rom hacking [HGSS] Is it possible to edit in game trades?

[HighFrequencyOcelot]

Hi everyone I've been working on a little Soul Silver ROM hack for a while now and I'm pretty close to releasing the first version. One thing I've been having lots of trouble with however is editing in-game trades. I found a really obscure tool that helped me out with this however it only works on unedited roms. I tried editing a clean rom using this tool and it worked out pretty well, but when I tried extracting narc file A112 (the in-game trade file) and inserting it into my already edited ROM, nothing changed. I then tried doing it the opposite way by adding all the other narc files that I needed from my edited ROM into the ROM where I had successfully edited the in game trades but when I went to playtest, the in game trades had returned to the base game trades.

I'm guessing I somehow have the wrong narc file or I just messed up somewhere but I've tried multiple times doing things this way and it never works properly. Could someone please help me out? If I'm using the wrong narc file and I found the real one I'd be sorted. Alternatively if you know the numbers of the in game trade scripts in SDSME then I could probably edit them from there (although I haven't gotten very far into script editing yet so it'll take me a while to learn that properly). Ideally there would be some sort of tool I missed that would let me just quickly edit the trades but as far I can tell there aren't any finished tools that can do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

[HighFrequencyOcelot]

Update: Mission acomplished!

No one replied to my post  but I figured it out on my own (not really tho)! Using the most dreaded method of them all, hex editing! A month or two ago I would've been scared away by hex editing but honestly it's not that bad, especially if you have tutorials and any basic coding experience.

I followed a tutorial for hex editing BW2 in-game trades but made a few changes so that it would work in HGSS. If you want to also edit HGSS trades then follow the tutorial I link below but read the changes I made below. Make sure to backup your ROM before following this tutorial in case you make a mistake!

1. First of all, you'll want to open these bulbapedia links in order to easily look up the hex value of the pokémon you want to trade/ be traded and to look up the item you want the traded pokémon to hold.

 https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_Pokémon_by_index_number_(Generation_IV)

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_items_by_index_number_(Generation_IV)

2. Next, extract narc file A/1/1/2 from your HGSS ROM (the ROM can be edited or non edited, it shouldn't make a difference usually) using NitroExplorer2.

3. Find the file you extracted, by default it will be a plain file with the name 2. Rename the file to whatever you want but make sure to add the extension '.narc'

4. At this point you can follow the BW2 tutorial and everything should work the same. Once you're done hex editing, make sure to save and reinsert the narc file into the same location that you extracted it (A/1/1/2). You don't have to rename the file again it should work fine.

I don't really have experience making tutorials so I thought it would be easier to link to an existing one but if you need any help with this process I'll try to reply to comments and maybe I'll make my own FULL tutorial. I'll be sure to post about any findings I make. One thing I couldn't figure out is how to change gender requirements since the Blackthorn city trade asks for a female pokémon, quite an inconvinience but it shouldn't break anything.

Edited July 3, 2020 by HighFrequencyOcelot