🎩Persona 5 Royal (PC) Mod Support

How to load modded files in P5R on PC - Updated 10/24/22

Background

The Switch/PC ports of Persona 5 Royal have very recently released in October 2022. You may notice a community effort to shift focus to these versions, especially considering the restrictive complexity of PS4 modding. It only stands to reason that this would be the most popular edition of Persona 5 to mod, so expect very little community support for prior editions going forward.

Persona 5 Royal is a re-release of Persona 5, originally launched on PS3 and PS4 in 2019 (2020 in the west). Just like its predecessor, it's a JRPG with life-sim and dungeon crawling elements that involves summoning and fusing a party of Personas.

It features many quality of life improvements and a longer campaign, and has just recently been ported to PC and Switch in 2022.

Dumping Files (Optional)

In the CPK folder, .CPK files (CRIWare archives) are used to store the game's assets.

In order to create your own mods, you'll want a copy of the game's unpacked files to work with. If you'll only be installing mods created by other users, you don't need to worry about this.

1. Find the game's directory. In your Steam library, you can right click P5R and choose Manage > Browse Local Files. (e.x. C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\P5R)

2. Download CriPakGUI-P5R.7z and extract with 7-zip.

3. Open BASE.CPK and click the Extract Files button to unpack the files to a folder. The program may appear to freeze, this is normal. Please be patient as this can take a very long time.

4. Do the same with the EN.CPK (or whichever language you use).

You can think of BASE.CPK and EN.CPK like zip folders. They are compressed, so once unpacked, the contents become much larger. The unpacked files end up being about 62 GB in total, so make sure you have enough space free on your hard drive.

Setting Up Reloaded II Mods

Thanks to Sewer56 and Lipsum (zarroboogs), Persona 5 Royal on PC now has support for loading modded files via Reloaded II mods, bypassing the need to repack BASE.CPK and use EN.CPK for mods as described in an earlier workflow.

Unfortunately, this method does not yet offer the "deep merging" capabilities offered by Aemulus Package Manager for other editions of the game, but Sewer56 promises to bring those features to Reloaded II in the near future.

Once you follow these steps, you'll also be able to skip the opening logos and run the game even when the window is unfocused. You can also toggle each of these features in the mod's settings.

1. Download ReloadedII and extract Releases.zip.

2. Run ReloadedII.exe. You may need to first install the following .NET runtimes:

   1. dotnet-runtime-7.0.0-rc.2.22472.3-win-x64.exe

   2. windowsdesktop-runtime-7.0.0-rc.2.22472.13-win-x64.exe

   3. windowsdesktop-runtime-7.0.0-rc.2.22472.13-win-x86.exe

   4. dotnet-runtime-7.0.0-rc.2.22472.3-win-x86.exe

3. Once ReloadedII is open, follow the steps on this page to set up Persona 5 Royal Essentials. It will also describe how to install mods downloaded from Gamebanana and launch the game with mod support.

Porting Existing Mods

While a lot of things are the same between the PS4 version of P5R and the new ports, there are some major differences you need to take into account.

• The contents of most .PAC files are now loosely distributed.

• File paths are in uppercase now, but the game will still load lowercase files/folders.

• .GNF textures (used for Thieves Den images, bustups, and field textures) are now .DDS.

  • Texture .BIN files no longer use headerless .DDS.

• The audio format is still .ADX, but .ACB/.AWB/.USM encryption keys have changed.

• There are additional flowscript functions.

There are also dozens of other, tinier differences too specific to list here.