📺Persona 4 Golden (PC) Mod Support

How to load modded files in P4G PC

Background

The internals of Persona 4 Golden on PC are largely the same as on its original release platform, the PSVita. Due to this, many mods are cross-compatible with a little tweaking. However, with the upcoming release of Persona 4 Golden on PC & Switch, you may notice a community effort to shift focus to that version.

Persona 4 Golden is a 2012 re-release of the 2008 turn-based JRPG released by Atlus on PS2. The game features dungeon crawling and life-sim elements. Combat is mainly based on summoning and fusing a party of Personas with different elemental affinities.

This re-release features many quality of life improvements and a longer campaign. It has recently been ported to PC and a Switch port will release in January 2023.

Steam Version

Mod Support Setup & Installing Mods

Please see here for a full guide on setting up mod support and installing mods for Persona 4 Golden on PC.

Extracting Files

If you are looking to create your own mods for this game, you will want a full dump of all the game's original, unedited files.

Persona 4 Golden on PC utilizes PreApp Partners' .CPK/.PAC archive format for storing files, which aren't the same as the .CPK/.PAC typically found in other Persona titles. Still, you can think of it somewhat like a .zip file that contains the directory structure, while offering compression.

On Steam, right click the game in your Library and choose Manage > Open Install Folder to view the files. There should be several large .PAC files and some .CPK files.

Download and unzip TGE's preappfile program. Drag each of the .PAC or .CPK files onto the .EXE to automatically extract the contents to a folder.

For simplicity, you can extract them all to the same folder (or merge folders later) if you'd like. It's not important which .CPK the files came from, because they all share the same directory structure when loaded by the game.

Creating Mods

To begin exploring the files and learning how to edit them, see the Persona 4 Golden page on the Amicitia Wiki. Once you have an idea for a mod, open Aemulus Package Manager and click on the New button. Fill out the form and it will create a mod folder for you.

Inside the mod folder, match the structure of the extracted .CPK/.PAC contents. For instance, if you're editing a file in the /init/ folder, copy the unedited one from your dump to your mod folder and place it in a /init/ folder.