Maximum Number of Player Units?

Is it possible to have more than 34 player characters in your party in Fire Emblem 8? I am noticing the character in the last slot (35th+) get trimmed after starting a chapter.

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I looked at it and it seems like you can only select 35 characters to deploy:

screen 1

However, you are able to get more than 35 characters in your party. The save that I took those screenshots from has 48 characters in the party. You can only deploy 35 playable characters at a time it seems, but via reinforcements you could get more on the map

screen 2

All the gray units in this screenshot can’t be deployed because of the 35 unit cap. It looks like it is possible to get more than 35 characters in the party, but you won’t be able to deploy them all at once
screen 3

How would you go about getting more than 35 units in the preparation screen without the bottom being spliced? I am not looking to deploy 30+ units (just 16), but it’s annoying when your benched characters disappear for no reason.

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I think the bottom units are not spliced because I loaded them separately in the chapter. I do not know if they stay in your party for the rest of the game after that though

It doesn’t look like the party members stay with you… I don’t think there is a method of getting it to work without increasing the number of units saved in the preparation screen. I am not entirely sure where the hex value for this is located or how to create a new table for this.

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My intuition tells me that the unit stack in RAM is too small.
Not the unit array… the unit stack.
At certain points in the prep screen, the unit array is kind of refreshed by pushing selected units onto the unit stack then putting them back. This puts selected units at the top of the roster. iirc this is how it works, so I would check that if I was debugging.
Expanding that sounds like an oof. You would need to edit the handler routine to allow for more units to be pushed, and you would need to repoint anything that would be overwritten by your expansion.
Again, I could be wrong, but this smells like a bothersome ASM fix.

If the unit stack RAM is too small, is there a way to increase the size? Most ROM hacks I have seen seem to have more than 30 playable characters. I have no idea where or how RAM is increased.

The only “RAM” in the FEBuilder under patches describes an increase to RAM area that record the number of clear turns. How do I apply that to player characters, so that I can have 45 total player characters in party (not deployed) at a time?

Could you post a screenshot of what is exactly happening? That might help people here understand,
because I have an idea as to what’s going on, but a screenshot would either confirm or dispel that
notion.

It’s not about how many total units you can have. It looks to be more about how many you can deploy from the prep screen.

Yup, I can provide some screenshots.

The first time I arrive at a chapter, I select my 14 units out of the 35 playable units available. Miredy happens to be in slot 35. Everything appears to be normal.

Next. I start the chapter per normal, and I get a gameover or maybe want to restart the map for whatever reason, or maybe I beat the chapter and go to the next chapter’s preparation screen. It doesn’t matter.

Eventually, I return to a preparation screen and now I am seeing 34 characters instead of 35. Miredy is deleted.

The data for Kyle and Gilliam was technically also deleted, and they resorted back to their base value. This is because Kyle and Gilliam (slots 33 and 34) are used as a placeholder unit for the player placement. These slots would be 100% deleted if that was not the case. Basically these units got reset.

Erk, in the 32nd character slot, seems to be the final character that is stored in the game’s memory and keeps his character data and items.

I may have misunderstood your problem, but it would be difficult for anyone to help without a report7z.

@paintedknight
Okay, so I don’t know if it could be related or not, but I know from experience that once you go beyond a certain number in the character database, FE8 stops saving/loading the data in game. For example, it doesn’t save support data when you go beyond…I think 0x45? It can load it at least one time (for something like the Lloyd and Linus bosses), but can’t make changes to it. If you have player characters beyond that being loaded into memory, that might be causing some kind of issue. Even if they aren’t the ones disappearing, it could be related.

Though with that said, I’m hardly that knowledgeable about hacking… This just rang through my head with the issue I had once upon a time, and moving all player characters into the top-most slots fixed the issue I had with data seemingly being purged.

Additionally, if you’re using febuilder, you should really take a report.7z to the febuilder thread. 7743 will almost certainly figure out what the problem is, and at the very least tell you what it is on the off chance that it can’t be fixed.

Thank you to everyone for all your insight. I believe I fixed the problem, but I am not entirely sure what I did.

I think my issue had something to do with the extra character flags or maybe the character ID’s I was using. I ended up shuffling things around and now I am not seeing it happen anymore. It could have also been some way I was writing the event in the first place.

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