Palette Editing Tutorial (outdated)

Note by madsiur (08/18/2017)
This thread was made 7 years ago. While it was relevant at the time, it is now highly misleading and confusing for newcomers. Here are therefore a few link you should read instead:

Sprite Tutorial (ff6hacking wiki)
Help Thread 1
Help Thread 2
About Merchant Locke in battle

Original post

Ok guys this 1 is gonna be a huge 1 here, much credit goes to Lord J for this 1

but here are some key things u need to know before editing the palettes,

1. if changing a character's palette u need to change both the battle and over world palette, they are in separate banks and need to be changed respectively

2. another unfortunate thing is, the bank where characters are in the shop menu is hidden and cannot be changed, this area is unknown but when it is discovered I will provide the correct information

3. each palette has a hex value (they are the same for both over world and battle) (there are 2 exceptions I will get to them later)

pal #0: uses value 00
pal #1: uses value 02
pal #2: uses value 04
pal #3: uses value 06
pal #4: uses value 08
pal #5: uses value 0A

these are the ones that act normal and share the value of the chars both battle and over world

pal #6: uses value 0C
pal #7: uses value 0E
pal #8: uses value 10
pal #9: uses value 12

(just for the sake of consistency)

Pal # 0 is used by: Edgar, Sabin, Celes, Imp, Leo, Ghost
pal # 1 is used by: Locke, Imperial Soldier, Merchant
pal # 2 is used by: Terra
pal # 3 is used by: Strago, Relm, Gau, Gogo, Bannon, Kefka
pal # 4 is used by: Cyan, Shadow, Setzer
pal # 5 is used by: Mog, Umaro

(the rest are a bit complicated but I will explain)

these are the offsets of each character

Offsets from base address:
00: Terra
01: Locke
02: Cyan
03: Shadow
04: Edgar
05: Sabin
06: Celes
07: Strago
08: Relm
09: Setzer
0A: Mog/Moogles
0B: Gau
0C: Gogo
0D: Umaro
0E: Brown soldier
0F: Imp
10: Leo
11: Banon
12: Terra as an esper (she uses 2 different palettes)
13: Merchant
14: Ghost
15: Kefka
16: Gesthal (shows up but is glitched)


17 and following are illegal sprites, they never show up in battle, and will cause glitches in the game (this is assuming u are editing the battle palettes, but the retain the same values, meaning regardless which is being altered over world or battle Terra will remain 00)

if changing battle palettes here is the offset 2D02B (search SNES Hi Rom)

you will find and search for your character, 00 will be Terra, her palette will be 04 you can change her palette to any on the list above, and this will change her battle palette

and when it comes to the over world palette this is the offset 268200

and follow the above procedure

and thats all there is to it

now here is where these other palettes are complicated

Esper Terra (as I mentioned above) shares 2 palettes

her battle palette is 6 and her over world is 8, this for some reason was coded this way and idk why but thats how it is

now lets say you want to add a brand new palette u will have the use of palette # 7 and # 9

Battle #7 is all white and is unused
Over World #9 is the exact same palette is #0 (with the exception of the last 4)

if u want to code in a brand new palette for a char u can edit the colors of the palette in Lord J's sprite editor and export the palette (PAL file)

assign both #7 and #9 to the char u want to have a custom palette

thats all there is to it guys I hope this proves useful