This year I got to participate in the Mother Direct, a video presentation styled after the Nintendo Direct. Every year, many creators use this opportunity to share their EarthBound-inspired fan projects. After toying with an old idea for many years, I felt it was time to share my own EB-related creation with the world.
Introducing the EarthBound Mod Menu— a romhack of the cult classic SNES RPG that adds bountiful quality of life features. Many of them can be configured from within the mod!
Features
The biggest new feature, which the mod is named after, is similar to my old Persona 5 mod that adds an in-game trainer menu. You can edit your party, items, health, warp to another map, start battles, play music… and much more that I’m forgetting to mention at the moment!
When you start a new game, or load an old save, you can Configure the Mod by enabling or disabling features. One of these is the Key Items menu– which uses story progression flags to track whether you have been given items instead of wasting your limited inventory management. This was a huge gripe many players had. I was inspired by AVGN’s review to address this using the game’s scripting engine.
Many other small changes were made using enhancement patches provided by the community– running faster when holding Y, skipping text by holding down Y, interacting with things directly by pressing A, faster loading times, equipping things from the inventory screen, and no interruptions from your dad reminding you to save.
Other optional features include the ability to use the bicycle anywhere, even with a full party– another common gripe about the game (although the new run speed renders the bike obsolete again anyway).
A crazier one is Chaos Mode which effectively turns EarthBound into an unpredictable experience. You’ll be warped around, the screen will distort and glitch, random battles might start and your party will get shuffled. See how far you can get while at the mercy of RNG!
Creating This Mod
The entire mod is open source, so you can see how it was pulled off and even incorporate parts of it into your own mods, if you wish. It’s a bit messy and not everything works perfectly yet, but I didn’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Similarly, for those who are waiting on a PC release of my P5R Mod Menu, I just released a preview that “mostly works” so I can buy more time to iron out the bugs.
EarthBound has always been one of my favorite games, and it’s actually the first game I ever modded. I was enthralled by the freedom granted by CCScript, a very similar (albeit more limited) language to P5’s Flowscript. Both are fan-made programming languages that adapt the control codes that power the game’s various scripted events. You can read more about the history of contro.l codes and why games have been using them since the 90s till today here in this excellent Legends of Localization article.
One of the earliest videos on my YouTube channel is an early version of this mod, which I started working on in 2015. It’s incredible that I was able to finally realize my vision after almost a decade. I couldn’t have done it without the assistance of everyone in the PK Hack discord server, so I’d like to give them a shoutout.
In no particular order, thank you to: Mr. Tenda, Mr. Accident, JTolmar, phoenixbound, Catador, ShadowOne333, vince94, Chaz, cooprocks123e & H.S.
I’ve listed which features each of them contributed in the README on GitHub.
You can download and try this mod from my website:
https://shrinefox.com/EarthBound