Petz Research

Breed personality hexing

On the RKC forums, shaina @ kizmet posted a tutorial on hexing pet personalities. You can view your pet's personality traits with the Goal Descriptor Analyzer (Download link) There are 22 personality traits in petz, but not all of them are defined in every breed, and you can't add any bytes there without breaking the game. But fortunately, you can change which personality traits are used. (Some breeds like the Alley Cat and Siamese give you a lot of traits to work with.)

I made these tables to use as a reference, in conjunction with shaina's tutorial:

Editable Catz traits

Editable Dogz traits

Default Values when a personality trait is not assigned.

Note that low is 0-20, mid is 30-70, and high is 80-100.

Personality hexing example (with help from IDA)

Note to myself: Value from 00-06 goes FIRST. Trait from 00-15h is second.

For this example, I am editing the orange shorthair to make it naughtier.

Open .cat in IDA Free and click on the ConstructGenome function.

Look at the pairs of numbers being pushed. 1st is value, 2nd is trait. This pair is setting trait 4, which is naughtiness, to a value of 1.

Switch to hex view to see what the offset is.

I don't know how to hex edit in IDA Free so I open an online hex editor to change the highlighted number.

01 (low) has been changed to 03 (high). Now the oshie is naughty.

Hexing Toy Behavior

Reflet's Toy Research was the starting point; that page has all the background info on what Toy Adjectives are in Petz. Hexing toyz would not have been possible without Reflet's toy adjective spreadsheet.

Important to know: 1) You can't edit toy adjectives in LNZ Pro; you have to use a hex editor. 2)You can't add new adjectives; you can only change the values of the adjectives the game has already set You actually can, but since you can't add new instructions, you can only give a toy a new adjective by replacing/changing an existing instruction. I learned about that after I wrote this tutorial. (Adjectives that don't exist for a toy are marked with -1 on the spreadsheet.)

This is how I created my hexed toyz:
• Open up toyz in IDA Freeware
• In petz 5, the toy adjective initialization function is apparently located in the "Sprite_[toy]::InitToyExtraCode" function, near the start of the code. (In the petz 3 version of the toy I think this function wasn't named, but in Petz 5 it was.) (Double click on the name in the functions window to open it in the graph view.)
• Here I compared the hair ball function and bone function to each other and to the adjective values in Reflet's goals spreadsheet (converting the values back to hex) to find where the numbers are.

• (It either sets a single number or a range. For the range, only the minimum can be directly seen, but according to reflet, the full range can be edited. It uses a rand function to calculate a toy instance at runtime.)
• Highlight it and switch to the hex view tab. It highligts the instruction. The first one or two highlighted bytes are the opcode and stuff, but I saw that the last highlighted byte was the number.
• I looked up the address/offset in a hex editor (still not sure which it is or what the difference is? the long hex number in the left-hand column) and changed the value. I changed the bone's min edibility to be the same as it's min tastiness (changed it from 0x0F to 0x46).
• These are the locations and values:

• I didn't bother compensating for the checksum, whatever that means in this context, like it said in the Carolyn's Creations sleepy sickness tutorial, but it didn't crash my game. (It turns out you don't need to do that when editing the assembly code; you just can't add new lines of code). It worked and cats started stalking and eating the bones. (I didn't change the ID or name, so the bone is overwriting.)

Relevant toy data

The data was all discovered by Reflet; I collected and commented on some of the relevant bits here:

Reflet discovered all the toy adjective values, including the flavor values. Almost every toy has set a flavor value, even if it is not edible. This is what I think they mean:

0 Tastes like chicken
1 Beef, dog food
2 Fish, cat food
3 Wet food (Leftovers, red food bowl)
4 Milk
5 Candy and popcorn
6 Catnip
7 Cheese
8 Shiny and colorful
9 Squeaky chewy toy
10 Soft and fluffy inedible things (Update 04/09/22: Recent research in the petz hacking community suggests this may be mouse flavor!)(Update 07/01/2023: Further research has discovered that the Petz 4 mice do not have a flavor.)
11 Bones
12 Mostly wooden things
13 Metal, jewels
14 Water
15 ??? (Shells and a few other things) (Update 04/09/22: I think this is a dry, hard, dusty flavor. Shells, bones, fossils, coconut shells. Also the petz 4 dlc vacuum cleaner, for some reason.)
(NEW) 16 This is the flavor possessed by Catz!
17 ??? (Hair ball and flea spray)
(NEW) 18 This is the flavor possessed by Dogz!
23 Chemical smells (and pirate skull for some reason... alcohol???)
24 Garbage (glass bottles, bag of coal)
26 ??? (The outside of the flea bottle)
27 Plants (seeds and jack o lantern)
28 Cardboard box

