How to Change Nom Nom Galaxy's 'Fever Time' Music Back to the Old Version

Nom Nom Galaxy has had a somewhat sparse update history over the years and as such I forget exactly which update the change occurred in, but I believe in the 1.05 update released mid-2018 the developers altered the 'Fever Time' music from its frankly randomly hilarious rendition of the Mexican Hat Dance (El Jarabe Tapatío) to something made in-house that is, well… Crap. I did actually inquire on the Steam Community forums for the game about the reasoning behind the change and I was officially told they had received complaints from some YouTube morons (not their words) that they had been getting copyright claims on their videos because of that particular tune.

I won't bother going into the various reasons why this comes across as a bit ridiculous; you can probably come up with plenty yourself. The fact of the matter was I also asked about potentially allowing people to modify the game files to put the funky 'Fever Time' tune back in and I got no response back, so I assumed it was OK to do. My first attempt was to merely use the old files from the previous version of the game in place of the new ones but that didn't work, indicating they'd done more than just change the music to something else. Fast forward well over a year and a half later and I finally got around to making a working modification! Turns out it was easier than I thought it would be too.

I had always been a bit stumped by the file formats the game's assets apparently get stored in, it's some kind of database which I couldn't open with the tools I had at the time, so I couldn't look at their contents. However I came across a tool called QuickBMS recently and using the script for 'Super Cloudbuilt' on that website (which is initially incorrectly labeled as 'Super Cloudbuild') I was able to pull out the music from the two files in the game installation folder (labeled music.pkdwin and music.pkiwin). It's probably worth noting at this point that 'Super Cloudbuilt' is a game by Double 11 (who worked on Nom Nom Galaxy with Q-Games, the main developer).

Upon inspecting the extracted contents of these two files I found they'd merely added a new OGG music track with the crappy tune that replaced the old one, but hadn't actually removed the old tune either, which is why using the old versions of the files didn't work. To remedy this all I did was rename the music files so that one replaced the other, I then used QuickBMS' re-import BATCH file to reinsert them all back into the two databases, moved them to the game installation folder and loaded up the game to test it. Happily I found that everything worked, as well as all the music including (you guessed it) the 'Fever Time' tune which plays the old version once again!

Originally when I wrote this article I didn't provide an archive with these modified files to download, as I didn't have the bandwidth and storage capabilities to host such files, added to which given the files were straight from the game itself I was a bit dubious as to if I might get slapped with a copyright infringement notice if I uploaded them somewhere, but given how old the game is now and how few fucks I have left to give on that front, here is the mod in all its glory (made from the files from the latest version of the game as of June 2023, which is likely to be the last update the game ever gets).

🗜️Original Fever Time Music (323MB) — SHA256 Hash: b5bace929a894c9b6cbbc3e9fc184164213675ca4234544616e2b75828d3120f

Meanwhile if you don't trust me or the download, I will also provide you clear but brief instructions on how to modify them yourself:

1. Download QuickBMS and the 'Super Cloudbuilt' (incorrectly named 'Super Cloudbuild') script from Luigi's website. Extract QuickBMS to a place of your liking.
2. Copy music.pkdwin and music.pkiwin from Nom Nom Galaxy's installation folder (by default they're in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\NomNomGalaxy) and put them wherever you like.
3. Run quickbms.exe, select the 'Super Cloudbuilt' script you downloaded, then choose the copied music.pkdwin file and pick a location to extract the files to (just make a new folder called musicpkdwin so you can differentiate).
4. Repeat step 3 but for music.pkiwin and make sure you choose a different folder to extract the files to (i.e. musicpkiwin). If you get requests in QuickBMS to overwrite existing files you've picked the wrong folder!
5. You now have a bunch of OGG music files in both these folders. In the first folder you extracted to, rename 00000003.ogg to 00000004.ogg and vice versa (basically swapping the names of these files around). Do the same in the other folder you extracted to.
6. Run reimport2.bat (makes sure you use reimport2.bat and not the other one or you'll get errors about checksums and shit). Choose the script file, the music.pkdwin file and the directory where you extracted that file to.
7. Repeat step 6 with music.pkiwin and make sure you choose the correct folder you extracted that file to. This one will take a bit longer to complete.
8. You should now have modified the two files successfully. Go back to Nom Nom Galaxy's installation folder and move or rename the original music.pkdwin & music.pkiwin files and copy over the new versions you just created. Resume hilarity by playing the game.

Provided you didn't get creative with those instructions you should now have the old Mexican Hat Dance tune playing again when a 'Fever Time' event occurs in the game. Of course you should be aware that doing this might cause disastrous issues; the two modified files will be identical in size to the originals as nothing has actually been added or removed from them, but the checksums are now different. As a result the game could become unstable and even crash, but then again it might not make bugger all difference to it. I haven't extensively tested this modification so cannot guarantee it isn't going to cause any problems but it certainly didn't seem to do anything bad in the short time I did test it in.

Having said that if things do go tits up you can always use Steam's file integrity verification scan on the game to check and replace any borked files with their originals. Steam has been known to do this sporadically by itself, so it might be an idea to keep a backup of your modified files somewhere safe in case it ever does. If the game gets another update this also might overwrite these files, so a backup is worth having, though if the game is updated in the future there's a chance they might make changes to the music files, in which case you'll actually have to go over the steps again to recreate your modified files using the new versions.

Other than all that though the only adverse effect I will say might happen when playing with this mod is that the online multiplayer will probably be broken by it, but that largely depends on how the game handles mismatched files between clients. I wasn't able to test it as no one was apparently playing the game online at the time, but the multiplayer is rather finicky and outright unplayable in the eyes of many though due to apparent buggy and poorly optimised netcode, so playing online probably isn't going to be on the cards for most people anyway.

Lastly, as an FYI, something completely unrelated to this modification (in case it happens to you and you thought the mod was to blame) is the fact there's a limitation with the way the game handles lots of sounds playing at the same time; namely that it doesn't handle it. If for instance you have a very large factory with lots of robots, sounds and indeed the music will eventually stop playing. The 'Charles & Charlie' robots are the main culprits because they make a 'clickty-clack' noise as they walk and all they do is walk back and forth all the damn time, so they're constantly making the noise.

The result is when you have 70 of them in a huge factory, the game's built-in simultaneous sound limits easily get reached and all other sounds and music can and do stop playing.

Video Games Nom Nom Galaxy Mod