Modding in Story of Seasons?

[Lynx]

Hello guys,

I think most of you are as happy as me, that we will see this gem on steam.

I'm not sure - because I am lucky to own a Switch as well - which platform I'll use and to have the game with the handheld-option is nice, but the PC maybe has the big opportunity of modding. This would be a big "pro PC".

Sure, it's hard to tell if modding will be a thing, but nethertheless: What do you guys think?

Easy things like textures, portraits, dialogues and so on would be nice enough. Scripted scenes, models etc. would surely be more difficult, but nice as well. I think a easy to mod Story of Seasons will be a big improvement to the game, but for me it's impossible to predict if the engine of the game let us some options to mod...

[2d0x]

Originally posted by Lynx:

...but for me it's impossible to predict if the engine of the game let us some options to mod...

What one person did, the other can always make out (С) "Formula of Love", 1984

[AsianGirlLover]

We’ll probably have the same problem we had with Dragon Quest Builders 2: the devs design the game in a way that makes modding near impossible.

If they force you to use Denuvo to play the game, that’ll be an additional nail in the coffin for people hoping for mods.

[Phoach]

this sounds stupid. I stopped playing olive town on my switch because the prospective bothers me and I pre ordered it on steam because I thought it would be simple enough to mod a 3rd person or first person mode to enjoy it more. honestly I played it in camera mode and it was a good way to walk around but every time I wanted to enter a doorway or move to use the path from town to farm I had to hop out of my camera bringing me to top down prospective and I hate it. this game is perfect in first or 3rd person. loved harvest moon a wonderful life and played it many times because of this and I want that experience again.

[Joper]

Game files are heavily encrypted. Modding is not possible at the moment.

I don't understand why some developers don't like other people to mod their game. It's not like we're profiting off of modding right?

[erobotan]

I would love to give Mari her original's hairstyle back. I hate her new design!!!

[Taweret]

modding actually bring more profit to the game developers since more ppl will buy it just for possibilities.

[Algester]

my hunch why its hard to mod this title this is basically an overlayed Switch emulator of sorts if you can crack open the encryption of the files on the switch then I think the same process could be done on this version of the game otherwise you are out of luck

even if the base game is built with unity but is ran through another layer to obfuscate the files then ya know... its hard to deal with

PoOT is modable however being Unity built game through and through

[Neo King Arthur]

Originally posted by Joper:

I don't understand why some developers don't like other people to mod their game. It's not like we're profiting off of modding right?

If I had to pick an analogy would be, Imagine you are an Italian Pizza chef, you made this perfect and authentic Margherita pizza for a customer dining in your Pizzeria who ordered it. Then as you serve the pizza that you made with love and perfection, the customer suddenly took out their bag grabbing some chopped fresh pineapples, and start sprinkling them on top of the pizza, and start eating it. How would you feel?

[Lynx]

Originally posted by Neo:

Originally posted by Joper:

I don't understand why some developers don't like other people to mod their game. It's not like we're profiting off of modding right?

If I had to pick an analogy would be, Imagine you are an Italian Pizza chef, you made this perfect and authentic Margherita pizza for a customer dining in your Pizzeria who ordered it. Then as you serve the pizza that you made with love and perfection, the customer suddenly took out their bag grabbing some chopped fresh pineapples, and start sprinkling them on top of the pizza, and start eating it. How would you feel?

But Neo, if I am that Italian Pizza chef and this help me to sell even more pizzas, the customer can sprinkle dog poo on the pizza and I am happy with that.

[Neo King Arthur]

Originally posted by Lynx:

But Neo, if I am that Italian Pizza chef and this help me to sell even more pizzas, the customer can sprinkle dog poo on the pizza and I am happy with that.

Well if that's how you feel, that's all fine.. But not all italian pizza chef share the same views as you do. There's such a thing called artistic integrity. Sometimes money isn't everything.

If people are going to mod things willy nilly up to a point it becomes unrecogniseable, then what's the point in making the game in the first place? Just make a blank platform, and have the community create and run 99% mods. Like Skyrim. When you put so much value to mods for too much, the value of the actual original content is reduced to barely nothing up to a point is practically an insult to the content creators.

