sopholophagus mods

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I’m currently developing an HD GUI/HUD texture pack of Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny on the Dolphin emulator. Mainly I’m using the Waifu Caffe upscaler, with a bit of hand-retouching here and there, so it’s definitely not perfect (some text is kinda janky), but a big improvement! Most of the main GUI you’ll be interacting with is done. Get the latest version here!

I will continue working on it and will update at the above link when there is more to share. Enjoy!

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ACNL High Res New Horizons Wallpapers

ACNL on Citra is a huge upgrade from the 3DS, but certain textures do not convert flatteringly to high resolution, and wallpapers are probably the worst offender. This texture pack replaces most of the wallpapers with their New Horizons equivalents, or some edited version of a New Horizons wallpaper.

ACNL New Horizons Wallpapers

There are two categories in the folder: Close/Exact Matches and Loose Interpretations. In Close/Exact Matches we have textures that are nearly identical to their ACNL counterparts or are at least very closely in the spirit of the original. I made some edits to some of these such as the princess wall retexture to match the originals. In Loose Interpretations we have wallpapers that fall under a couple scenarios: they were redesigned drastically for New Horizons, or they had no New Horizons equivalent so I chose something I felt was similar in appearance/spirit. Either way the wallpapers in this category differ considerably from the original, which is why I put them in their own category. 

You can pick and choose which ones to use if you don’t like the choices I made. Click here for a guide to which ACNH walls were used to replace each ACNL wall.

There is only one wallpaper in both categories, which is the Gold Screen Wall. The New Horizons version of the Gold Screen Wall is really beautiful and has a bonsai, but the texture dump included a high-res version of the original ACNL design, so you’ll find the texture more closely matching the original in Close Matches and the bonsai version in Loose Interpretations (choose one or the other).

Citra custom textures installation instructions

Special thanks to Reddit user u/nimaid who shared a full dump of New Horizons textures here, making this project possible. I plan to try to do the floors next.

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Witchy Valley - Stardew Valley

Ever wished your Stardew character could be just a bit witchier? This mod adds potion-brewing to the game. You’ll buy the cauldron crafting recipe from Clint, but you’ll have to befriend the wizard to get him to teach you new potion recipes. This mod includes 6 new potions each with unique buffs. I hope to continue to update it to have even more witchy content!

Witchy Valley

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Pet Deerfox - Stardew Valley

My latest Stardew mod replaces the pet of your choice with a deerfox inspired by the Hilda comic/TV series. There are 4 colors available, each based on a character and shade from the series’ color palette. They are: Twig White, Hilda Blue, Frida Orange, and David Red. 

Pet Deerfox

Enjoy!

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How to make custom Dolphin and Citra texture packs

I haven’t found many resources out there, so I’d like to share my process for creating texture packs for Dolphin (the process is nearly identical for Citra, except for a few settings being in slightly different menu locations).

The first thing we need to do is get the original game textures from Dolphin. This is essential even if you have the game textures from another source because Dolphin names every texture with a Dolphin-generated hash, and you will need this name in order to have Dolphin pick up your custom version of the texture.

1. From Dolphin’s main interface, open the Options menu and choose Graphics Options. Go to the Advanced tab and check “Enable” and “Dump Base Textures” under Texture Dumping:

You probably don’t need to dump mip maps unless you specifically know you need them.

2. Play the game! Textures only get dumped when you actually encounter them in-game. This is a blessing and a curse: you won’t be overwhelmed with the innumerable textures all at once, but you will need to access a texture in-game in order to dump it and get the hash, which can be challenging for long games. If the texture you’re hoping to edit is far in the game, it may help to use cheats to access the texture quickly. For instance, I used Action Replay (AR) codes in Harvest Moon: Animal Parade so that I could access all the clothing options right at the beginning of the game to dump the textures.

3. Now that the textures have been dumped, you should be able to find them in  C:\Users\[your name]\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Dump\Textures\[your game hash]. Every texture that has been dumped will be in this folder. It’s up to you to visually identify the ones you need for your texture pack. Dolphin’s naming convention seems to be tex1_[image width]x[image height]_[generated hash].png. 

4. Open the texture you want to edit in the image editor of your choice. I use GIMP because it’s free and has all the tools I need. 

