Animal Crossing Map Editor

From Wild World Wiki

[edit] Animal Crossing Map Editor

The Animal Crossing Map Editor is one of the famed tools amongst ACWW used in the process of Save State hacking, use of this downloadable application lets you modify your save state in various ways, which include:

• Hacking of items, obtainable and unobtainable (often the "not used" items.)
• Editing of the town's layout, moving houses, rivers, adding Nook stores, trees, rocks, items.
• Large sums of money, 100k in the pocket at the push of a button, 1 million in the bank.
• Hacked emotions, choose out of 59 emotions, 29 normal and 59 used in game but not available from Dr Shrunk.
• Filling out the catalogue.
• Changing neighbours, their catchphrases and their room layouts.
• Changing the town type, from one of 3 types which affect your towns appearance and Nook's items.
• Changing Nook's store items, making him sell normally unobtainable items.
• Editing the recycling, lost and found and inventory (including drawers).
• Editing the layout of your house.
• Renaming your town and residents.
• Unburying world map items

Using the Map Editor unlocks a potential of fun, depending on how you want to use it, it can be used for hacking the Mario Set, or creating fun and interesting mazes, the possibilities really are endless.

[edit] How to hack

In order to hack your town, you need the following tools.

   * NDS game "Animal Crossing:Wild World" (or the Japanese version "Oideyo Dobutsu no Mori").
   * A way of backing up and restoring your game save, EITHER
         o S backup tool (like ETool or RAIN) or the NDS Homebrew trainer. (For Homebrew NDS's)
         o The $35 Action Replay, the most popular choice.
   * A Windows PC to run the map editor program (AnimalMap.EXE). 

Without at LEAST an action replay you won't be able to hack, you will most likely have the game and the Map Editor is easily and freely downloaded anyway.

Once you have these tools, it's time to get your gamesave out of your cart.

1. Using the Action Replay, assuming the Max Drive software is installed on your computer, open the program and ready your Action Replay with any GBA cart and a copy of Animal Crossing.

2. Plug in the USB cable packaged with the Action Replay and turn on the DS, the AR should boot in USB mode, if not, turn off, adjust the cartridge and try again till it works. (The hardware is known to be dodgy.

3. Via the Max Drive application on the computer, select Max Drive DS, and then Backup cart, specify details of the save, including game name and save name, and press start, the backup will begin. (Choosing to backup to PC is recommended, due to the save's filesize.

4. After the backup is complete, access your Max Drive database and decompress the gamesave, it will ask you to put the file somewhere on your computer, put it somewhere you'll remember (like the samples folder in the Map editor's folder).

5. After decompressing, create another backup copy, the original will be saved incase something goes wrong.

6. Open the copy gamesave in the Animal Crossing Map Editor tool, afterwhich, whatever modifications you want can be made, adding bells, items, changing the map, whatever. If an error comes up and it doesn't let you edit, the tool is being extra safe for you, go play animal crossing again, do something, save and backup again.

7. After doing EVERYTHING you want, hit the Final Save button to save all changes to the gamesave.

8. Back to the Max Drive DS application, import the newly hacked gamesave into your database by compressing it.

9. Restore the cart image, doing so should be familar by now.

10. After restoring, close the programs and turn off your DS, then try playing Animal Crossing and see what you think of the changes!

[edit] Bugs

The map editing tool is far from perfect, and can infact causes bugs that you need to be wary of, the most common bug is causing the game to wedge when loading the title screen, this usually happens when the town is overloaded, it could be patterns or items or even having too many buildings (like adding all 4 Nook stores.) What can also happen is as soon as the game is finished preparing when you select your resident, the game will freeze unexpectantly if you choose your 1st or 2nd resident, or the game will let your character walk into nothingness with no fade out, followed by a bizzarre white flash and no proper view on your bottom screen if you choose your 3rd or 4th resident. This also makes music play for a second, before fading out, and lets the mailbox continue to make it's noise if mail is present. This usually happens when you've done something with the rivers, such as including ocean in your main 4 by 4 area. Another bug can be that the game will wedge when leaving houses, this also happened from being overloaded.

Hacking can cause various bugs if you're not careful, experimentation is required. You may or may not like what happens as a result of these bugs.