Removing the Butterflies: What I've found

[Mandy]

I saw a topic around here somewhere, where someone wanted the butterflies to be removed from the game. Someone else suggested getting rid of the Flowers.toy, but that resulted in game crashes. Rather than necro that age-old post, I decided to post my own resource topic for reference's sake.

Anyway, that topic made me curious. I've previously hexed Petz' South Seas and Beach playscenes to remove the dumb bugs/hermit crabs, so I figured, "The methodology is probably identical." So I set work.

Now, in the Beach.env file in Petz4, the hermit crab.toy is referenced a few times. It's possible to rid of the hermit crab (I hated it because once it showed up, it never went away) by doing the following:

• 1: Make a backup copy of your original Beach.env. (This step is not necessary if using HxD because it will create a backup file for you)
  
• 2: Open the Beach.env in a hex editor, such as HxD.
• 3: Do a "text string" search for hermit crab You might have to do this a few times.
• 4: Replace all instances of hermit crab with white shell (they have the same number of characters, so you won't mess anything up if your hex editor is set to overwrite instead of insert. And they are by default.)
• Save

This makes the game spawn White Shells (hermit crab shells) instead of hermit crabs. Unfortunately, these shells cannot be brought to other playscenes, for they poof from the toycase after you leave the Beach, but it does accomplish its goal of getting rid of that pesky hermit crab for good.

So I went into the Kitchen.env searching for Flower, but all I found were the Yellow Flower Plant. I spent several minutes trying to find various other search strings, but to no avail. Then I realized: "ALL of the playscenes have those butterflies. Maybe it's in the .exe file?"

Low and behold;


I attempted to edit this by typing BathTub.toy over it, but doing so made Petza fail to recognize the .exe file, and refuse to load. This, of course, means that Babyz becomes very unstable and won't run longer than a minute or two before freezing. This particular area seemed to be for the Nursery playscene, so I loaded the game up and went there anyway, just to see if any butterflies would show up. The game froze shortly after, more likely due to a lack of petza than editing the .exe.

So then I booted up Babyz in my Windows 98 Virtual Machine, and currently have it running. 5 minutes in, and no butterflies have shown up at all. I then moved to the kitchen, where still no butterflies have appeared 10 minutes later.

CONCLUSION:

It is entirely possible to remove the butterflies from the game, without "missing file" errors.

It is impossible to remove the butterflies from the game if you are running the game on a newer machine that requires petza for stability.

[Budgie]

ooo, the concept is good though! What if you edited the flower toy file to remove the butterflies?!

[Mandy]

Sept 1, 2017 14:01:29 GMT -5 Budgie said:

ooo, the concept is good though! What if you edited the flower toy file to remove the butterflies?!

Thank you for suggesting this. It gave me an idea!

While removing the Butterflies from the Flowers.toy would most likely result in a crash... What if we replaced the flowers toy, instead?

So I took the Yellow Flowers Plant.toy and made it into a clone of the Flowers.toy. It now won't show up because the Yellow Flowers Plant is a hidden toy, but hey! No butterflies, and no crashes! XD

Now I really need a place to hold these files at. Hm.