Chicken treat and healthy treat
Bone treat and beef treat (also dog food)
Fish treat and olive treat (also green food bowl)
Candy hearts, popcorn, and cotton candy
(Cheese's flavor is shared by no other toy. The Petz 4 dlc easter egg tastes like the red/yellow ball and striped ball.)

• Fish Bone
• Bone
• Hair Ball
• Red/Yellow Ball
• Striped Ball
• Exotic Seeds I
• Exotic Seeds II
• Carrot Seeds
• Carnation Seeds
• Rose Seeds
• Tulip Seeds
• Violet Seeds
• Pirate Skull (!)
• Ornament Box (!)
• Xmas Light Box (!)

Milk Bottle
Bone Treat Box
Popcorn Treat Box
Tug Toy
Fish Food
Olive Treat Bowl
Fish TreatBox
Cotton Candy Box
Driftwood
Stick
Beef TreatBox
Chicken Treat
Candy Hearts
Healthy Treat
Wool Chew Doll
Chewy Sneaker
Leprechaun
Parrot Plush
Catz Plush
Dogz Plush
Spray Bottle Mist
Soccer Ball
Yarn Ball
Star Ball
Tennis Ball
Duo Ball
Jack O'Lantern
Bug Barn
Exotic Seeds I
Exotic Seeds II
Carrot Seeds Box
Carnation Seeds Box
Daisy Seeds Box
Rose Seeds Box
Tulip Seeds Box
Violet Seeds Box
Snowballz
Spray Bottle

Edible but not tasty:

Daisy Seeds(Sprite_Seed_D1)
Coal Bag(Sprite_Coal_X1)
Flowers(Sprite_Bowl_F1)
Xmas Light

Petz Animation frames

The [Head Shot] section of a pet's LNZ lets you change the frame number of the pet's profile pic. (When you change a pet's [Head Shot], you need to take the pet out and put it back in again before you see the change).
The default is 0, for the default standing pose. You can't set the animation number and tell it to use the first frame; all the frames of all the animations are stored next to each other, making it hard to set a pose. So this was my adventure in learning how [Head Shot] works:

I tested powers of two (the first number in the [Head Shot] part of a pet .lnz)

8,191 is fine, and so is 8192.
16,383 is a bad frame number and crashes the game.

How to find the max frame? Time for a binary search!
12000 is ok
14000 is ok
15000 is ok
15691 is ok
16037 is ok
16210 is bad
16123 is bad
16080 is bad
16058 is bad
16047 is bad
16042 is bad
16039 is ok
16040 is bad

**16039 is the biggest frame number you can put in [Head Shot]**

Animation #444 is the exploding one... I want to find the frame number of the exploded pet...
And 450 is the 'bang head on floor' one...
According to petz workshop, there are 493 animations. (first is 0, last is 492.)
(409 is also an explosion)

Frame number 16010 (animation 490) is the belly flop slide yesss :3
16012 is the last frame of the belly flop.

16040 frames divided by 493 animations equals an average of 32 frames per animation.

Also, only the adult lnz seems to affect the picture, no matter the age of your pet.

it seems like eyelid height and eyelid tilt influence each other (height seems to affect how much it rotates)

more information that builds on the pet manual:
rotation: 0 degrees the pet faces the camera, positive rotation turns the pet's left side to the camera (the pet has spun to the right)
roll: positive roll rotates the picture counterclockwise
tilt: positive tilt puts the camera below the pet (think "cats loafing on glass tables"...)
head rotation: positive rotation = the pet turns its head to the right
head tilt: positive angle = the head turns its head up
head cock: positive angle = the pet cocks its head to the left
R/L eyelid height: zero is wide open eyes. higher numbers = the pet closes its eyes
R/L eyelid tilt: negative numbers are angry eyes