How's your stuff laid out? What files do I need?

Listen, my setup is actually so bad, but I'm not here to loan you a silver bullet. I'm just telling you what's so far worked for me! (Poorly!)

I'm keeping everything* in my universal ~/.wine prefix folder because I believe that wine mostly works better that way. It shouldn't be necessary and it probably usually isn't, but I like ruling out that sort of BS I know I'll have no idea how to actually diagnose. (*Except Dragon Quest XI itself, and the surrounding Steam installation, etc. Those are in a separate prefix managed by CrossOver.)

Consequently I have no idea how you're supposed to sort your stuff on a normal Windows computer, but I just keep everything in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files. THIS INCLUDES... (you'll want to snag all of this for yourself)

• ...a folder called dotnet which is really .NET Core 3.1.426 and I think that's an SDK or something, not the normal .NET runtime. Obviously grab the Windows download. The download I used is in the Binaries column, .x64, not .x86 (or Arm32). You straight up just unzip the folder and rename it to "dotnet" and put it in Program Files. It should contain the program dotnet.exe at the top level (and also file hostfxr.dll in folder host/fxr/3.1.32, or nearby).
• ...a folder called DQXIAsset_0.2.5 which I downloaded from that project's releases page on GitHub. Yay! Inside of this folder I made a symlink called DataTables which points to ../MCT/dq11demo/JackGame/Content/DataTables/. We'll get there in a sec. But I'm also superstitious that Windows programs run better if you run them from the folder they actually exist in, so the symlink is just for command-line convenience.
• ...a folder called MCT, short for "mod customization tools", which I must have got from Nexus Mods. I have a folder here called dq11demo too, but we'll get there when we go over like, actually starting modding. Or you can just read the "Grabbing the Source Files" section of Yggdrasil's tutorial. I mean I'm not your boss, that's what I used. The links at Yggdrasil are mostly dead though and the MCT download I've got here comes with all the important files. FOR POSTERITY it should include:
  • quickbms_4gb_files.exe
  • u4pak_dq11_v2_packer.7z
    (unpack it: u4pak_dq11_v2_packer.exe)
  • unreal_tournament_4_0.4.20a_dq11_v4.bms
  and maybe directions.txt (backup here) which you can probably also follow on your own.
• ...a folder called DQXIWorkingDirectory, which I just made for myself, and yes it's also a sibling to this other stuff in Program Files. This has all of my junk stuff for my actual project, so I have a copy of DQXI S Item ID List here, several notes files, etc. I also keep a couple shell scripts here, update.sh and live-update.sh, which you can reference if you want. But they're like only okay. And a folder called JackGame which houses the actual files for my mod.
• WAIT ALSO: There's one other important file in DQXIWorkingDirectory: u4pak_dq11_v2.py. Blah blah you probably shouldn't google around for this because it's a program like anything else (written in Python), I couldn't find it on the open internet - I got it from Yggdrasil's actual Discord server, it's in their #de-tools channel there, ctrl+f "packing python script (from zip file above)" or such.

You really are gonna want all of that if you're doing data table editing like I am (and if you're not then why are you reading this). Gathering this stuff is your second obstacle. Go go go!

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