ROM Hack [Question] Editing Mii Maker text strings: What am I doing wrong?

[Ridge]

As the title suggests, I'm trying to edit a text string in Mii Maker. This is my first time trying to edit a ROM like this, so if I'm making myself look like what could be described as clueless then it's exactly what it looks like. I have a vague idea of what I'm doing wrong, but I'm just looking for some guidance, so here's what I did step-by-step.

1. Dumped Mii Maker using Braindump.
2. Used ctrtool to extract the romfs.bin (and exefs.bin but that doesn't matter I think, didn't do anything with that file).
3. Decompressed ../romfsdir/Message/EU_English.arc using EveryFileExplorer.
4. (Here's where I believe I screwed up astronomically) Opened the decompressed EU_English.arc file in a hex editor.
5. Found the text I wanted to edit. Yes, I ADDED bytes to the file.
6. Compressed EU_English.arc again.
7. Used HANSHelper to build the modified romfs with the first 0x1000 bytes trimmed.

This didn't quite work and Mii Maker failed to boot using this romfs file, so I'm hoping someone could help point me on the right path at least? Thanks in advance.

 

[DJ-Yoshiman]

Have you tried keeping the same amount of characters for the strings you edit in the hex editor? It's always better to start simple and make sure it works, and work your way up. Makes debugging and finding the root of the issue easier than trying to do everything at once and having multiple potential problems.

 

[Hiccup]

Why don't you edit the file inside the archive, rather than editing the archive?

 

[Ridge]

Have you tried keeping the same amount of characters for the strings you edit in the hex editor? It's always better to start simple and make sure it works, and work your way up. Makes debugging and finding the root of the issue easier than trying to do everything at once and having multiple potential problems.

It's been on the back of my head to try next, yeah. Should probably have done it before posting, so I'll do that now.
Still gives me the same error. This time I even made sure to recompress with LZ11.

Why don't you edit the file inside the archive, rather than editing the archive?

I could do that, but I'm unsure how to make the archive again.