound effects. I haven't looked into doing anything with these files yet because I'm still just working on getting anything repacked to work at all.

 

[MasterLel]

So the freezing problem is fixed for you guys ?

 

[EpicInki]

I finally managed to get the Romfs path valid and it just crashed with a line on the side xD!! I only edited a texture .-.
EDIT: I can now finally get on the Title Screen but it freezes :3 Now I'm stuck with y'all.

 

[MasterLel]

I finally managed to get the Romfs path valid and it just crashed with a line on the side xD!! I only edited a texture .-.
EDIT: I can now finally get on the Title Screen but it freezes :3 Now I'm stuck with y'all.

Can you try to encrypt back the modified romfs then use it with hans ? Maybe it will solve the problem

 

[EpicInki]

Can you try to encrypt back the modified romfs then use it with hans ? Maybe it will solve the problem

I'm not sure how, It took me a long time to do a lot of this stuff without much help and a lot of confusion xD

 

[MasterLel]

I can't help you about that, I'm still waiting for a new entry point to use HBL haha... But if we can decrypt something, we should be able to encrypt it back, it shouldn't be a problem

Ask @neobrain @smealum @Kaphotics

The problem is either with HANS or with the game (though ACNL not "special" and some people already did rom hacking before, like this guy : https://miiverse.nintendo.net/users/Mew_Mod )

 

[EpicInki]

I can't help you about that, I'm still waiting for a new entry point to use HBL haha... But if we can decrypt something, we should be able to encrypt it back, it shouldn't be a problem

Ask @neobrain @smealum @Kaphotics

The problem is either with HANS or with the game (though ACNL not "special" and some people already did rom hacking before, like this guy : https://miiverse.nintendo.net/users/Mew_Mod )

Hmm the freezing issue reminds me of something that happens to me a few times in Ram editing, when I spent ages trying to get a passport picture of a jpg, if I deleted wrong code it crashed on the title screen, weird aha.

And isn't it like already encrypted back if I use a Romfs Builder which is basically what I did to get the id.romfs (renamed from exefs.bin), I really want to keep trying aha but I don't want to spend much more time, I only wanted to edit a TV Channel texture :3

 

[MasterLel]

Never got any crash while changing my TPC picture, so yeah that's weird !
I don't know if Romfs builder encrypt it back, I don't think so... it's just meant to repack the romfs file.

ACNL have updates or it's still the 1.0 version ? Because HANS doesn't read update, and I heard that our EU/US games aren't the same as JP games (our games are "patched", because there was a duplication glitch on jp games). That could be the reason why it freezes