v1.0.0b15

Dream World IX 1.0.0b15 — Battle balance rules, a hand-built continent, and Chocobo Hot & Cold

Dream World IX is a toolkit for building brand-new playable Final Fantasy IX content — and faithfully forking the real game — for the Memoria engine (Steam/GOG FF9). This release adds a declarative battle-balance rules engine, closes the last gaps in custom overworld authoring (the first fully custom continent, cliff and beach reshaping, a closed shore-tile vocabulary), and reopens the Chocobo Hot & Cold minigame for custom prizes — 183 commits and 3283 passing tests since b13, all DLL-free.

Scale every enemy's HP for a hard-mode run, give the party a second-wind revive, dig up your own Chocobo Hot & Cold prizes, and sail out to a brand-new island chain built entirely from real FF9 coastline — no engine rebuild required.

What's new since v1.0.0b13

⚔️ Battle balance & rules (the Overload gameplay hub)

A new architecture for hooking the engine's battle-calculation callbacks hosts three declarative, flag-toggleable gameplay features — no Assembly-CSharp rebuild.

• [difficulty] scales every enemy once per battle — enemy_hp / enemy_attack / enemy_magic (0.05–20.0), players untouched — with an optional flag gate so a journey can switch hard mode on/off at runtime (toggle live with F6 → Flags; takes effect next battle).
• [rebalance] scales the final HP-damage number by the caster's side — player_damage / enemy_damage — the only way to scale what the party deals; composes with [difficulty]. Takes effect live, mid-battle (the 9999 cap needs Memoria.ini [Battle] BreakDamageLimit = 1).
• [deathrules] owns the party-wipe verdict: second_wind cancels a wipe once per battle with a full Phoenix-party revive (queued exactly like the vanilla Eiko default, recharging each battle), with an optional chance roll and keep_rebirth_flame = false for a hardcore mode with no auto-revive at all. Fail-safe by construction — any hiccup is a normal defeat, never a canceled wipe with nobody revived.
• Discovered here: the GRANULARITY LAW — a flag-gated feature's toggle latency equals its hook's fire cadence. [rebalance] rides a per-hit hook (flips live mid-fight); [difficulty] rides a per-battle hook (takes effect next fight). Same gate mechanism, different granularity, depending on where in the engine it hooks in.
• In-game proven (2026-07-11) — [difficulty] ×2 HP confirmed byte-exact via telemetry (Fang 68→136, Goblin 33→66); [rebalance] 2×/0.5× confirmed both directions; [deathrules] wipe → Phoenix revive → second wipe → normal game over → next battle recharged. See SCRIPTS_DLL.md §12.

🥚 Chocobo Hot & Cold — custom dig prizes

Author your own prize/timer lane for the Chocobo's Forest treasure-hunting minigame on a faithfully forked forest.

• A new declarative [chocobo] block sets the dig prizes and timer tuning for a --verbatim forest fork — no hand-patched .eb, a purpose-built expression-literal edit primitive under the hood.
• In-game proven on all three Chocobo Forests (2026-07-10) — Elixir Forest / Phoenix Down Forest / Magic Tag Forest each redeployed with a custom prize and confirmed matching pop-up text to actual item given, every time.
• The F6 debug menu's Flags tab gained a BATCH operator (bit/byte/word story-flag operations in one click, with named presets) to warp straight into a chocobo dig without manually walking there each test.

🏝️ The first hand-built continent, and a closed shore vocabulary

Custom overworld authoring reaches its capstone this release: a fully composed, multi-island continent built entirely from real FF9 coastline, plus the tools to reshape any coast — cliffs, beaches, and growth — by hand.

• The first custom continent — four real, verbatim-carried FF9 islands (a cliff/highland island, a shore/shallow-water island, a real sandy beach, and Uaho — FF9's own air-only islet) fused into one seamless archipelago in open ocean via world-fuse, deployed and walked in-game with zero seams at any shared border. The layout ships as a worked example (ff9mapkit/examples/continent-v1/).
• The coast-morph pillar — reshape any verbatim-transplanted coastline in place: cliff bumps, structural headlands, bays, and multi-lobe combinations (--cliff-bump/-headland/-bay/-lobes); full beach reshaping and sliding (--beach-reshape/--beach-slide) that moves the whole sand/foam/waterline assembly as one unit; and --in-place morphs that reshape the REAL, already-shipped map coastline directly, no carrying required. A new world-morphs scanner catalogs 324 lawful morph windows map-wide (ready-to-run deploy commands included).
• The shore tile vocabulary is now closed — the sand band and foam end-caps are fully byte-learned and regeneratable from scratch (sand_rebuild / cap_rebuild), closing the last gap in FF9's coastal tile language. --beach-mint re-mints a real beach's sand+foam assembly from a chain spec at any width, including its own synthetic land chain — the first fully kit-authored (not just carried) beach.
• Underlying growth machinery landed too: world-transplant --size NxM carries a multi-cell verbatim landmass as one rigid assembly; RowInsert/chain_row_inserts grow an island by inserting real lattice columns; spill-clip unlocks growth using an empty neighboring cell's water as slack.
• In-game proven throughout July 2026 — the continent (2026-07-09), the coast-morph rungs (2026-07-09 through 2026-07-10), the shore-vocabulary closure (2026-07-11). See the overworld skill/memory for the full 115-law reference.

