Star Rod

Star Rod is a modding tool created by Clover. While Star Rod can be used to create mods on its own, it does not support writing mods in C, and it does not support adding other mods as dependencies. Merlon, however, leverages the Paper Mario decompilation to provide much more powerful modding capabilities.

Comparison with Star Rod

Feature	Star Rod	Merlon
Open source	No	Yes
Mod management	Yes	Yes
Supported base ROM versions	🇺🇸	🇺🇸
Distributable format	`.mod`	`.merlon`
View source code of distributable	No	Yes
Dependency management	No	Yes
C language support	No	Yes (decomp)
`.mpat`/`.bpat` language support	Yes	No
Compile modded ROM	Yes	Yes (`merlon build`)
Easily run modded ROM in emulator	No (manual)	Yes (`merlon run`)
GUI Map editor	Yes	No (use Star Rod)
GUI Sprite editor	Yes	No (use Star Rod)
GUI World editor	Yes	No
GUI Image editor	Yes	No
CLI-GUI feature parity	No	Yes

Using the Star Rod editors with Merlon

Note

The Star Rod world editor and image editor are not compatible with Merlon.

Star Rod’s map, string (message), and sprite editors can be used with Merlon. To do so:

Open Star Rod.
Open the Mod Manager.
Change the Mod Folder to the papermario subdirectory of your initialised Merlon package.
Dump Assets if you haven’t already.
Copy Assets to Mod.
Close and reopen Star Rod.
Open an editor.