#mad rat modding tutorials

[gamergal-ds]

HOW 2 MOD MAD RAT DEAD ON SWITCH! PART 1: MUSIC!

If at any point you need more information or further assistance, drop me an ask or direct message! Even if it's something 'stupid' don't worry, I'll help :)

What you'll need:

A copy of the game in .nsp or .xci format

Switch Explorer

Sonic Audio Tools

VGAudio

Audacity (My recommendation, alternatives may work)

Switch explorer is used to extract the files from the game to be modded

Sonic audio tools is used to extract the .acb archives the songs (.hca files) are packed in, and to pack the files back in

VGAudio is used to convert the .hca files (the actual audio files) to .wav to be opened and edited in audacity, and to convert them back to .hca before being repacked

Lastly, audacity is used to edit the .wav files to put whatever you want into the files, completely replace it's contents or whatever, go wild

Did any of that make sense to you? no? Good, keep reading.

LET'S GET THIS SHOW ON THE ROAD!

I'll add like a pastebin link here later with every song's internal number so you can easily find the one you're looking for and extract it, too lazy right now tho :P

Open switch explorer, choose to load up your nsp/xci of the game (file > open) and navigate to data > sound

then, find the song you wish to edit and right click > extract file, then drop it in a good spot for later

Afterwards, open two file explorer windows, one in the sonic audio tools folder and the other where you extracted the .acb file. We do this so you can easily drag the .acb into the ACBeditor.exe found in the sonic audio tools folder:

this will produce a folder in the same directory as the .acb sharing its name, and inside you will find your .hca files:

these are the actual audio files, but we can't edit them yet, because no program knows what to do with a .hca! First, we need to convert them to .wav files, so boot up VGAudio, click open file, pick the .hca file (you need to repeat this process for all 4+ files), choose to convert to WAVE and hit save file.

wherever you saved it, you now have a .wav of the audio file, feel free to give it a listen! If it's just silence, don't worry, some of the songs are like that.

Now these files require a little explanation, the one ending in 0 to 2 are all related to the song's into, opening, and cut scene loops, basically everything you stop hearing once you've started playing the level properly. The file ending in a 3 is the main loop, the part that plays so long as you keep playing through the level. In some rare cases, there will be even more files, or less! I haven't done enough of my own research yet, so you can come to your own conclusions on those, shouldn't be hard to figure out once you get how these work.

Anyways, now that that's outta the way, audacity time! Individually open, edit, and export each .wav you extracted, again as .wav (keep the file name the same!) using audacity, make any changes you want, import other files of any format into it on a new track and remove the original when you're done, whatever, but I recommend keeping the lenght (not filesize) of the audio file the same, idk if the game will have a stroke if it's too long or not long enough. (Also a lot of the song info like BPM is hardcoded so any old song won't work if you just drop it in here, stick to mad rat monday songs for your first edits like I did, those work the best, but do be ready to splice them to extend the main loop (file 3)) (also line it up properly, it can't be off beat from the original, you gotta find a point in the songs where the waveform is similar and use it to line it up exactly right)

This part's kinda all up to you, but I can provide some basic audacity tips specific to your situation if required. Or just general ones, if you can't wrap your head around audacity :P

once they're all edited, use VGAudio to reverse the process, open the .wav files and choose to convert to HCA, and save them, maybe backup the original .hca files instead of replacing them if you want to (i just added an 'og' to the start of the original file's name)

then, remove all the junk from the folder besides the new .hca files you made (or move them to another, identically named folder separately), and drag the folder into the same acbeditor.exe from the sonic audio tools folder, just like you did with the acb the first time. It will pack your folder back into an acb in the same directory as the folder you dragged in (it'll replace the original if you kept them all in the same directory, but don't worry you can just extract the file again if you need the original). Now, we set up the mod!

This part's easy, just make a new folder with the name of your mod, in there make one named romfs, in there make one named data, and in there make one named sound, then drop your new acb file into the sound folder. The mod's done! Drag it into the mod directory on your real switch (idk how that works I don't have a modded switch) or in yuzu right click mad rat dead, choose open mod directory and drop the mod folder in there. Then right click the game, hit properties, and the mod should show up with the name you chose for the top folder. Here's some screenshots for all that:

Tick the box to enable the mod and boot up the game! That's it!

If you need any more help, further assistance, suggestions, anything, just drop me an ask or DM, I'll respond in due time! Additionally, if you have any suggestions or requests for how to improve this guide, let me know with a reply!

Happy modding everyone!

[dzamie]

Do autistic folx often platinum their games? I recently started down the road to autistic dx and I basically can’t start a new game until I plat the one I’m playing S.S Elden ring has a grip on me right now. Please, the autism, I must know, is this another thing I have failed to see in myself til now?

(For context: a bit back, I wrote a verse of a "Gay or European" parody about a viewer wondering if DemilyPyro (not a valid chumhandle) is European or autistic; part of it was "Look how she platinums those games / Look how she pronounces those names / That's an autistic demon dame / She's not NT, I say, can't be!")

