Author Topic: [FF8 Steam] Level Restrictions within GF Refine Abilities  (Read 1820 times)

IonXi

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Hello all!

Obligatory long time lurker, first time poster statement.

As you may be able to guess from the title, I'm wondering if anyone has any insight on what controls the level requirement for GF refine abilities. I'm working on modding my game files (shout-out to Sega Chief for the excellent FF7 New Threat Mod which inspired me to jump on the bandwagon. Play it if you haven't!) and, without getting too messy, I'm trying to alter the level requirement for refining items in a single ability(e.g. make Thunder Magic Refine require GF level 5 to refine Thundara).

Some notes about my journey so far:
  • Using a combination of excellent tools by this community and a hex editor, I eventually found myself in the mngrp.bin, where I set to work decoding and demystifying the refinement tables.
  • Like others who've explored this bin, I noticed the seemingly static "00 01" bytes between the "amount received" and "ID" values.
  • I noticed in two instances these 'static' values were set to "00 64". These were for Siren's Dark Matter and Doomtrain's Hero-Trial, and I realised that these bytes were actually the minimum level for the GF to refine those items.

Now, as I'm sure you've caught, I'm on the Steam version of FF8. These bytes are obviously skipped, as the level requirement for Siren and Doomtrain isn't used in that version. I would rather not edit the exe, as that is messier than I would like, so does anyone know if there is another file/byte responsible for making that skip? Else, would someone be kind enough to point me in the direction of how I might go about finding and re-enabling the check?

Regards, and happy modding!