Is it possible to give Ramza Shadow and Dusk Blades but...

[LegoLeonidas]

only obtainable by picking up Gafgarion's crystal? I know I can un-check the "learn by JP" box and raise "Chance to learn" to 100%, but would I be screwing up Orlandu's abilities?

I suppose I could simply make a pair of separate skills with the same effects and names, but I'm not sure how many free spaces I have for skills to replace...

[RavenOfRazgriz]

There's plenty of space to make duplicates for that, it's something I'm doing as well.  The only issue is that you need Gafgarion to have those "dupe" skills learned but told never to cast them, but have Ramza not know them.  I've been too lazy to figure out exactly how one would rig that up, but I'm sure it's more than possible.  You want your duplicates to be Learn On Hit, No Learn By JP, Chance to Learn 100%, 1 JP Cost, if memory serves.

[Glain]

I was actually doing a mini-patch where Ramza would get skills that were Learn on Hit. Not quite the same thing, but kinda similar... if 'Learn by JP' is off then it shouldn't be visible in Ramza's list until he learns it; however, he seems to auto-get ability 6 (should be Wish; if you don't replace it, then not a problem). I believe AI learns skills with JP regardless of that 'Learn by JP' flag (thus Zodiac is 9999 JP so enemy summoners wouldn't have it).

Are you sure you don't need to have the job unlocked to learn skills by crystal, though?

[LegoLeonidas]

I don't know. If that's the case I may have to rethink things, or maybe just stick with "Learn on hit". If anyone knows, speak up!

When the game first came out, there was a rumor that if you grabbed Gafgarion's crystal with Ramza, you learn his abilities. I can see the attraction, as Gaf's abilities are pretty useful(read: broken), and for some reason, he automatically crystallizes on death. I figured, why not make it true in my patch!

PS: Raven, your avatar is AWESOME!

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Uh, I don't think you can learn abilities from another job via crystal, even if the abilities are the same.  Ramza never learns any Squire abilities from crystals during the battle at Gariland.

There should be a hack to fix this.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Glain is correct, he should learn the skill regardless of Learn by JP flag, as long as it has a JP cost.  Just make sure only the "enemy" Gafgarion has these skills learned in his Default Skillset and is told never to use them in battle.

As for Learning it from a Crystal when you're not specifically a Dark Knight... I don't know how that'd function, honestly.  You can always trick the game, though.  Set Enemy Gafgarion's Default Skillset in the Jobs tab to Chapter 2 Ramza's Guts.  This will allow him to learn the skills, and have the same primary skillset as Ramza.  Then, force-apply Enemy Gafgarion's Primary to be that of Guest Gafgarion, which will allow him to auto-learn everything in the Dark Sword skillset and use it properly.  The only issue with this is that if you leave his Secondary as <Random>, he'll sometimes come in with the Guts secondary, so you'll probably want to force-set one and make sure he's Job Level 1 so the only skills he can learn from the Guts skillset are the "fake" Dark Sword and Night Sword, but this workaround should otherwise work fine.  You'll need to test it to be certain but that SHOULD allow you to learn the skills from his Crystal.

Then again, I don't think I've EVER learned a skill from his Crystal, so I think the Event's Auto-Crystal feature may get in the way of learning skills.  If so, you'll need a workaround for that, but my above should allow you to learn the skills from his Crystal from natural forms of Crystalization at the very least.

[LegoLeonidas]

Alright, guess it's time to get cracking and test it out! Thanks all for your help! Also, any other pointers are always welcome!

[Glain]

Oh my, what's this doing in here?


In the patch I tested this with, enemies have tons of stuff unlocked, which is why there are so many abilities to inherit. On a sidenote, it seemed to generate the crystal correctly, even though it was an event. Usually Gaf probably just doesn't have any jobs unlocked but Dark Knight which you're not allowed to inherit from.

...Or at least, not without this patch! It removes a check found in the code that generates crystals in BATTLE.BIN that wouldn't allow inheriting of abilities from a base job unless the crystal unit and the inheriting unit had the same base job.

In order to inherit an ability like Night Sword, however, you will have to:
1. Put the ability in your own base class (In this case, I gave it to Ramza's Guts skillsets)
2. Ensure that the unit that you're inhereting the ability from has that ability at the same slot in the skillset.

For this test, I modified Ramza's squire and Gaf's Dark Sword skillset to have Night Sword in the tenth slot. There's nothing wrong with having a bunch of empty slots in a skillset, so I imagine this sort of thing shouldn't be too cumbersome. It also gives you a measure of control over whether you want abilities to be inherited through crystal or not (if not, put them in a different slot from whoever would be inheriting the crystal).

I wrote a routine in kanji space to determine if the skillset slots of the two different base jobs actually contain the same ability. FFT's normal code doesn't ever check this... if you're the same job, you must have the same skillset; therefore, it only looks at the slots, not the actual ability IDs. That wasn't going to work if you were inheriting between different base jobs.

spoiler: Patch (XML)

 <Patch name="Crystals can include special job abilities (Base job matching check removed)">
   <Description>
     Crystals can contain abilities from special jobs regardless of the inheriting unit's base job. However, the inheriting unit's base job would have to include the ability in the same slot in order to learn it. (e.g. Ramza could learn Night Sword from Gafgarion's crystal if it was Gafgarion's 10th ability and Ramza's 02 Squire class also contained Night Sword as the 10th ability.)
   </Description>
   <Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="1196E8">
     65006B15
   </Location>
   <Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="1197F4">
     D4720508
   </Location>
   <Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="F5B50">
     1400A016
     00000000
     FCFFBD27
     0000A2AF
     3C00A38F
     00000000
     40100300
     21104300
     0680033C
     9461638C
     00110200
     21104300
     00004990
     21282002
     5A69010C
     21202001
     21504000
     0000A28F
     0400BD27
     03005415
     00000000
     FE010608
     00000000
     12020608
     00000000
   </Location>
 </Patch>

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Tl;dr you can cross-learn abilities from Crystals as long as they share the same Skill Slot in each class' ability list.

That's pretty delicious, actually.  It addresses the one concern I was having about cross-learning skills and gives us our old GameFAQs rumor in one attempt.  Well done, Glain.