How to Convert Wii U Model Mods to Nintendo Switch

cailei110

https://gamebanana.com/tuts/12737

Hi guys, in this tutorial, I will be explaining how to Convert Wii U Model replacement mods to the Nintendo Switch. I will be going over the process and explaining what to do with each tool.

Please note that as of writing this post, it is not possible to port breath of the wild mods that have a higher poly count than the original games allocated amount.
1. Tools

These Tools will help you decompress and decrypt Wii U Files:

- Sarc_Tool This tool will decompress sbfres files into bfres files, as well as .pack files.
- BFRESExtractor This tool will extract Wii U texture bfres files into .gtx files.
- GTX_Extractor This will extract .gtx files into .dds files for use with BNTX injector.

These tools will be used to convert all extracted Wii U Files into usable Switch Files.

- Custom Fork of Smash Forge this fork of Smash Forge can convert Wii U Models to Switch Models
- Embedded Extractor This will extract the .bntx texture file from your Switch texture,bfres
- BNTX_Injector This will allow you to edit/extract textures from the Switch .bntx file.
- A dumped Breath of the Wild Cartridge / Digital Download.

After you've downloaded everything, I think it's time to get started!
2. Obtaining a Dumped Format of Breath of the Wild - Switch

Before you go Porting anything, it is important to get access to the files you want to modify. This will be done through these next few steps, and its definitely longer than the actual porting process.

2.1 Extracting your Switch files from your Cart or Digital Download

In order to mod Switch files, we're going to need some first. This can be achieved by using a Cart dumper called WAINCartDumperNX. This tool will be used to Extract an XCI formatted file that contains the base game. Most files will be in this, however only the very first version that came with the cart will be in it. This means that any updates you have done will need to be dumped as well.
To start, download the CartDumper and place it into your "SD:/switch". Afterwards, Load into CFW and launch hbmenu. Locate and Run WAIN and select "Dump Game Cartridge (Full with Certificate exfat)".

Once it is done dumping, go ahead and power off your switch and put your SD card back into your Computer. You should now have a .xci that can be used with Hactool.
In order to extract the XCI format into an NCA, and then the NCA into romfs (where everything is stored) you will need XCI Explorer. This will be used to extract the NCA from your XCI. To do this, open up XCI Explorer and find where you stored your dumped .xci file. Opene it with the tool, and go to the partitions tab. In the folder "secure" there should be 4 .nca files. Select the biggest one and extract it.
Now that you have your nca, you will need to extract it to be able to access all of the files. This will be done with Hactool. You will also need this. Download both and then make a folder called "botw" that is located inside of your hactool directory. After that, open up a command prompt thats in the directory hactool. Now, type in,

hactool.exe -k keys.dat --romfsdir="botw\romfs" --exefsdir="botw\exefs" "Filenamehere.nca"

(Note: if your keys is in a .ini file type, you can rename it to a .dat or just change it in the command. Also, make sure you change "filenamehere.nca" to the actual name of your .nca file.)

This will extract the NCA file into the folder you made called "botw". This is where all of the data you will need will be stored.

2.2 Extracting Update Data from a NAND dump

This part is probably the hardest, as it requires you to have a NAND Dump of your switch that contains your update data for Breath of the Wild. This method does NOT work if you have the update data downloaded on your SD Card. Dumping the data off the SD Card is Much harder, though.

To start, you will need to Dump your rawnand.bin. This can be done with the Hekate payload you use to load into CFW. After you obtain the dump, you will need a tool called Hacdiskmount and biskeydump. Hacdiskmount will be used to mount your rawnand.bin and extract the update NCA from your nand. Biskeydump will be used to get your BIS keys as a payload on your Switch. Both are available here.

Once you have downloaded both, use biskeydump.bin as a payload for RCM mode through your choice of payload launching. This will give you all device specific keys needed to mount and edit your rawnand. go ahead and either write these down or scan the QR code to get a picture of all keys.

Now, go into HacdiskMount and open your rawnand.bin file. It will now show all partitions that your nand has. Open up the USER Partition and Fill in the required BIS Key 3 (Crypto and Tweak). Test to make sure you put them in right, and then Save. Now you can mount the Partition by pressing the Mount button after installing the required drivers.

