did a few more tests with the original template file and noticed the look up box for the base template had the last two bytes trimmed as well. so I went through the fantasy life template and yes, there was a few unwanted spaces at the end of some lines (not the sha1 one though). once those were removed, the problem disappeared
had the same problem with another game, cleaning up unwanted spaces in the base template worked as well. the games that worked seamlessly did not have those unwanted spaces in their base template... so it's definitely a problem with sky3ds template file