Do you want to make a Romhack of EarthBound? You're in luck! Since the early 2000s, programming enthusiasts in the community have gathered together to play around with EarthBound's game engine, creating custom music and dialogue, making translations for languages like Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, and inventing whole new stories and cutscenes! With CoilSnake, the hacking tool the community uses and works on together, anyone can experiment with the game like this— Nothing is impossible, the only limiting factors being free time and imagination!

In the early days, the original program created for hacking EarthBound, in YEAR, was called PK Hack. "PK Hack" stuck as the name of our community as well, while the program was replaced by JHack in 2003. Both of these programs had a major flaw, however: since they edited ROMs directly, data would get corrupted, and it would be impossible to fix. In 2012, the program Coilsnake was created, which used a new approach of decompiling all of EarthBound assets and scripts to a "project", which hackers could edit however they wished, and simply recompile when they wanted to try it out. As of 2025, Coilsnake remains the premier hacking program, and gets constant updates!

So with that said, PLEASE do not use the programs called PK Hack or JHack. Only Coilsnake!

If you're ready to hop into the world of PK Hacking, then you'll need the following equipment:

• A copy of the EarthBound ROM. Due to legal issues, we can not provide this, and please don't ask where to find one. The best I can do is direct you to google.com. Please watch out for viruses and malware on shady sites! A proper EarthBound ROM should be only either a .sfc or .smc file, or a .zip containing a .sfc or .smc file. If you wind up with anything else, delete it!
• Coilsnake! Grab the latest release from the GitHub page!
• See the Resources page for more info!

In April of 2025, we ran a week long Jank Jam where we challenged everyone to create a new EarthBound hack from scratch in the span of a week! We had an incredible turnout, with a whopping 9 hacks being released, all featuring a wide variety of themes. Ranging from brand new original stories, to advanced tech demos, to creative new ways to play the base game, everything here is very worth checking out. Play them here!

We have a very active community of folks who love hacking EarthBound just as much as you (hopefully) do! Here's where you can find us:

On the Forum!

TODO include proper link and probably a fancy image too!

You can make a thread on the forum to post updates about what you've been working on, but please keep in mind you need to have more than just ideas for the story you want to tell, or cool character designs! New threads should only be made when a project is being worked on, and with proof of it being worked on.

If you need some help with something you can't figure out, you can do so in the The Help and Troubleshooting Topic!

On Discord!

yeah there's folks who love talking here, about earthbound or general programming or even other random things like "start truck" whatever that may be. you may even meet a few celebrities here

In case it isn't evident, this box is also a big TODO