[Help] Finding Defense in Monster Hunter Frontier

[Ghend]

Basically the title. I am playing on my own private server as a purely single player experience. Long story short, defense and health are the only two values I have been unable to change. The character's attack value, elemental resistances, items, and most other things are stored as plainly visible 2 Byte addresses and are easily changeable with scripting / the usual methods when attached to the game's executable. The only values I can find for HP are the display values (e.g. I can make it look like my health is full, but my actual health is still decreasing), and the only values I've found for Defense don't seem to do anything when changed.

For those unfamiliar with the game / series: the character has a "base" Defense of 61 that is just innate, as far as I can tell. Equipment adds flat Defense (e.g. equip a helm with 50 Def, you now have 111 Def). There is a character sheet / summary which shows your stats in plain numbers, as far as I can tell they are not obfuscated in any way (though I suppose that'd be why this one is harder to find...). Things I have tried, for Defense, include:

• Plainly finding the address for the totaled Defense stat on the character sheet - Found in 2 Byte, can change, change is displayed on sheet, no change in damage taken.

• Initial search of 0, then searching for the total of Defense from actual equipped armors (e.g. 0 when naked, then 50 with above helm) - No values found in 2 Byte nor All Types

• Cycling through equipping 3 different helms and searching for the exact Defense granted by each - No values found in 2 Byte nor All Types

• Cycling through equipping 3 different helms and searching unknown initial value, then increase / decrease - Only gets narrowed down to 10,000+ values in 2 Bytes / All Types, doesn't seem to be any major pattern in the values I looked at.

I have also tried searching for the same values while attached to the server emulator software but no luck. Not sure why this one value is so sticky, I would imagine stats wouldn't necessarily be stored on the server, but maybe it's pooling Item A + Item B = C Defense from your server-side "save file" and feeding that back to the client. Doesn't really explain why you can change Attack / Resistances so easily though.

Anyway, if anyone has any tips or methods to try (specific to the game or just in general), I'm all ears. Thank you!

Edit: After digging around in the community, it seems like there's just some super high diminishing returns in this particular game. So yeah, it's not just a display value, but increasing it (even to absurd numbers) doesn't change much beyond a certain point. Ah well.