Explorers of Sky Mods

After creating a modpack, one such mod you can add for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky is the Starter Mod, a modification that changes the available starters you can use. Before continuing, please make sure you've reached the "Making Mods" section of the Sky Editor guide to ROM editing. Creating the Project On the New Project window, choose "Starter Mod" in the dropdown, and fill in the name with something that makes sense. Then click OK. Expand the project you just created and open "Starter Pokemon". You can do this either by double-clicking or by right-clicking and clicking Open. Edit things to your liking. You should see something that looks like this: For the purpose of this guide, we'll do this: You can also go to the Partner tab and customize things. Be careful, since the game will not let you choose anything with the same type as the player. For the purpose of this guide, we'll do this: Click File -> Save -> Save File. You can now build the modpack, continue editing, or move create another project. The Result When you create a new save, you should see the results of your modifications as you would expect. Here's what my example edits look like: Remarks Observe how there's no portraits for Grovyle or Porygon. This is because many unplayable Pokémon do not have all of the usual emotions, like the grin that's normally here. We'll want to copy the default portrait to the other emotions to be less distracting. Luckily, this is very simple, as the Portrait Mod does this as soon as you create the project. Follow the instructions for the Portrait Mod, then build them together: The result of the two working together works like this:

This mod lets you customize the Pokémon portraits. Additionally, it will copy the default emotion to empty slots, for use with the Starter Mod. Before continuing, please make sure you've reached the "Making Mods" section of the Sky Editor guide to ROM editing. Instructions On the New Project window, choose "Portrait Mod" in the dropdown, and fill in the name with something that makes sense. Then click OK. Wait for the loading to complete. This may take a while depending on your computer. Portraits should be under (Solution Directory)/(Project Directory)/Pokemon/Portraits. Sky Editor has no UI for this, so you will need to use another program. Remarks Portraits can only have 15 colors.

This mod lets you change the menu backgrounds. Before continuing, please make sure you've reached the "Making Mods" section of the Sky Editor guide to ROM editing. Instructions On the New Project window, choose "Background Mod" in the drop-down, and fill in the name with something that makes sense. Then click OK. Wait for the loading to complete. This may take a while depending on your computer. The backgrounds are under (Solution Directory)/(Project Directory)/Backgrounds. You should see two kinds of files: *.png and *.original. Do not touch the *.original files; they're there so Sky Editor can quickly tell if you've modified any *.png file (this saves time, since Sky Editor doesn't have to rebuild any files you haven't changed). Remarks The number of colors you can use is a bit tricky. There can be no more than 255 colors in the entire image. Each 16x16 tile can have no more than 8 colors. And you can't have too many dissimilar colors too close to each other. How many this means requires an illustration. Imagine our palette for the entire image looks like this: Color 1 Color 2 Color 3 Color 4 Color 5 Color 6 Color 7 Color 8 Color 9 Color 10 Color 11 Color 12 Color 13 Color 14 Color 15 Color 16 Each 16x16 tile can have any 8 consecutive colors in this list. The first tile might use colors 1 through 8, the next tile use colors 9 through 16, and so on, until we reach the limit of the image, like so (red is tile 1, blue is tile 2): Color 1 Color 2 Color 3 Color 4 Color 5 Color 6 Color 7 Color 8 Color 9 Color 10 Color 11 Color 12 Color 13 Color 14 Color 15 Color 16  But that's only if the colors are drastically different. The palettes can overlap if the colors are used more gradually. Tile 1 can use colors 1 through 8, tile 2 can use colors 3 through 10, and tile 3 can use colors 2 through 9, like so: Color 1 Color 2 Color 3 Color 4 Color 5 Color 6 Color 7 Color 8 Color 9 Color 10 Color 11 Color 12 Color 13 Color 14 Color 15 Color 16 Now what does this mean in terms of how many colors you can use? I don't know. Sky Editor will do its best to maximize the number of colors you can use, but it doesn't do quite as good of a job as whatever tool Chunsoft used. If you have too many colors, you'll see this in the Errors window when building the modpack: If you see that, it's up to you to reduce the amount of colors you're using. If you contact me, I might be able to help identify where the problem lies, but it may be a while before I can get to it.

Sky Editor comes bundled with psy_commando's tools, and this project is a wrapper for StatsUtil, letting you edit scripts, Pokémon data, and more. Before continuing, please make sure you've reached the "Making Mods" section of the Sky Editor guide to ROM editing. Instructions On the New Project window, choose "Stats Util Project" in the drop-down, and fill in the name with something that makes sense. Then click OK. Wait for the loading to complete. This may take a while depending on your computer. All of the XML files that statsutil created are in (Solution Directory)/(Project Directory). Do not touch the "Raw Files" directory, since that's for Sky Editor's use only. Editing Scripts Due to the lack of documentation regarding the XML statusutil generates, the best way to learn how to modify it is to look at the existing scenes and compare it to what happens in-game. However, it's important to have a basic understanding of the script nodes: LSDTable - This is basically a list of script definitions.  ScriptSet ScriptData - controls how the map is set up (like which actors are on the map and their locations) ScriptSequence - controls what happens afterward (this is where the bulk of the stuff happens). Remarks Refer to psy_commando's thread for additional instructions regarding statsutil. You shouldn't have to worry about any of the command-line stuff, since Sky Editor handles that. At the time of writing, he has an imgur album with instructions on how to deal with the XML. You can skip to the 7th image, where the XML files have already been created, and you can stop at the 3rd to last one, since building the modpack with Sky Editor accomplishes the same thing:https://imgur.com/a/bBnmQ If you have any additional questions, you can either ask in psy_commando's thread or create your own thread in the ROM Editing Help forum.