It only took 3 years
Well, sort of.
Around February 2021 I decided to jump into reverse engineering Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, with the objective of creating a mod that would introduce some quality of life changes.
To recap, starting with Monster Hunter World, the series has seen some very welcome improvements that make the game much more accessible.
The changes that most interest me for this project revolve around gathering and crafting, but at some point in the future I'll see to implement other changes that modernized the series, if possible.
I worked on and off (mostly off) trying to reverse engineer and patch the game for 3 years now.
Fortunately there are a bunch of effort done as part of the 3DS community that allows me to reach a point where I can dump and extract the binary representing the entire code of the game in one file.
But from there, there's no much going on regarding Monster Hunter in particular.
You'll find people tweaking (or attempting to) the games resources, with results like this HD texture pack (which sadly exists mostly on Discord :( )
From there you can find cheats, but as the name suggests they are more focusing on cheating the game than improving it1. Still, those are helpful to understand the in-memory layout of things, as my first clue was the memory address where the first item in the Item Box is, and how its laid out2.
Lastly, there is a list of Item IDs which is probably the most helpful resource I found aside from the enormous work dedicated to dump and extract games.
For other games like Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda or Fire Emblem, there are guides or projects that tweak, cheat, enhance or otherwise just change the game. But for Monster Hunter? mostly random people asking about cheats or how to access the code of the game, but no major projects or guides (that I'm aware of, please contact me if there are!)
That didn't stop me though >:)
So I went on a journey to try to make a seemingly simple change: Allow crafting a Potion from only Herb(s), instead of Herb + Blue Mushroom. Just like in Monster Hunter World.
After 3 years, here we are:
Two herbs craft two potions, with 100% success chance
Took a while, but I'm in a place were I should be able to edit the entire crafting table to have the following quality of life improvements:
- 100% chance for all items
- Alter the resulting quantity for items that need so. For example: two resulting potions after combining two herbs, since I've yet to find a way to make only one Herb result in a Potion.
- Mimicking Monster Hunter World/Rise crafting ingredients and results
- More??
More posts detailing my process, guides, and more hacks on the way! Please pester me on Mastodon or by whatever other means you prefer if I happen to leave this project hanging for too long. ADHD is a tricky one. My wishlist for quality of life changes so far comes to:
- Crafting
- Potions from only herbs
- Autocraft some items
- Infinite Items
- Whetstone
- Pickaxe (or no item required)
- Bugnet (or no item required)
- Always have the monster painted (maybe after some criteria like in World?)
- Gather all items at once, animation skip
And finally, a release of the patches is also coming soon. Most likely they'll come as cheats at first for ease of use, then as patches to the game's binary.
And as always, happy hunting!