6 Letter Names - pk-hack/CoilSnake GitHub Wiki

I want to make a name longer than 5 letters, how can I do it?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to EarthBound hacking.

For YEARS, it was considered impossible. Back in the JHack days a patch was made that supposedly expanded names to 6 letters, but it was actually totally broken, and scrubbed off the internet to prevent people from using it. Ever since then, most people would use a workaround where they would create a new letter in the font that is visually a combination of two letters. But finally, in 2025, a properly functioning patch was made that works! You can find it here: 6 Letter Names. This patch has a few limitations, namely problems that come from really long names such as "WWWWWW". Improvements will be made in the future.

As big a breakthrough as this patch is, it only allows 6 letters. If you want an even longer name, you can still use the old method!

Old Method:

Consider, for example, the name Ninten. It's six letters long and can't be entered in EarthBound's naming screen! Well, let's make a brand new character in the font that combines two of the letters. We'll go with the i and n, since i is a small character which means our new character won't be very big. Follow the instructions on the main page about Fonts, and we should end up with:

Now we have a brand new character at the bottom there, in. That's not all we need to do though, cause we still need to add this character to the sheets for the other fonts as well. At the very least you'll need to add it to fonts 3 and 4, so that the name will show up right in inventory windows and in the HP/PP boxes. You only need to add it to the Mr. Saturn font or the Credits font if you intend for the name to be used with them.

There's a few more steps before we can use this custom character. Again, the main Fonts page describes these steps in more detail, but to summarize, you'll need to update the widths.yml files with the width of your new character, and then use the hex code corresponding to it in scripts. The first custom character is [B0], so to use the name Ninten now, you would type N[B0]ten into dont_care_names.yml.

So how long can a name actually be, then?

The maximum length for a character is 16 pixels, so with 5 characters the longest you can make a name is 80 pixels, though in practice this will cause problems with spacing if the last character is the max 16, so you'll need to limit the last one to 15 thus limiting an actual name to 79 pixels. Within this, you can try and squeeze however many letters you want into it! Here's an example of an obnoxiously long name I made as a joke once:

Keep in mind though, that the length of letters in the HP/PP box font (TODO does this apply to the inventory font as well?) is hardcoded to 6 pixels, which will make it harder to cram letters into there. And of course, there will also be issues with the name looking weird in places not designed to hold such a long name (I edited the windows in that screenshot to be larger.)