The hard Part

Once you have mounted your USER partition, you will need to navigate to Contents > Registered. This is where every update your NAND contains is located. One of these folders will contain your breath of the wild dump, which should be called 00000049. the Update NCA should be around 950,000KB. go ahead and copy that to a safe location.
Now that you have your Update NCA, you will need to extract it with Hactool. This is a useful .bat that will make the process more straightforward. Just follow what it says and input whatever is needed.

After all of this is finished, you are now ready to begin porting your mods to the Switch! (woohoo!)

3.Converting Wii U Models to Switch

The next step in world domination- I mean porting your mods to the Switch is to convert all models into a compression format called Little Endian. This format is used in both 3DS and Switch, so many tools out there for something like Smash, can actually work with Switch format.

3.1 Using Smash Forge to Convert model.bfres to Switch format

Now that you have your dump, locate your download of sarc_tool and drag whatever model.sbfres you have extracted from your base/update nca over the .exe. This will output a model.bfres that can then be opened in Smash Forge (sbfres can be opened in Forge but bfres is what we need for converting).

In Smash forge, open your SWITCH .bfres and go to the right of the screen. There should be a dropdown box that you can click and will show your .bfres file. Right click on that and select "ConvertWiiU2Switch". It will then open a window where you have to navigate to where your Wii U Mod is located. Make sure you also extract that model.sbfres into a .bfres. Select that file, and then Smash Forge will automagically convert the wii u model to switch. Once that is finished, you will need to Calculate Tan/Bittans for shading to work properly in game.

To do this, expand the dropdown box again until you see "Models" Open that up and you will see each seperate part of your model. Open each one, and you will see each individual mesh there. Right click one, and you will see an option that says "Calculate Tan/Bittan". Simply click that, and then do the same for each mesh in each section of your model. (For example, an armor set would have Armor_Upper, Armor_Lower, and Armor_Head).

After you have finished the Calculations, save the .bfres. You can repack it with yaz0fast. Simply drag the .bfres over the application and it should compress.

This will output a bfres.yaz0 that you can then simply rename to .sbfres.

Well that was certainly easy! Now its time for Texture porting.

3.2 Wii U Textures to Switch Textures

In order to make your models pretty in game, you are going to need to port over your textures (or if you want a freak of nature, with textures all over the place, feel free to skip this step.)

First, grab your mod's textures (in the wii u version, there are sometimes 2 texture files, just use the first one, as the second one contains mip-map data, which should not be needed with the switch version). You'll be needing to use BFRES Extractor after decompressing the .sbfres with sarc_tool in order to extract the .GTX files from it.

After you've done that, go ahead and locate GTX Extract and drag any .gtx files you have ontop of the .exe and it will turn that .gtx into a .dds. If you have a bunch of .gtx files (like over 100) you'll probably want to use this .bat file I made to simplify things. Simply put it into your GTX Extract directory and also put all .gtx files there too. Run the .bat and it should convert them all.

Now that you have the .dds files from the Wii U mod, you can now move on to embedd_extract in order to extract the .bntx file from your Switch tex.bfres. You can Open the embedd_extract and it will open a window for you to locate your tex.bfres.

Once it has been extracted, you can finally use BNTX_Injector to change every single texture inside the bntx, one by one.

After every single texture has been replaced with the new modified one, you can now use a python script called bfres_tex_replacer. Note that this script requires python 3 or higher. Simply click on it and it will open up a window for you to find both the original Switch tex.bfres and the textures.bntx. This will replace the textures inside the bfres with the newly modified ones you placed in the textures.bntx.

After you have a finished Modified Switch tex.bfres, use the same command from earlier with sarc_tool to compress back into a .szs, and then rename to .sbfres.

End

After ALL of that, you should now be ready to use your mods / release your ported mods to the Switch. Check out this tutorial by ExecutiveKrab in order to learn how to load mods onto the Nintendo Switch. Huge thank you to everyone in the Switch modding community who were able to make all of these amazing tools in order to make Breath of the Wild Switch Modding a reality. If you have any questions, feel free to go to the Zelda Modding Discord, where I myself and others will be there to answer any questions you have about Modding Zelda, Switch or Wii U. Thank you for reading my Tutorial, and I hope you have fun with your new Switch Mods!