5. Make the edits you want to the texture. I will explain the specific process I use to make character model color edits in a separate post, since really anything can be done to edit the texture and I don’t want to assume what changes you’ll be making. Be sure to pay attention to transparency! Note: the final image does NOT need to be the same size as the original to replace the texture. For example, if you want to replace a 32x32 texture with a high-resolution 256x256 image, you can use the larger texture and the game will load it just fine. It should, however, have the same width-height ratio as the original.

6. Save the edited/replacement image as a .png with the exact same name as the original texture. Place it in C:\Users\[your name]\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Load\Textures\[your game hash]. You may need to add the folder under C:\Users\[your name]\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Load\Textures\ if you have never used custom textures with that game before. The name of the folder will be the same as the folder name that was in Dolphin Emulator\Dump\Textures.

7. Back in Dolphin, open Options > Graphics Options again and be sure to enable “Load Custom Textures” in the Advanced tab under Utility.

8. Launch your game through Dolphin. You should see your custom texture in-game! 

That’s it! You’ve created a custom texture for Dolphin (or Citra). You can share these images with other people who can place them in their own Load\Textures folder and use them in their own games!

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I forgot to mention this in my ACNH Animal Villager Houses spreadsheet post, but I got most of my house images for the spreadsheet from this Drive folder created by niconicosette x. Huge thanks to this person for compiling this resource!

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Documentation - ACNH Animal Villager Houses

A while back, I made a fully filterable spreadsheet documenting the house that each animal villager has in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, since each one is unique. It’s helpful if you’re going for a certain look on your island and want all the buildings to match that style! Here it is:

ACNH Villager Houses

I will probably continue to post video game documentation that I make on this blog and hopefully other people will find it useful!

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A different kind of mod! Anyone else like modding their tech? There’s something about a pastel Switch that just feels right. Thumb grips to match my ACNH town fruit are my favorite part!

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HM: AP - Perry’s Less Creepy Eyes Mod

Look, we were all thinking it: Perry looks like that 150 year old liver-eater who builds newspaper nests in the X-files, and it’s not helping that he lives in a windowless church broom closet. This retexture makes his eyes much less threatening. Here it is:

Perry’s Less Creepy Eyes

To use it with Dolphin, paste the .png into your C:\Users\[yourname]\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Load\Textures\RBIEE9 folder (if you are using a HM: AP rom that isn’t the North American version, see the readme from my original Animal Parade retextures mod for how to find your game’s Dolphin hash).

Enjoy!

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Ghibli Critters for Stardew Valley

This was the first mod I released! It replaces some of the Stardew woodland critters (such as squirrels and birds) with critter from the Studio Ghibli universe. It’s available on Nexus Mods:

Ghibli Critters

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Harvest Moon: Animal Parade Modder Resources

As part of my hair and eye texture project for HM: AP, I included most of the gimp files I used to create the customized texture sheets. Those can be found here:

HM: AP Modder Resources

These files include all the hair and eye colors that I included in my texture pack, each on a separate layer of the image. These can be pasted onto other images or hidden/shown to overwrite the texture image files. Anyone is free to use these as a jumping-off point to create more hair and/or eye colors or to make other edits to the character models, such as different facial features or skin color.

At some point, I will try to fully explain my process of making texture mods for Dolphin and Citra emulations for beginners.

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Harvest Moon: Animal Parade Texture Pack - Changes hair and eye color!

I always thought it was silly that all 4 character models for Animal Parade have brown hair and brown eyes, which inspired me to start this texture pack project! Here is the link:

Texture Pack Project

There are 6 new natural hair colors available: red, black, blonde, platinum, grey, and dark brown (Molly/Angela) / light brown (Kevin/Kasey). There are also 4 fancy hair colors: lilac, pink, mint, and blue. There are 4 new eye colors: blue, green, grey, and violet.

There is a readme in the Drive folder with instructions for how to use the textures. This only works for people emulating Animal Parade using Dolphin. I haven't tested how it plays with Pride Parade (a mod allowing for LGBT relationships) but I imagine it could be tweaked to be compatible, which anyone is welcome to do if they are interested. Enjoy!