Hello all. First, I'd like to express my continued gratitude toward removed – and also to Squall8 – for their continued dedication to a great game that has gone through a lot of changes since its release.
I do not know if this might be helpful to anyone, but I figured I would at least post this here. Working off of the pointer Marcus had under the Endemic Life header, I was able to find and add some of the pointers for a handful of the endemic life creatures you have captured. My primary hope is that this may facilitate a more complete and better refined way of handling it. I will probably try to keep plugging away at trying to locate the addresses for all of the endemic life in the meantime.
A few notes to consider:
- The effect on Steam Achievements is unknown. I had already found all of the rare endemic life for the achievements through Steam. So, I have no idea what effect, if any, this might have if you give yourself a rare creature that you did not actually catch yourself.
- The total number of animals caught is dependent on the sum three values, one for each size category, and calculates automatically. There are values for normal sized, gold crown, and mini crown versions of each animal caught. Updating any of these values will change the total number of animals caught in your Hunter's Notes appropriately. Selecting, deselecting, or leaving and returning to the page with the endemic life in question will show you the updated total.
- The values for the largest and smallest sizes you have actually caught will be unchanged. The game appears to only consider how many of each size of an animal is available for placement in your room.
- I have attempted to find, but have not yet found, the pointers for the largest or smallest endemic life caught.
- Variant species appear to be separated by 4 bytes within the same size category, but I have not found a distinct structure as of yet for different species. All this means is I do not know of a better way to find the rest right now except through trying to catch more then scanning again. Either that, or just get an idea of where the address should be and use trial and error.
- The pointer for the gold crown size of an endemic life species appears to always greater than the pointer for normal size of that same species by a hex value of 8E0. The value of the mini crown size pointer is, in turn, greater than the value of the pointer for gold crown size by another 8E0, or 11C0 from the normal size pointer.
The species included currently were selected effectively at random. I started by trying to look for values that were particularly large. That is to say, some of the ones for which I'd gone "Oh, it's smaller/bigger and it's got that hue. It must be a crown! Shoot! It's just shy of it..." many, many times. From there I tried to see if there was an easy to discern structure that would make it simpler to just make a list of pointers and see which ones affected what. As noted, except for variants of the same species, I have not found one. I then tossed in the Blue Diva just to see if I could establish with some relative certainty where the correct range of addresses would be, get just a few results, and then use trial and error.
Hopefully this is helpful. If it is and there are any questions then please let me know!
EDIT 1: In light of the much more enlightened approach Marcus is taking, my version of his table will be here only until he has released it with the finished script. When he does, it will be much cleaner looking and more convenient to find and edit what you want.
EDIT 2: Marcus has updated the table with the endemic life script.