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Let the Hacking Games... Begin
FEBuilder is the newest tool to grace the Fire Emblem hacking community. It has a functional UI, implementation with multiple pre-made mods, and has a means of interacting with basically every important detail of the hacking process. Even more importantly, it has a devoted creator constantly applying updates and patches to make it more functional on a nearly daily basis. So, how do we get this application into our hands?
Before I go into that, let's make sure we're all on the same page. Confused? Check out my first blog post where I explain… basically everything we’re talking about in layman’s terms. Feel free to check out the second one, too, while you're at it. I’ll wait. With some classy music.
Everyone clear? Good? Good. Great? Great. If you’re still here that probably means you want to make your own Fire Emblem project or you’ve got a passing interest in Fire Emblem, hacking, or what have you. That’s great! It can be a lot of work to see a project through from start to finish, but it is very rewarding and teaches you useful info about data structures and game/program composition that can easily translate into useful knowledge in the job world.
In The Beginning…
…there was chaos. Now I guess there’s still chaos. Whatever, the analogy was dead before it began. I’m going to assume we’re all operating on no knowledge here so that no one’s left in the dust. Bear with me. Pared down to the basics, you’ll need a Windows PC to make this work, or some way to run Windows applications. You’ll also need the program 7zip to extract FEBuilder once you download it.
Side note for those of us running non-Windows PCs, FEBuilder runs perfectly fine on Wine. Otherwise you can setup a virtual machine Windows drive (Windows 10 can be initially installed without a software code these days) or run Bootcamp on Mac.
Where do we get this mythical application? It all starts at the FEUniverse thread. 7743, as the creator of FEBuilder, has a bustling thread on FEUniverse where they announce updates and address community concerns. There are a lot of machine translated guides here, but I think I’m a bit more fun than machine translation, so we’re going to ignore all of them.
If you have questions, 7743's thread can be an excellent resource but please do your due diligence and search for pre-existing answers before asking questions. An even better venue for immediate help is FEU's discord channel, but please be patient and respectful there, too.
Download (In Japanese)
While on this page we’re going to scroll to another link… which brings us to the Japanese download page. It’s impossible to understand for a good old fashioned ‘Murican like me. Luckily, finding the newest download is easy! Scroll down until you see something that looks a little like this:
We want to download FEBuilderGBA, and we want the most recent date. So click that blue title (if you haven’t already)
Now we’re on another page, and this one doesn’t habla my ingles.
Just click the box at the bottom, the page will refresh, scroll down to the same place again and we get rewarded in our native tongue!
Click that “Download Now” button like it’s going out of style.
Once it’s downloaded, use that nifty 7zip we downloaded to extract it. Voila! We can build FE games now. Feel free to explore the layout and try out some stuff. Next time, we’ll go over FEBuilder’s layout so we can confidently use it to the best of our abilities.
Official Seal of Shindad approval:
Was there anything I wasn't clear enough on? Is anyone excited to get working in FEBuilder? Share your thoughts and let me know if there's anything you're struggling with so I can make a blog about the most pressing questions people have. Until then, I'm Shindad the Great, and you're pretty awesome, too.