How to edit music, text and graphics in vanilla NT (u99r1)

Virtually every part of vanilla NT can be edited. How everything looks, what everything says, and what's playing while you scour through the wasteland. In this guide I go over the guide on how to go through each.

Introduction

Hello everyone! People seem to be interested in the NT discord often about editing Vanilla NT, so I decided to make a guide briefing over how to edit everything in base NT. As long as there are no mods, any edits to NT can count towards records and so on! They are pretty fun to mess around with, so I plan to share how you can edit any text in the game, any images in the game, and any pictures in the game. Hope people find this helpful!

This guide contains spoilers for all characters and areas in the game.

Make sure to back up your save file in general, but also if this is the first time editing these things, especially for sprite editing!

First, as a brief overview everything is numbered. Characters are referred to as Race and Places are referred to as Area. Here is a brief overview of how they're numbered, which is important for Text and some Sound editing;

Races are ordered from 0 to 16. 0 is Random, 1 is Fish, 2 is Crystal, 3 is Eyes, 4 is Melting, 5 is Plant, 6 is Yung Venuz, 7 is Steroids, 8 is Robot, 9 is Chicken, 10 is Rebel, 11 is Horror, 12 is Rogue, 13 is Big Dog, 14 is Skeleton, 15 is Frog, and 16 is Cuz. Big dog is only playable on April Fools. Cuz has many in-game information related to him being a character, however he is not actually programmed in to be playable and only seems to have been planned.

Areas are numbered as well with 0 being the Campfire(where you fight Throne 2), 1 being the Desert, 2 Sewers, 3 Scrapyards, 4 Crystal Caves, 5 Frozen City, 6 Labs, and 7 being The Palace. Secret areas are numbered starting at 100 to signify being different, with 100 being the Crown Vault, 101 being the Oasis, 102 being Pizza Sewers, 103 being Y.V.'s Mansion, 104 being Cursed Crystal Caves, 105 being Jungle, 106 being IDPD HQ, and 107 being Y.V.'s crib.

Finally, there are some unused assets in the game(besides playable Cuz). There is an object called "New Cave Thing" that is an unused placeholder prop/enemy, "mine" that refers to unused mine hazards, and "big fish" that refers to an unused Oasis boss. These can be found in the text files and/or the graphic files, so be aware that these are just filler and are not actually a part of the base game, just exists in the games code!

How to edit your text files

Editing your text files is probably one of the easiest things to do in the game. What you'll want to do is right click on Nuclear Throne from your steam library -> click on properties -> click on the Local Files tab -> Browse Local Files.

From there you should see something resembling this:


You will see two highlighted files. lang, and lang-example. If you have not text edited yet, you will only have lang-example. What you'll want to do is open it up(with notepad) and voila! There is all editable text in base NT.

Starting at [Tips] all the way to the end of the notepad is a list of everything that can be edited in-game. Only tips that appear can be edited. Additional ones will not appear in-game if you add new lines.

Once you finish editing whatever text you like, you'll want to Save As and rename lang-example to just "lang". Save as type will probably appear as notepad, that's fine. Often times people will say "save as lang.ini", .ini refers to the file type which it should be saved by as default. If not, well, that's the file type it's supposed to be.

As for the tips itself, there's a few things to note, including what all the tips are for and what what the weird extra code in the lines are.

Every text starts after the =(equals) sign. Anything before that should not be touched. You can put the @ character then a letter that will put in a color, or some other stuff. You then should put an @s after the selected text to end that color line. For example, the first tip you can edit as follows; "General:1=@rHP@s will only drop when damaged". the letter r makes the color red, so the word HP will appear as red in the screen tips.
https://yal.cc/r/17/ntt/gml/#draw_text_nt this site gives an overview too, most is here for simplicity;
Here is a list of what does work:

• @r for the color red
  
• @y for the color yellow
  
• @g for the color green
  
• @b for the color blue
  
• @p for the color purple
  
• @w for the color white
  
• @s for the color silver(may look grey-ish depending on background)
  
• @q to make the text shaky. @s is not needed at the end; however multiple @q can increase the intensity of how shaky the text is
  
• @0 makes a weird fish symbol
  
• @(<sprite>) Inserts a sprite into text. Can be either name of built-in sprite or a decimal sprite index for custom sprites. The sprite will be shown animated at 12fps (game's standard). You can find sprites located here -> https://yal.cc/r/17/ntt/sprites/

At this point you have all the assets you need to be able to edit text as freely as you want. Make sure to save it as lang, and not save over the lang-example, so if you ever need to see the vanilla tips or want to start fresh you have the entire original file waiting there for you!

From here everything else is all the text that can be edited in-game. It will be confusing to navigate at first but it doesn't take long to figure out! Feel free to join the official NT discord if you have any questions though!

How to add custom music to the game

Adding music to the game is incredibly easy as well, however it can be frustrating when it takes time to convert so many files. Basically, you'll want to go to your Nuclear Throne file directory and sort by file type.


You will see something like this, where each music file is an OGG. These are all tracks that can be replaced in-game. I recommend making a back-up of every vanilla song, as well as a folder with every custom song. If you ever verify your game cache these files may be replaced with the original ones.

This guide is pretty simple; you'll want to find a song you like, whether through youtube or any other site and you'll want a site to convert it to an OGG file(if incompatible, you may want to convert to mp3 first then convert mp3 to OGG). Once it's converted, you'll want to rename it exactly to what the song is called in the NT folder, and all you have to do is replace it!

Remember to scroll to the top of the guide to see what areas are labeled as what for quicker editing. Ambiance refers to areas, snd refers to all the sounds mutants make in the game, and mus refers to each area's main music that plays. If it ends with a "b", that is the b-theme for the level, which has a very small chance of playing in an area. These are for the four bigger areas in the game that have them(desert, scrapyards, frozen city, and the palace). However HQ also has an alternative track that plays specifically for Rogue titled mus106b.

