Dream World IX

A toolkit for building brand-new playable Final Fantasy IX content — and faithfully forking the real game — on the Memoria engine (Steam/GOG FF9).

The core: author a complete custom field — camera, walkmesh, painted background, NPCs, dialogue, gateways, encounters, events, story branching, cutscenes — from a single declarative field.toml, compiled into a drop-in Memoria mod; or fork any of FF9's ~674 real fields with their content carried faithfully. Around it: custom 3D battle backgrounds and battle tuning, multi-field campaigns and journeys (New Game → a selectable arc of forked game slices), items/equipment/shops, custom 3D character models (Blender round-trip), custom playable characters, overworld authoring (custom islands and terrain, coastlines, entrances), custom music/SFX, experimental two-player co-op, and save/story-state tooling.

Public beta. The engine work is in-game proven; expect rough edges in docs and tooling. Bug reports and authoring questions: see Contributing.

The project is Dream World IX; the Python package is ff9mapkit (pip install ff9mapkit, import ff9mapkit).

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Start here

• SETUP.md — install (installer / PyPI / source), configuration, verification.
• Tutorials — single-goal walkthroughs: first fork, original-art field, campaigns, journeys, the GUI, battle maps, custom models.
• ff9mapkit/README.md — toolkit overview and command families.
• FEATURES.md — the full capability list.
• Troubleshooting · Known issues

Quickstart

Non-developers: the Windows installer (DreamWorldIX-Setup.exe, see Releases and installer/) installs everything, including the optional engine bundle. From a terminal:

pip install "ff9mapkit[assets]"        # or, from a checkout: cd ff9mapkit; pip install -e ".[assets]"
ff9mapkit setup                        # find the FF9 install, extract base assets, report engine status
ff9mapkit import <field> --out myroom --verbatim    # fork a real field — or `new` for original art

Prerequisites (Python 3.11+, a legally-owned Steam or GOG FF9 with Memoria) and the optional extras are in SETUP.md.

What's in here

Path	What it is
ff9mapkit/	The Python toolkit (package ff9mapkit), its docs/, and worked examples/.
apps/	The desktop Workspace GUI (PySide6).
tools/	Repo-checkout dev-loop scripts (test-slot deploy, revert).
installer/	The Windows uv-bootstrap installer.
memoria-patches/	Engine patches (see Engine below).
release/	A complete kit-authored example mod (build oracle for the test suite).
SETUP.md	Setup + CLI reference.

Engine

A novel field (from-scratch art or borrowing a real field's background) runs on a stock, unmodified Memoria install — as do custom battle backgrounds, custom 3D models, and custom music/SFX. No engine patching required.

A forked field also runs on stock Memoria for its physical layer (scene, walkmesh, camera, objects), but FF9 hardcodes some behaviors against the original field's id — narrow-map letterboxing, after-battle and off-mesh fixes — and those need the bundled fidelity patch set (memoria-patches/, s23–s33) for fork fidelity. Overworld mesh authoring (terrain, land reclaim, coasts, islands, water, entrances) requires the s34 mesh-override patch, and the experimental co-op requires the s36–s41 netsync patches. The shipped engine bundle (dwix-custom-memoria-*.zip, installable via ff9mapkit setup --install-engine) contains all of these plus an overlay-load cache (s35) and the debug menu (s22) — an in-game warp/cheat/flag tool available in fields, battles, and on the overworld, opened with the ~ tilde/backquote key (earlier bundles used F6; it moved because stock Memoria binds F6 to its LvMax cheat). Details: ENGINE.md.

Legal & provenance

Dream World IX is an unofficial, fan-made toolkit. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Square Enix. FINAL FANTASY IX is a trademark of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.

This project ships no Final Fantasy IX game data. It is an authoring tool — like a ROM-hack patcher, it operates only on assets read from a copy of the game you legally own, and it does not distribute or enable piracy. The base assets it needs are regenerated from your install via ff9mapkit extract-templates. See DISCLAIMER.md and Provenance.

License & credits

MIT (© 2026 GameJawnsInc) — covers the Dream World IX / ff9mapkit source code only. It grants no rights to FINAL FANTASY IX game data, which belongs to Square Enix.

Built on the Memoria engine (MIT, © Albeoris); the bundled engine patches modify Memoria — see memoria-patches/. Claude Code was used extensively as a coding agent during development.