Foreward: I would like to extend a massive thank you to Pan-hime (@regularpanties on Twitter) for graciously providing me with a firmware 6.72 PS4 so that I can test and verify the following procedures myself, in addition to modding this game. Thanks to her, there is now a Persona 5 Royal section on the site, as well as P5R support for the Mod Compendium & In-Game Mod Menu.

Prerequisites

To get started, the following are required.

• A Playstation 4 on firmware 6.72; no higher, no lower.
  To upgrade to it from a lower firmware, see this guide.
  To downgrade– you can’t, sorry. 🙁
• An FPKG (Fake PKG) of Persona 5 Royal (JP). Sorry, you’ll have to find this yourself.
  This is required to install the game to dump files from and to create custom updates. The English version is not dumpable/playable on a modded firmware yet.
• A Windows PC.
  This is for running the software to mod/extract the game’s files and to produce an update PKG.
• An External USB Flash Storage Device. This could be a hard drive, flash drive etc. for storing and transferring dumped data from PS4.
• Mod Compendium version 1.5. With this program you can easily manage mods and build new PKG files to send to the PS4.

Hacking the PS4

To run fake packages, you need to be running HEN, which is a framework that allows unsigned code to boot on the PS4. You can think of it like Henkaku on the Vita. This relies on a webkit exploit (a bug in the PS4’s browser) which has been patched after 6.72. Since 6.72 also has a kernel exploit, the web exploit allows you to use homebrew apps that can decrypt and play unsigned copies of games– including fake update patches, which is what we will use to mod the game.

There are a couple ways of exploiting the firmware– set a custom DNS to point your internet traffic to the exploit page, or host it yourself over the local network. Either one is very easy:

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