This part of the guide is pretty simple because it's all about the manual work of just converting any music you want into an OGG file and renaming it correctly. In older videos of NT people may notice that people have edited not only the music, but the sounds. Unfortunately outside of what is in the NT folder, there is no "simple" way to edit anything else. Editing sounds is a tricky process that is beyond the scope of this guide.

Finally, any sound or music file will work as long as it's .OGG! Just remember that the songs made here were made to loop after the song ends, so if you put in a song and it ends and loops back to the beginning it may sound a bit awkward. Song length does not have to match up with the original sound whatsoever.

How to edit graphics/images in the game

This final part of the guide will be the most lengthy, and will require the most work in editing. However making custom edits of anything is worth it!

As a formal instruction I strongly urge anyone who wishes to edit their file to create a back-up of their nuclearthrone.exe file. The first time doing this it can be easy to mess up, so having an application on-hand with everything back to what it was is strongly recommended.

Here is a list of tools you will need:

• yal's texture view[yal.cc] is the one thing that is actually required here to edit. Open this up while starting the guide.
  
• https://www.getpaint.net/download.html is a free program that lets you edit images freely. This guide will be using paint net as instructions, though other image editing software is allowed, for the love of god do not use mspaint.
  
• pngcrush[pngcrush.com] which will reduce the file size of the image you edit. For whatever reason, when saving your file size becomes bigger which may be rejected by YAL's site when inputting the new image. For that reason the site recommends various sites to reduce file size, pngcrush will not compress anything that will seriously mess with the game's graphics. You can use other sites, but do so at your own risk with a backup on-hand.

Step 1: Start-up

With paint net or another image editing software downloaded, and YYTextureView open, you should be ready! What you'll want to do is go to the texture viewing site, and on the top left there will be a Menu! button. It should bring you to your NT directory(otherwise you'll have to manually find it), and you can select your nuclearthrone.exe (If you have NuclearThroneTogether downloaded, do not open it then save it as the new nuclearthrone.exe or vise versa! They are different sizes and this will immensely mess up how your game looks.)

After you open your nuclearthrone.exe, there will be 6 sheets numbered 0-5 here, each with a copious amount of randomly-placed graphics. This includes everything in-game that is visible! You will then decide what you want to edit, whether how a boss looks, or your favorite character, or something else. You can switch between the sheets freely and zoom in/out to try to find what you're looking for. You can only edit 1 sheet at a time. Once you decided on what to do, we can get started!

Step 2: editing the image

This guide will be using paint net as linked above, so follow along as best you can. Once you've decided on which sheet to edit first, you will want to right click it and select "Copy Image". Near the top highlighted in blue the "Save?" button will also work. Then you will want to paste/ctrl+v into your image editing program, so it will look something like this:



From here, you can freely edit any texture you want to re-color it! Do not add any additional pixels, nor delete any filler space on the ends. This is all there for a specific reason.

Remember that if you want to edit a boss or character, you will have to edit every individual frame of them, which can be a bit time-consuming. However re-coloring stuff can give NT a "fresh" feel despite being exactly the same, which is worth the trouble.

Step 3: Wrapping up

Once you have edited what you pleased, you can go File -> Save as then save it as any file name(does not matter). Paint net will ask you for bit depth when saving, going for auto-detect is just fine. Once you have saved it, you'll want to go to PNGCrush as linked above to reduce the file size(you can try without, but you'll most likely get an error!)

Once you have the reduced file size, you'll want to go back to the textureviewer site you got the image from. You will want to click "Replace?" and select the newly edited file in its place! Replace? works on the current image you're viewing, so if you refreshed or looked at a new one by chance make sure you have the appropriate number selected. After you have submitted it everything will appear to be the same, if you switch to a different numbered image and switch back the updated graphics should be showing!

From here you'll want to click on Menu! again at the left top and "Save As". This will then save it as a nuclearthrone.exe, which you can then move to your Nuclear Throne file, replacing/deleting the original one that is in there. And voila! Anything that you have edited will now appear in the base game.

Wrap-Up

I hope this is depth enough to help anyone looking to edit their base NT! Here are a few edits to show off the fun of editing Vanilla NT:

To the left is an edit I made to Plant, using Plantera's color palette, with it's splash screen name and abilities name changed.

Below is a Plant edit my friend Semente made that I'm using for Plant's A-skin; Piranha Plant style.



And to just show how ridiculous you can make things, I've edited Eyes to just have eyes only:

[The bay harbor gooner]

Thank you

[I / Me / Meowself]

"how do i change messages in NTT?"

You can do the command '/loadloc lang' in order to load your lang file in. You have to do it every time you load the game. (If you don't want to, make a .txt called 'startup' in your mod folder and add commands on there to auto-load)

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"editing sprites doesn't work"

Are you on a beta? This guide is for the non-beta version of the game, but if you share your version I could walk you through it

[bombinglaces]

editing sprites doesn't work

[The bay harbor gooner]

how do i change messages in NTT?

[Competitive Armpit Sniffer]

sucks to hear

[TheSleepingDead]

Cat girls killed my father

[I / Me / Meowself]

@new item You would be right, additional tips do not normally appear. However in the 2023 beta only you can now add extra tips to categories and the game will register them.

[Competitive Armpit Sniffer]

Editing graphics in the base game does not disable achievements or dailies

[【Nesquik】]

will this disable achievments or daily/weeklys?

[󠀡󠀡Who, me?]

Is there any mod that allows additional custom tips in lang.ini? I assume the source code of the base game is using hardcoded ranges in lang.ini which is why additional tips don't work.