Back to the Pizza analogy, if you want to sell the pizza just sell the pizza dough and let the customers put whatever they want. That's a good business model sure but only if the business is designed as a "buy pizza base, put any topping you want" model. But when you spent so much time and effort to create the perfect pizza for customers with the perfect topping. Only for the customers to butcher your own creation with their own, sure you get the money, the money you receive would feel empty. Like it's worthless, because you earn the money, by having your creative integrity insulted.

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm a pro-modding person. But there has to be a balance and a line being drawn. Sandbox games or simulators are good with modding. Storytelling adventure games, not so much. And SoS:FoMT is just in that category where it's just a small game that just isn't worth having the need to be mod able.

[Mr C.Folt Scruff]

I wish ican put elli theme back on

[ejh1990]

Bumping this thread with information that might be useful and/or interesting.

Is this game moddable? Yes. Here's some silly examples (a demo of modified text, and modified image/texture)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2638522254

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2638523971

But is the game easily moddable? No. For anyone up for the challenge and who wants, however:-

• The disc file is a PKzip filetype (note the file header: 50 4B 03 04)
• The disc file is indeed encrypted. However, once decrypted...
• Game files are packed into LZS files. These can be unpacked/repacked with quickbms.
• Repacked LZS files can't just be readded to disc. <-- this has been the stumbling block

The disc file isn't compressed (files are instead stored). However, using a lot of the common archive software that is on Windows -- even using store as an option -- causes a crash to desktop.

After playing around a little today, I made a discovery: what didn't seem to cause a crash to desktop was repacking the disc file via Ubuntu 20.04LTS on WSL2 (using zip with the -0 flag, for no compression).

So for anyone reading this who has managed to unpack the files but struggled with the last step... Linux to the rescue, I guess.

The real challenge, however, is distributing mods... Since everything is stored in the disc file, you can't easily distribute that without entering into really murky waters. And it's not likely the average person wants to go through the process of manually patching a mod into their disc file.

How can these challenges be overcome? One of two ways:-

• Someone comes along and makes a tool that handles the extracting of LZS and unpacks them, repacks them with the modified files, then rebuilds the disc file; or
• Someone creates a tool that can patch in game files on the fly.

edit to add...

A few more things of note:-

• Text isn't stored in an easy to edit way. Unlike with SoS:PoOT where you can work with dumped Unity assets in a simple text editor, you will need to use a hex editor.
• Also, Latin characters are stored as two bytes (padded with 00).
• To further complicate things, it looks like there is something like a filesize table (as you can see from the weird text in the text demo).

I haven't delved too much into it just yet, but it's nice to know that it's possible -- if extremely awkward -- to mod this game.

[Joper]

^Damn, really well done on this.

Are you the only one modding PoOT and FoMT at the moment?

This is really promising. Thanks for doing this.

[ejh1990]

Originally posted by Joper:

^Damn, really well done on this.

Are you the only one modding PoOT and FoMT at the moment?

This is really promising. Thanks for doing this.

I'm not sure.

I know that there are people who have made a start with a fan translation of PoOT (and expressed an interest in FoMT translation). An Indonesian fan translation, I believe.

This isn't so relevant to you (since I know that you're already on there) but...

If there is anyone seeing this who wants to stay up to date with everything I am up to re: investigating moddability of the Story of Seasons games, there's a modding Discord:-

https://discord.gg/EXDjBWq39V

Shameless self-plug, I know. But I would especially love it if there is anyone who wants to lend a hand with documenting/researching etc. The more the merrier! :)

For anyone passing by who isn't interested in Discord, I will provide this here: the list of assets.

(as a tree):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/eo9wr6kyyjqvas5/sos-fomt_asset-tree.txt?dl=0

(as a simple list):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oh8jj1ulk7d7o4q/sos-fomt_asset-list.txt?dl=0

edit: dedicated thread here:-

https://steamcommunity.com/app/978780/discussions/0/3159831641989625851/

[LunaGoddess0512]

I wish you could change the hair color of the main character.