Enhancing with HD DATs

What are HD DATs?

Each object and texture in FFXI is held in a DAT file in your FFXI directory (you’ll find them in ROM/{number}). There’s… well, tens of thousands of them–every flower, rock, sword, bunny, and dragon is stored in those DATs. The HD DAT creators are working to update those textures from the old 64x64 resolutions to 1024x1024 and providing for crisp textures for zones, items, enemy models, and even overlay text.

Here’s some of our favorites!

• HD Overhaul is a youtube channel covering many of the zones.
• FFXI HD Mods is an ongoing community thread on FFXIAH where individual items, enemy models, and a few zones have been updated.
• FFXI DATS is an open forum with several community made .dat modifications. These are NOT all HD.

The installation method varies depending on how the DATs are packaged and all packages come with instructions.

Keep in mind that these are community resources and not verified by the Nocturnal Souls team. YMMV with installations and it’s recommended to ALWAYS backup your .dat files before applying modifications (unless you enjoy the Check Files process).