Trails From Zero Toolkit

🇷🇺 На русском: README_RU.md

Tools that came out of translating The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero (PC port) into Russian. Everything here is what you need to put your own alphabet into the game and ship a working build — the same toolchain the Russian translation uses end-to-end.

Tested versions

• Trails from Zero — Steam, build 1.4.13. Every tool here was developed and round-tripped against this build.
• Trails to Azure — same engine, same data formats. The dt-tools/ decompilers and the font/ builder apply directly. The five binary patches in binpatch/ target zero.exe specifically and are not yet ported to Azure's executable.

On other PC revisions of Zero the patch byte offsets may differ. The Ghidra scripts in binpatch/research/ reproduce the analysis if you need to find the equivalents on a different binary.

What we went through

The PC port already supports Japanese, English and a baked-in Russian, so the obvious starting point is to swap strings in the existing data files. That works for English (proper font, 1-byte ASCII). It doesn't work for Russian as shipped: the built-in glyphs render packed together like kana, layouts overflow, and a handful of fields hit hard length caps. Replacing the font with a real TTF fixes the look but not the lengths. The fix for the lengths is to encode every letter as 1 byte (in the SJIS halfwidth zone the engine already understands as 1-byte slots) — and that works almost everywhere, except in five text formatters that silently drop bytes above 0x7F. We patched those five spots in zero.exe. That's the toolkit: the font builder, the data-table re-encoder, and the five binary patches.

Which path is yours

Pick one. The choice is determined by the language you're translating into, not by preference:

• Path A — passthrough. For languages the game already supports natively (Japanese, English) or for tweaking strings in the stock Russian build. Letters encode as standard 2-byte SJIS or 1-byte ASCII, exactly like the original files. You only need dt-tools/ in --passthrough mode. This path will not work for any language without a proper font in the game, including Russian as shipped — you'll hit the layout / length / readability problems that path B was built to solve.

• Path B — halfwidth. For any language with no proper font in the game (Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, Hebrew, …). The full pipeline is mandatory; nothing here is optional. You need all three components:

  1. font/ — build a custom font.itf for your alphabet.
  2. dt-tools/ in --halfwidth mode — re-encode every translated ._dt to 1 byte per letter.
  3. binpatch/ — apply the five surgical patches to zero.exe so the engine stops dropping halfwidth bytes.

  Skip any one of the three and the build will look broken in non-obvious ways: missing letters, random truncation, infinite loops on item descriptions.

What's in the box

Folder	Path A	Path B	What it does
dt-tools/	yes	yes	Decompilers / compilers for the game's ._dt data tables. Step-by-step usage, the two encoding modes, drag-and-drop interactive flow, and the substitution-table reference are in its README.
font/	optional	required	Builder for font.itf. How to build, how to retarget it for a different alphabet, and the required game-side input file are all in its README.
binpatch/	no	required	Five tiny patches to zero.exe for halfwidth mode. Apply / revert flow and the patch table are in its README; ASM-level deep-dive in PATCHING_NOTES.md.

Game paths to know:

• ._dt data tables → <game>\data\text_us\
• Font → <game>\system_us\fontdat\font.itf
• Scenarios (separate module, not in this repo yet) → <game>\data\scena_us\

Common prereqs: Python 3.6+, pip install freetype-py (only for the font builder), a copy of the game, and a TTF that contains your alphabet's glyphs. Always make backups of zero.exe, system_us\fontdat\font.itf and any ._dt you plan to edit before you start.

Credits

• Edrahor — toolkit, packaging, byte_codec, ._dt compilers (books, items, memo, shop, town), binary-patch reverse engineering, docs.
• Ivdos — original font.itf builder (font/glyph.py) and original quest decompiler (dt-tools/dt_quest.py). Both adapted for this toolkit.

Community

Discord: Trails Localization Team.