[FF7PC-98/Steam] gjoerulv's "Hardcore" mod (v1.0.7.2)

[Ethario]

Hey guys I played this mod a couple of years ago maybe, I wonder did anything change ? Thinking of replaying

[gjoerulv]

It's pretty much the same, unless you 1st played it in 2010 or something xD
Not much have really changed since 1.0.5 (since 2011). You can see the changelog in 1st post. The latest gameplay change was in 2018.

[Strifegarza7777]

I know I'm really late to all this but I absolutely love this mod. I do have some questions though. I worked my way into disc 3 and headed into Cosmo Canyon's Huge Materia section wondering or expecting to get Master Magic materia but got "Banish" materia instead. I was surprised but eager to see how this will change my strategies moving forward. But I wondered; is Master Materia still something we can get on a playthrough of the game? Of course we don't want to make things too easy, but I was hoping to use it during my Weapon fights. But we'll see

Also, kudos on the materia cave fights. I'm going at this without any help from forums and some enemies leave me completely clueless as to what makes them tick or how to win. KOTR enemy made me wonder if it would EVER die and the Midgar Raid Theo/Locke/Venus battle took me over an hour. I wondered about the best way to reduce damage taken at times and whether I'm supposed to be maxed out on all my stats to stop one-hit deaths on my part members.

Lasty, quick FYI, Headband Accessory (protects against Sleep, Slow, Stop) isn't allowing my character to be hastened. If I do Added Effect + Contain, I also get the same effect. Seems like any protection against Slow or Stop is also dis-allowing any Haste. I check my status protections in the party menu to make sure so I don't know why it's coming back immune to Haste. Not sure if it's a bug or not

[gjoerulv]

.

Thank you for kind words

Sorry again for super late reply (man, I suck at paying attention ).
All master materias are removed and replaced with some (semi) useless ones.
Master Magic -> Banish. Kinda useless for other things than meme fights. But banish only costs 1 MP. It does work on some of the later game fights (not bosses), but also removes the lot/drops.
Master Command -> Flash. More useful than Banish, but equally useless for the same reasons. It requires enemies to not be immune to "Death". The reason it's better is that it requires 0 MP, animation is shorter, and you keep the drops/loot from the fights.
Master Summon -> Coin Most useful in most situation, as this does flat damage based on how much gil you use. The other ones are way more useful if the enemies are not immune to "Death".

When it comes to Stop/Slow/Haste, I tried to be consistent with time magic. I can't remember if I specifically did this to Headband. Will check. *checking*. Yes, Headband only makes you immune to Sleep/Slow/Stop according to the data. No idea why this somehow affects Haste too. Interesting. Now I need to check for myself in game.


Also on a complete unrelated note to the note: There is a bug in the installer when picking the Steam radio button on the top. It gives an error that it won't find the Steam installation. I may need to update the installer. In any case, the "data" folder in the installation folder needs to be picked. I swear, I quality checked this, like, 6–10 years ago lol, so there might updates to steam/windows/ff7 that caused this bug. Dunno... This seems to be a Windows 11 thing.

[Mediocre]

Hi Gjoerulv, I finished playing your mod for the first time in 2024 and I loved it for the majority of it, thanks for creating this great mod. The thing is I play with restrictions like only getting xp from bosses and fleeing from normal battles (no enemy skills either), which is all of my own volition and accountability, but the final bosses: emerald, omega...; requiring 255 lck+dex and master phoenix+final atks were not so great to me, i defeated them with lucky 7 and spamming meteors to avoid farming sources+AP, but i didn't enjoy it. My question is if there is an easy way to tweak their stats without costing you effort, like doing it on my own with no coding knowledge. I would like to replay it this summer but i need the motivation that the last battles will be more fun to me.
    I installed Proud Clod Editor but I really don't know how to apply changes, is it possible?
    Is the 7th-heaven version of this mod the last one? because it reads 1.0.2, not 1.0.7.
    When I played the mod last year, Ma Bino Gi On's Modron Atk freezed my game, is there any fix to this?

[gjoerulv]

.

Sorry for late reply, but for what's it's worth, here is my response

Thanks! And, in hindsight, I agree that I may have gone overboard in some places, specially endgame. I guess my reasoning/thought process when I made this was that I wanted a challenge even with a maxed out party. That's why the final dungeon is as brutal as it is. Personally I really enjoy having a maxed out party and still have trouble with random encounters.

Using Proud Clod isn't too hard.
Open scene.bin (obviously).
Under the top manue (file, Search, Dump Data, etc., etc.) there is a dropdown where you can select what scene to edit. A scene is basically a collection of enemy data, battle formation and AI. You can search for enemies by names. Keep in mind that most enemies are in multiple scenes. One enemy can have different stats for each scene they are in.
But in your case you just want to edit bosses. Omega is in scene 5. Select scene 5 in the dropdown. After that, click "Enemy Management" in the top menu. Here you can edit stats. When done, save. You may be prompted to update kernel.bin (iirc), if so, select yes/ok.

Ma Bino Gi On Modron may use an animation id that could crash the game. You want to go to scene 254 and select the modron attack in the list on the left. Chenge the attack Animation ID to another hex value. A safe value may be AE (same as) Mabonagrain.