🎩Persona 5 (PS3) Mod Support
How to load modded files in P5 (PS3 CFW & RPCS3)
Background
Persona 5 (PS3) has been around the longest out of all editions of P5. It therefore has the largest modding community, largest selection of mod & tool compatibility, and largest support base. However, with the recent release of Persona 5 Royal on PC & Switch, you may notice a community effort to shift focus to that version.
Persona 5 is a 2016 turn-based JRPG released by Atlus on PS3 and PS4. It features dungeon crawling and life-sim elements. Combat is mainly based on summoning and fusing a party of Personas with different elemental affinities.
The re-release, Persona 5 Royal, launched on PS4 a few years later, featuring many quality of life improvements and a longer campaign. It has just recently been ported to PC and Switch in 2022.
Custom Firmware PS3 Console
This section is missing the following info:
How to install CFW on the latest possible PS3 firmware
How to install FTP Homebrew
How to replace EBOOT.BIN and mod.cpk
RPCS3 Emulator
You can run this version of the game on PC using the RPCS3 emulator.
Setting Up RPCS3
Download the latest release for your platform.
Extract anywhere on your PC using 7-zip.
Download any PS3 firmware PS3UPDAT.PUP file and install in RPCS3.
If using a .PKG file, place a .RAP license in /dev_hdd0/home/000000XX/exdata/ This license must match the region of .PKG you downloaded or dumped!
Launch the game to make sure it works!
For detailed instructions, see RPCS3 Wiki's Help: Dumping Playstation 3 Games page.
Patching the Game
In order to load modded files, you need to patch the executable of the game to look for them in a custom mod.cpk archive. Fortunately, RPCS3 makes this fairly easy to do.
Go to ShrineFox.com's Getting Started Page.
Follow the directions and enter the correct PPU Hash.
Enable any optional patches you'd like.
Download the patch.yml file and move it to RPCS3/patches.
In RPCS3, go to Manage > Game Patches and select No when prompted to download patches.
Enable the patches you'd like to use (including Mod Support) for your installed region/game version.
Run the game to check if patches work!
An easy way to check if patches are working is to enable the File Access Log patch and launch the game. There's a tab named TTY near the bottom of the main RPCS3 window where you select a game. Click on it and you should see a list of files being printed as they are accessed while the game is running.
Installing Mods
To use community-made mods, or to eventually create your own, you'll need a mod manager.
Download the latest release of Aemulus Package Manager.
Extract it somewhere on your PC using 7-zip.
Choose Persona 5 in the games dropdown, and click the Settings button.
Click on Extract Original Files in order to improve mod merging.
You can switch to the GameBanana tab to download community-submitted mods directly from the website. Enable them with the checkboxes and re-order their priority as desired.
Fill out the settings in Aemulus to point to the game's installed directory, or wherever you want the mod.cpk to be generated.
Click Build and test it out in-game! Transfer the mod.cpk to the game's USRDIR folder on PS3 using FTP if you aren't using RPCS3.
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 5 utilizes CriWare's .CPK archive format to store its individual files. You can think of it somewhat like a .zip file that contains the directory structure, but offers compression.
On RPCS3, once the game is installed, you can right click it and choose "Open Install Folder" to view the files. In the "USRDIR" folder, there are several large files such as data.cpk and ps3.cpk.
On PS3, you can use FTP to navigate to dev_hdd0\game\NPEB02436\USRDIR to view the same files. It may be more convenient to download a copy of the .PKG file (USA/EUR) and extract using PKGView.exe than to dump and transfer these files to PC.
Use CriPakGUI to open and extract the contents of each .CPK file 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 5 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 contents. For instance, if you're editing a file in the /init/ folder, copy the unedited one from your .CPK dump to your mod folder and place it in a /init/ folder.
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