🗿 Battle-model export gap closed

Every alias id a real FF9 character's battle form can take now exports, previews, reskins, and deploys engine-faithfully.

• extract.resolve_prefab replays the engine's own alias-resolution chain (boss forms, alternate outfits, F1 field-avatar aliases) so all 71 shipped alias ids — not just the 84 primary character/enemy models — round-trip through the custom-model pipeline; the 43 truly-unshipped ids now refuse with an actionable message instead of a wrong export.
• Bone display labels — model-gltf's exported skeleton now carries anatomical names (bone012_R_hand instead of a bare index) for 83% of FF9's bones, derived from family-clustered rest-pose heuristics; --plain-bones opts back out. Makes hand-editing a skinned mesh in Blender dramatically easier to navigate.

🖼️ Image-to-field improvements

The experimental image-field command (turn any picture into a walkable FF9 room) gained the pieces that make it usable on a real photo, not just a synthesized test image.

• --auto-floor automatically detects the walkable floor region (a refusal-biased seeded region grow) instead of requiring a hand-traced polygon, and pre-loads the browser-based --trace tool for manual correction.
• Anchored occluders now depth-sort correctly against the player character (a foreground cut-out's Z is set to the actor's own depth at its floor contact point), so walking behind an object correctly hides behind it.
• A full-resolution cover-crop fix sharpens the deployed background (earlier builds shipped a softened image) — rebuild any pre-existing image-field project to pick it up.
• In-game proven on a real photograph (2026-07-09) — the user's own hallway, traced and deployed as a walkable field.

🎛️ Engine & F6 debug menu

• The F6 debug menu's Flags tab gained the BATCH story-flag operator (bit/byte/word operations, all-or-nothing, named presets) — see Chocobo Hot & Cold above.
• New overworld vehicle-mode and disc-switch tooling in F6's Go tab, reverse-engineered from the dispatcher tables.
• The Position readout now leads with the canonical wrapped coordinate triple every kit tool actually speaks (world (x,z) · block [x][y] · cell (x,z)) instead of the engine's raw unwrapped position, ending a recurring coordinate-confusion class of bug.

Engine bundle

The b15 public engine bundle is UNCHANGED from b12/b13 — same fork-fidelity patch set (s23–s33) plus the s34 overworld mesh-override plus the F6 in-game debug menu, shipped as dwix-custom-memoria-*.zip.

• If you already have the b12 or b13 engine, you do NOT need to re-download it. Every b15 pillar above is either DLL-free or runs on the existing bundle (the continent/coast-morph/chocobo work all reuses the already-shipped s34 override).
• A newer overlay-texture-cache patch (s35) and an F6 diagnostic addition exist in the patch set but are not yet in this public bundle — held for a future from-source engine rebuild. Nothing in this release depends on them.
• A novel (from-scratch / BG-borrow) field runs on stock Memoria, as do most of this release's headline pillars.
• A forked field, and the overworld synthesis/reshape commands, need the shipped s23–s34 suite (all present in the unchanged bundle).

Getting started

• Windows: grab the installer .exe from the release assets — it bootstraps everything, and can optionally install the engine patches (backed-up, version-aware).
• From PyPI: uv tool install "ff9mapkit[gui,assets,save]" then ff9mapkit setup (detects your FF9 install, saves config, extracts base templates, and reports Memoria status).
• Already installed? uv tool upgrade ff9mapkit.
• Full walkthrough, prerequisites, and the CLI reference: SETUP.md.

Provenance

Dream World IX ships NO FINAL FANTASY IX game data. It operates only on a copy of the game you already own, reading and patching your local install at build time. Base templates are regenerated from your own install via ff9mapkit extract-templates; no Square-Enix bytes are distributed. This is an unofficial, fan-made toolkit and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Square Enix.

License

Dream World IX / ff9mapkit is released under the MIT License (© 2026 GameJawnsInc). The bundled engine patches modify Memoria, which is likewise MIT-licensed (© Albeoris).