MSBT file (Pikmin 3)

To do: Document the file format.

.msbt files contain the strings in Pikmin 3. They can be found in the /content/*/system/message.szs files. For a list of MSBT files in the game, and what type of strings they usually contain, see MSBT file list.

Tools

• MSBT Editor Reloaded
• Kuriimu
• ObsidianX's msbt.py (MSBT <-> JSON)
  • To use this tool with Hey! Pikmin, you will need to first change the parameters in JSON's text dumper to force ASCII. Find the line with json.dump, and change ensure_ascii=False to ensure_ascii=True.
  • In addition, in order for it to work with Pikmin 3, find the line with substrings.append, and change the line to substrings.append(string.decode('utf-16-%s' % ('-le' if self.order == '<' else '-be'), 'replace')).

Changing who speaks in dialogue

Before most lines of dialogue in Pikmin 3's MSBT entries, there are 10 bytes of hex starting with 0E 00 17 00 or something similar. Of these ten bytes, the last two bytes (the two bytes before the actual dialogue text) determine the character saying this dialogue. The second to last byte determines the voice used, while the last byte determines the icon used.

If MSBT Editor Reloaded (linked above) is used to edit a given MSBT file, the hex values before these lines of dialogue can be directly edited via its hex editor on the bottom right of the window.

Hex value	Character voice
00	Alph
01	Brittany
02	Charlie
03	Louie
04	Olimar
05	S.S. Drake

Hex value	Character icon
00	Alph, neutral
01	Brittany, neutral
02	Charlie, neutral
03	Louie, neutral
04	Olimar, neutral
05	Alph, shocked
06	Brittany, shocked
07	Charlie, shocked
08	Louie, shocked
09	Olimar, shocked
0A	Alph, happy
0B	Brittany, happy
0C	Charlie, happy
0D	Louie, happy
0E	Olimar, happy
0F	Alph, worried
10	Brittany, worried
11	Charlie, worried
12	Louie, worried
13	Olimar, worried
14	Alph, determined
15	Brittany, determined
16	Charlie, determined
17	Louie, determined
18	Olimar, determined
19	No icon is displayed
1A	S.S. Drake