Temporary Party Members

Temporary Party Members

Besides the main Chosen Four, who you control in battle, you may recall EarthBound has several characters who join you only for a short time. Some help you on your quest (Tony), some fight for you (Dungeon Man, Flying Man), some protect you (Teddy Bears) and some are quite useless (Pokey).

In total, there are 9 temporary party members (not including the duplicate flying men) who follow you around but cannot be controlled in battle, instead they act all on their own. These party members are controlled with a special small table, which Coilsnake currently does not decompile, so for now you can grab this CCS file to modify them.

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To use it, first off understand that all these party members are actually configured just like enemies. That's right, deep within enemy_configuration_table.yml are entries for each of these party members! So to fully customize them, head on over to the page about Enemies. Several attributes of the entries are unused for party members, such as music, item drops, encounter text pointer... But most everything else is used to control how the party member acts, when they take their turn, and what happens when they die. Basically pretend you're making an enemy but on your own side.

The overworld appearance of these party members is NOT taken from the enemy config table, rather it uses playable_char_gfx_table.yml.

Using the AI Changer CCS File

The table that this file modifies is simple: it controls whether the party member can be attacked and get hurt (targetability), and which enemy to use as its AI.

There are 3 options for targetability:

• 01 means no attacks can target this party member. In this case, they can never get hurt, and thus stats like HP and Defense go unused.
• 06 means that attacks will prioritize this party member first. This is used by teddy bears, to make sure that they protect you.
• 07 means that they can be attacked like normal. This makes the party member available to be targeted just the same as any of the chosen 4.

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You may notice that there are 5 Flying Men in this table. There is only one Flying Man in the enemy config, and that same entry is simply used 5 times for each party member entry. Since all 5 behave exactly the same, it's unknown why the developers duplicated this. But that's great news for us hackers because it means we have 4 free slots for adding new party members, allowing for a total of 13 different ones!