Completionism or fixation on things can be a symptom of several kinds of neurodivergence. In Demily's case, her autism is presumably connected to the compulsion she's mentioned to perfect the games she plays (I think she's said she wasn't satisfied with Celeste because, well... go look up "golden strawberry." And "golden winged strawberry." Utter lunacy). In my case, my ADHD makes bimonthly obsession go brrrrr and also gives me a perfectionist streak - as such, I am first on my friends list at every metric on every level of every Zachtronics game I've played (as of the last time I played them), and I ended up learning speedrun strats for Celeste because it made several C-sides easier than the intended route (luckily, I am content with simply having every single red strawberry, fuck the golden ones).

I am inclined to believe this is not behavior shared with neurotypicals because Steam publicly shows the % of people who get each achievement, and the "beat everything" type achievements are always much lower than "beat the tutorial" stuff.

Good luck on your search! Thanks for sitting through my disorganized ramble. It's a damn good thing it's currently 2am, because otherwise I'd be sorely tempted to reinstall Celeste (I hear there are cool mods with new levels) and I think adding that to FFXIV, sudoku, tumblr, and probably the Mad Rat Dead demo would make me ascend to a lower plane of existence or something.

[shahdaryu]

23, 24, and 38?

HELL YEAH THANKS FOR THE ASK PAL

23: Most frustrating experience in a TES game

HMMMM okay there are so many. Here’s some that come to mind bc i cant make decisions and Oversharing is my character flaw:

- during the quest to kill Vittoria, I reloaded and redid it so many damn times, following wiki suggestions and etc to try and get the dAMN bONuS , but it was never succesful???? i think i gave up eventually even tho i do kill her when she’s addressing the crowd that damn quest is just hopelessly glitched >:(

- ok this is probs on me but i was so excited to try the Brotherhood of Old mod and id never moded before so i got it and it was actually working for quite a bit but a few quests in, there was a quest i had to do at (iirc) the thalmor embassy, which is well, off limits? and because the mod doesn’t give u quest markers all the time u gotta use ur brain n shit i didnt know if i got it wrong or i was stuck. i tried many ways to get in and tried asking cicer to go in, also tried finding a way to yeet myself over the wall, jsut couldnt do it. i know there are console commands but i wanted to see if it was possible without them. i have since given up.

24: Funniest experience in a TES game

there are also. a lot. i guess the first one that comes to mind is when i lost cicero, so i console ccommanded myself to him an d he was fuckin ?? stuck under the map of some ??? icey place ??? we were in an inaccessible location that was just an icey loop ???? i just looked at him lke ??? boi how did u get here ??? we are going home.

38: You have awakened to find you’re in Tamriel. How do you react?

first of all, if i never get the ‘hey you you’re finally awake’ experience irl im suing.

okay no kidding but HMM first off it depends on where i am and what i’d have. if it’s skyrim and im fuckin being sentenced to execution alongside some stinky men i’ll be paniCKING. at least the starting of oblivion aint so bad but i guess the tutorial also involves stinky rats. but honestly i don’t think i’d be mad to wake up in tamriel i’ve always wanted to live my fantasy life :’(

[gamergal-ds]

Alright the tutorial is up! Took me a hot minute to type that out, and at one point I hit undo and it erased like half the post and wouldn't put it back so I had to redo that, that sucked, also will be coming back to touch up the formatting later

Anyways, the torch has been passed, I'll still be messing with all the other stuff in the game but if someone actually learns how to mod songs with this it'll no longer be my sole responsibility to port over the whole mad rat Monday album, which would be awesome, I can still gather all of the seperate mods and compile them into one to host on gamebanana for y'all tho, unless there's anyone who can format the mod page better cuz I suck at that :P

Hope y'all have fun! even if no one ends up being bothered to follow the tutorial, which I can't blame ya it's one hell of a process, at least now you guys have a better understanding of how modding this game works, and by extension how the game works as a whole, the more you know, you know?

also if no one else does it first I'm thinking of finishing the whole album by July

so it'll be

CHRISTMAS IN JULYYYYY!!!

[gamergal-ds]

Thinking of making a "#mad rat modding tutorials" tag if anyone asks me how to mod the game so I can also document the process for anyone to see, because I love documentation and I would like to help out others the same way undertale voice guy helped me (we are in a parasocial relationship)

[gamergal-ds]

nevermind the .hca's have stumped me, .hca is apparently a type of compressed audio file, vgmtoolbox has an option to decompress an HCA but it just infinitely creates more identical hca files, and I found exactly one tool that can convert it to a .wav, but it's a command line application and I'm not sure if it's for Linux only or if it works on windows too, either way it can convert hca to wav but not vice versa so I can get clean rips of the ost, I just can't replace the files with custom music, however it does seem to be possible to mix and match what song goes where by moving the .hca files between the acb archives, though I don't see the point in that if you can already play any song on any stage, I am no mad rat modder this is out of my scope, maybe if someone drops a tutorial or makes some functioning tools to modify these things easily I'll make this crazy idea a reality

...though it's actually possible to do all this incredibly easily if you purchase criware's official audio codec, but that's for big studios only

I WOULD LIKE TO NOTE HOWEVER, that on gamebanana, someone has posted a fully working mod that replaces the dialogue sounds in the sounds acb archive with that of Undertale characters (mad rat is sans lol) so therefore this IS possible, maybe I'll extract the acb in the mod and see what magic they did

but look there's anime in this game

in the process of trying to mod mad rat dead on switch, it's working but the game keeps crashing, don't know how to convert audio to .acb yet but imma keep at it. I think ya'll know what the end goal is.