Let’s set the scene. You are a somewhat tested, yet still relatively fresh member of the FE romhacking community. Perhaps you played Vision Quest or Hag in White, found inspiration, read Parrhesia’s Basic Guide to Romhacking, and recently finished your first attempt at a romhack. It was rough, but you at least now know how FEBuilder works. You also installed Skill System for your hack, played around with skills, but soon realized that you hit a ceiling.
You have the unfortunate case of no longer being excited at merely giving your units +2 Atk when they stand next to female units anymore, yet also being a “Builder Baby” who is much less comfortable doing coding than they are, say, writing, or spriting, or doing anything else.
Then, as you are browsing the FE Universe “Getting Started” page, you notice a link at the bottom of the Buildfiles section.
When you open it up, you are in shock. It looks perfect! It’s like Skill System, except more, and better! It has equippable skills! It has combat arts! It has Engage chain attacks! It has Gaiden Magic that actually works! It has so many more skills and it is so much more customizable than the regular Skill System! And what’s best - you don’t actually need to learn Buildfiles to use it! Yeah! It’s included in a community patch of FEBuilder and can be easily installed much like the regular Skill System!
Excitedly, you install it into a fresh ROM of Sacred Stones and begin working. And then, the questions pile up.
How do I assign skills to units?
Why can’t I set units’ Mag?
What are all these popups in-game?
Where is everything?
Why is the text so different?
Why does the game freak out and crash when I try to install patches I’ve used so often before?
Why does this not work? Or that? Or this thing?
And what’s worse - why can’t I find answers to any of these questions anywhere?
If you ever found yourself in this situation, much like I had, you’re in luck. This is an 8000+ words, 59 page long introduction into Modern c-skillsystem, a custom alternative to SkillSystem made by Mokha, on FEBuilder.
This document goes over the system’s capabilities, how to use it on FEBuilder, where to find menus and configs for each of its mechanics, as well as its limitations and relevant bugs.
The doc is written by me. Special thanks to Saint Rubenio, whose own experience with c-skillsys was very helpful in making this doc, as well as to ditto for providing an insertable bug fix for c-skillsys’s promotion item bug.