Crystal Rose - border collies

Hexing unborn baby petz - tutorial by V-T

This entire tutorial was inspired by a conversation on the Duke's Group Discord. At one point, it was brought to my attention that the LNZ of a baby pet is stored inside the mother's file at conception. And that, of course, means that technically you can hex a yet unborn puppy/kitten while the mother is still pregnant.

That information in of itself isn't new; it was definitely included in Reflet's .pet file breakdown, which has been incredibly helpful during my hexing adventures. However, I never paid too much attention to the section that straight up tells you where the unborn baby information is stored - I just sort of didn't comprehend just how much power that actually gives you.

So! I decided that, since I can use a hex editor a little bit, I want to actually give it a try and hex a baby pet. Thus, baby Pumpkin was born!

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And now I will show you exactly how to pull it off, too! It's really not too difficult and with a bit of patience, I believe anyone can do it. Just make sure to backup the mum before editing!

Important note

If you choose to completely replace the LNZ data with that of another pet, you have to be careful. I do not recommend copy-pasting from LNZ Pro. The line breaks are formatted slightly differently. If you choose to copy-paste from LNZ Pro, your pet will end up mute! I didn't notice any other symptoms of corruption but that's probably something you don't want. Initially, Pumpkin was mute and I couldn't quite figure out why, since her [Sounds] LNZ section seemed perfectly fine. But because I copy-pasted her LNZ directly from LNZ Pro, it was actually borked!

What you could do instead (and what I do) is hexing an already independent pet first - that pet will give their appearance to the newborn pet. Let's call that pet the donor pet.

Of course, you might just want to do very minor edits, like changing colours of specific ballz. In that case, you can probably just do it directly on top of the LNZ in the hex editor. I'd probably chicken out if I wanted to do something like that though lol

Again: make sure to backup the pregnant pet before attempting to follow this tutorial!

You might break something and that'd be a disaster! Just copy the file to a safe place on your computer, just in case.

Step 1

Open the pregnant mum's .pet file with your hex editor.

Step 2

You now need to find the LNZ section of the baby. I know, I know, it seems scary in that sea of numbers. I promise it's not that hard though. I recommend searching (Ctrl+F) for [Texture List], as that's usually near the beginning of the LNZ section.

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There we go, now that looks a little less scary! But that's not what you need quite yet. If you searched for [Texture List], you should get multiple instances of it within the .pet file. The order is as follows:

You want to edit both of the baby LNZ - as such, you should skip ahead to the third instance.

Note for Petz 5 users

Petz 5, of course, comes with the ability to have litters of multiple puppies/kittens. And yes, you can edit all of them this way! I've done it before with my Pride 2025 litter! All of the babies' LNZ are stored in the mum's .pet file. When you searched for [Texture List], you could have gotten up to 10 instances of it! The mum's LNZ always comes first. The subsequent LNZ entries are the babies. Each baby gets two LNZ sections: adult, then child. For example:

[image]

So if you want to edit all the babies, edit all their LNZ sections. Just keep in mind which baby is which!

Step 3

You've located the LNZ section of your baby. So, there's only one thing left to do in your hex editor... edit away! The general question of how to hex is a bit out of the scope of this tutorial, so I won't get into it here. Just as a note of warning: keep in mind the formatting.