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Modding MH:W

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hpxro7 edited this page Oct 17, 2018 · 11 revisions

Introduction

This wiki goes through the steps needed to extract and replace sound assets in Monster Hunter: World. This page is still very much a work in progress, and will be updated over time.

By following the instructions below, you can extract or replace in-game background music, sound effects (environmental, monster, weapon, etc.) and voice lines.

The primary containers of sound assets in MH:W are SoundBanks(.nbnk) and File Packages(.npck). The actual sound assets within these containers are .wems (Wwise Encoded Media), which can be encoded in Vorbis, XMA, or WAV. These are proprietary file formats that are created by the AudioKinetic's Wwise program.

The wwiseutil tool can be used to inspect, extract and modify these containers.

Prerequisites

Setup

  1. Go to your MH:W folder. This is usually at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Monster Hunter World.
  2. Copy oo2core_5_win64.dll to the chunk folder.
  3. Open the chunk folder.
  4. Copy WorldChunkTool.exe to this folder.
  5. Drap and drop each chunkN.bn file onto WorldChunkTool.exe. This can take a long time and take up a lot of space on your machine.

The assets are now available in the created chunk folders. From a given extracted chunk folder, audio assets can generally be found in chunkN\sound\wwise\Windows.

Mapping In-Game Audio to Assets

An ongoing project to map .nbnk and .npck files and the wems inside them to labelled in-game audio can be found in this spreadsheet. The name of the containers with specific wem information are at the bottom, with "BankLevel" containing an overview of what each .npck or .nbnk is used for. Thanks to elliotbw and Asterisk for creating and moderating this spreadsheet. Thanks also to the following contributors and the rest of the MH:W modding discord community who worked on this labeling project: NaGel, ThePlotHole, JunkBunny.

In general, monster, environmental, weapon and voice audio live in .nbnk files. Each monster or weapon usually has all of its assets (minus background music) in a single .nbnk. Larger audio assets like background music generally live in .npck files.

Replacing Audio

Preparing Custom Audio

Currently, the wwiseutil tool only supports replacing in .wem files. So, we first have to convert our audio/music from it's original format (e.g. .mp3 or .ogg). Audiokinetic's Wwise program can be used to convert any .wav of your choice into the .wem format for audio replacement. If the format of your original audio is not already a .wav, you can easily have it converted with Audacity. You can follow the instructions found in this video to then convert any .wav file into a .wem.

Replacing wems

  1. Open up wwiseutil-gui.exe.
  2. Click Open and navigate to the target SoundBank(.nbnk) or File Package(.npck) that you want to modify. Keep note of the path to the file, excluding everything at and before chunkN\, e.g. sound\wwise\Windows\em118_se.nbnk.
  3. Click on the .wem that you want to replace.
  4. Click Replace. Select the .wem that you want to replace into this slot. This can be larger or smaller than the original. Just make sure that you don't manually pad the wem; the tool will automatically take care of that.
  5. Hit Save. You'll want to save your file to the root MH:W directory, followed by nativePc\ then followed by the relative path you took note of earlier. You may need to create new folders to do this. For example, in my case I would save my file to:
  6. Make sure wwiseutil is closed before starting up MH:W.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Monster Hunter World\nativePC\sound\wwise\Windows\em118_se.nbnk

MH:W looks into the nativePc folder before loading any assets. If a file exists there, it will load up that file instead of using the asset baked into the original chunkN.bin. Your audio mod should now be ready! Depending on the asset you modified, you may either have to reload your map, or restart the entire game. Enjoy, and do file a bug if you run into any issues.

Extracting Audio

Unpacking Wems

  1. Open up wwiseutil-gui.exe.
  2. Click Open and navigate to the target SoundBank(.nbnk) or File Package(.npck) that you want to unpack.
  3. Click on Export Wems and select a directory that you want the .wems to unpack into. There could be a lot of wems unpacked, so you might want to create a new directory to keep things organized.

Converting Wems into a Playable Format

Note that this step will eventually be taken care of by wwiseutil in the future, when it supports playing audio and extracting to .ogg or .mp3 natively in the GUI. If you knew how to, you could easily turn the following steps into a batch executable that you could drag a folder of .wem files to convert.

  1. Download and extract ww2ogg. The main things you'll need from the archive is ww2ogg.exe and packed_codebooks_aoTuV_603.bin.
  2. Copy both files above into the directory where your .wems were unpacked.
  3. Open up the command prompt and cd into this directory.
  4. For each N.wem run the following command ww2ogg N.wem --pcb packed_codebooks_aoTuV_603.bin

The wem will be output to that directory as a playable .ogg, which you could listen to with a program like Audacity or VLC

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