If you're coming from Monster Hunter: World modding, you might expect that you can simply drop your mods in a folder and call it a day. Unfortunately things are a tiny bit more involved for the time being. The game prioritises the .pak container files and only checks the natives\NSW folder if a referenced file doesn't exist in the .pak files. The most sensible solution to this problem is creating a new patch file with your mods that will take priority over any other .pak.

• Rise Pak Patch Tool

The above tools and files may be updated periodically.

To understand how to take advantage of the games loading system for .pak files, we have to look at the load order.

1. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak (full v1.0.0, demo v1.0.0)
2. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak.patch_000.pak (full v1.0.0, demo v1.0.0)
3. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak.patch_001.pak (full v1.0.0, demo v1.0.0)
4. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak.patch_002.pak (full v1.1.1, demo v1.0.2)
5. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak.patch_003.pak (full v1.1.1, demo v1.0.2)
6. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak.patch_004.pak (full v1.1.2)
7. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak.patch_005.pak (full v2.0.0)
8. rom:/re_chunk_000.pak.patch_006.pak (full v3.0.0)

Example: We use the full game v3.0.0. This means we should build a custom re_chunk_000.pak.patch_006.pak (or try renaming our existing one). It will take priority over any other .pak file.

Said file will be called re_chunk_00x.pak.patch_00y.pak for future compatibility of this tutorial. Please note that this load order and the amount of containers being loaded might change depending on Capcom's update policy.

1. Create a mod folder that contains your modified files. We will name it "examplefolder". You can place this mod folder anywhere on your PC
2. If you are downloading mods by somebody else, make sure to just drag and drop the folder "natives" of said mod into "examplefolder". If you are creating own mods, pay attention to use the matching relative file path for each file based on where you found it in the extracted folder (e.g. C:\...\examplefolder\natives\NSW\systems\gui\SystemDialog.gui.400022)
3. Unpack the zip file for Rise Pak Patch you downloaded above next to your mod folder "examplefolder"
4. Drag and drop your mod folder "examplefolder" on build-pak-patch.bat
5. Rename the resulting re_chunk_00x.pak.patch_00y.pak accordingly, see load order above
6. Done. Now proceed with moving the file to the correct location, see below depending on your use case

Ryujinx is an experimental Nintendo Switch emulator with mod support, making it ideal for comfortably testing and debugging your mods on PC. Follow the official guide here and then move the previously built re_chunk_00x.pak.patch_00y.pak file in the newly created romfs directory.

Click on the thumbnail below to watch a video of the process of building a custom .pak file and placing it appropriately for Ryujinx.

Yuzu is another experimental Nintendo Switch emulator with mod support. Follow the official guide here and then move the previously built re_chunk_00x.pak.patch_00y.pak file in the newly created romfs directory.

Atmosphère custom firmware for Nintendo Switch supports LayeredFS and therefore allows you to use game mods as well. Move the previously built re_chunk_00x.pak.patch_00y.pak file to the directory atmosphere\contents\<title-id>\romfs on your SD card. The title ID for the Monster Hunter Rise Demo is 010093A01305C000, Monster Hunter Rise is 0100B04011742000 (US) / 0100559011740000 (Asia). Change romfs to exefs if you want to use ExeFS patches.

As alluded to in the introduction, there are other ways to use custom files in Monster Hunter Rise which come with their individual drawbacks.

1. Stubbing .pak files entirely — You could stub the .pak container files and move the extracted files to the respective romfs directory in order to have a solution similar to Monster Hunter: World. The issue with this approach is that by nature of how .pak containers work, there will be "unknown" files that cannot be properly extracted. This might cause crashes or other issues.
2. Stubbing single entries in .pak files — You could also stub single entries for files you want to mod. Given that you will need to potentially maintain multiple selectively stubbed .pak files and the accompanying directory, this approach requires quite a bit of management and is prone to errors. Furthermore, you will need to restore stubbed entries if you decide to remove a modded file etc.
3. Injecting files in .pak container — This has the same drawbacks as point 2.

In summary, the patch approach explained above is currently preferable until perhaps one day there is a mod that prioritises loading the natives\NSW directory over .pak files.