Creating a new area from scratch

This tutorial will teach you how to create a totally new area from scratch, and link it to the Overworld.

Temporal Flux Tutorial Disclaimer

This tutorial involves Temporal Flux. Since these tutorials are not meant to augment your game, you should make a copy of your Chrono Trigger ROM for use with these instructions. This not only backs it up, but will prevent you from unnecessarily changing and overwriting your clean copy, which you probably want to still play time to time, no?

In this tutorial, you will use and learn the basic, following skills and commands:

• Designing a new house on the Oveworld
• Making a functional Overworld Exit and avoiding pitfalls
• Selecting and creating a new house in Locations
• Making a functional exit back to the Overworld
• Ensuring event code will propely load in the house

Creating the House on the Overworld

First thing's first! We need to create a new house on the overworld that we'll be accessing. Let's make it reside in 1000 A.D., the present, and put it near Zenan Bridge, where it can be easily accessed even in a new game. You can choose how it looks down to the last detail, but for simplicity, I'm going to go with a simple design. Remember that houses are placed in Layer 1.

Now, the house is on the map. That seems easy enough, but now we have some decisions to make. Firstly, we need to figure out where we will place our new location in terms of maps. When Chrono Trigger was made, the programmers packed in data and locations very neatly, leaving little empty space for playing around with. However, a few empty spots are lying around. For instance, the lower half of Manoria Cathedral's Map 65 is mostly black space. We're going to put a small room there. But first, we need to make a new room pointer. Location pointers are what tells the game what map to load, what palette to use, and what to prevent the player from seeing. It also instructs the game which events to load. In Temporal Flux, they're how you select locations and stuff to edit (appearing as {001} Crono's Kitchen, {002} Crono's Room, and on down the line).