Adding custom characters to FE6

So, I’m almost done with the classes but I was wondering, it is possible to add custom characters to FE6? Like, expanding the characters list? Idk if I’m explaining this well (:V

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I don’t think there’s a simple way to expand the character list, but there most definitely unused character slots in FE6 that you could make into new characters. Idk if your hack is like a rebalance of vanilla FE6, or it’s own thing using FE6 as a base, but if it’s leaning towards original hack, than you can change around the majority of the character slots to whatever you want.

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Kind of both things, a rebalance but is its own thing

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One thing to note about adding recruitable characters is that FE6 has a limit of around 51 units in the party at one time (54 total recruits, with Larum/Elphin, Echidna/Bartre, and Juno/Dayan being route exclusives). You might be able to squeeze in a couple extra, but they’ll start disappearing after a certain point.
One way to add in at least one extra unit is getting rid of Merlinus and giving Roy the supply flag. Any units beyond that may need to be route exclusives, like making Geese/Gonzales available on only one route in the Western Isles.

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Playable Character space is tough to fight for in GBAFE, but FE6 has quite a few duplicate character entries that you can repurpose. The duplicates have a mysterious “NPC” flag, but most aren’t even placed in any chapters; the few that are get auto-converted to the normal character slot when spawned in anyway, so I can’t foresee anything wrong with replacing the NPC appearance with the normal character slot. There’s 11 of those duplicates.

If you need a couple more, you could also replace Eliwood and Guinivere since they’re just Trial Map units, I think. They might show up in a few odd events, but they shouldn’t be hard to change. Those two definitely have BWL data so they’re good for players, but you can’t use any of the bandit slots after them. Oh, right, player character IDs need to be under 0x45 in FE6 so the game can record extra data with them, that’s why that’s important.

There’s also a hard limit to how many characters can be in the player’s army at once. The overflowing characters will just get removed when you reload the save. I always forget what the numbers are 'cause they’re slightly different for every game. If you’re only adding, you’ll need to split which characters are given in some way.

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The NPC flag makes it so after the unit is loaded, their ID gets changed to the unit before it (if that unit also has the NPC flag, it keeps going). What this means is that you can have multiple starting stats for the same unit such as Gonzales in the different routes. If you don’t care for this, they’re pretty much free to replace.

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For sake of documentation are Dayan and Gonzales the only character IDs with NPC flag used in vanilla? I looked at all events that load a character that has more than one ID relating to them (Dayan, Douglas, Tate, etc) and only Dayan and Gonzales B route load the NPC one, but idk if NPC IDs for other characters are used somewhere else (cutscene, etc)

As far as I know, that’s all there is. I can’t confirm exactly since I just go off what I’ve looked at and searched for, but I had went over it several times by now. If you want, you can learn a bit more about the function itself here, like what it really does and what (very minor) practical uses it has: The “ALT_PID_Setter” function
(I point out later in the thread that Dayan is the second character who uses the flag)