Can the Cocoon tool bundled with your LR mod releases be used by anyone, to do other stuff with the game? Is there even any kind of documentation? ffxiiicrypt works, but ff13tool seems to break things. Trying load a repacked file kills the game at the Square Enix splash screen. Whatever Cocoon does, it seems to be the only way to change things without breaking the game.

Tried some more things, the game really doesn't like SpecialK or anything else that tries to inject textures. At worst, it crashes. At best, injected textures are ignored. SpecialK did allow me to dump the textures in the first place at least.

Best bet is probably replacing textures directly through the files.

I know replacing textures is possible, the console button GUI mod is a thing. But besides the buttons, most (hell, 99%) of the textures in the game are atrociously bad due to the lower budget and limitations of the PS3/360. The HUD/UI is still 720p-oriented as well.

But years later we have stuff like AI upscaling, and after much head-banging I've managed to take some textures from the game and run them through an AI upscaler, and the results aren't always terrible. With some specific choosing and manual adjustments, the game can at least look a bit better texture-wise, for environments at least. Some character textures also upscale decently well, but would need some more manual adjustments.

Question is, how do I re-insert them into the game? VRAM shouldn't be an issue as the game barely uses any, and if one avoids going overboard I can't imagine stability being affected. I poked around the GUI buttons mod and the tool it uses, but couldn't figure it out.