RPG Maker VX for Beginners: Adding Chests and Customizing your Items

For this tutorial, we’ll switch back to the little map we created together back in the first tutorials.

As you are more experienced now, I won’t be explaining in details how to do certain things we’ve already dealt with in the past. If some terms or tasks are confusing, simply quickly read again the previous tutorials or leave some questions in the comment section.

You will find chests in just about in RPG games and they comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Follow this procedure to add a chest:

While in “Event mode”, right click the tile where you would like your chest to appear. Select “Quick Event Creation” and “Treasure Chest”.

Once you’re done, a new window will pop up.

You may click the black and blue checkered box to change the appearance of your chest. Remember to export your art to photoshop if you'd like to use your own chest (see previous tutorial for more information about exporting).

On the right, you will have to select what kind of content you would like the chest to have. Choose between Gold, Item, Weapon or Armor.

For our example, let’s just put an item in the chest. Let’s say a “Magic Key”. Select the “Item” box and click the scroll down arrow to the right to select an item. Can’t find the “Magic Key” anywhere? ^__^’ This is because we haven’t added this specific item to the database yet! Note that you can only put items in chests which are available in the database.

Since the item we’d like to put isn’t there at the moment, just select an item of your choice and click “OK”. Once you’re done, start you game, move your character over to the chest and press “Enter” (the action button).

And that’s it! You’ve managed to add your first chest! Congratulations!

Ok, let’s go ahead and add the “Magic Key” to the database. Access the database and select the tab “Item” like so:

Click on “Change Maximum” (#1) and proceed like you did last time, changing this number to something higher than 20.

Once you’re done, select a blank line like so:

In #2: Type in the name of the item, in this case “Magic Key”.

In #3: Click the black and blue checkered square to choose an icon to represent the item in game. In this case, you’ll want to select something that looks like a key.

In #4: type a description of the item. This description will show up when you the player browse through his inventory (when he’s playing the game).

I typed: “A key that can open any locks.”

In #5:

Scope: item area of influence.

In Scope choose “None”. This particular item won’t be used in battle, it’s more like a key (no pun intended) item.

Occasion:

The screen where the item can be used.

Choose “never” as this item will be used automatically when it is needed. Take some time to read the various possible options as it might give you ideas for some other items in the future.

Speed:

The “speed” affect the initiative of your character. Leave this to “0” as the key can’t be used in battle.

Price:

This is how much the item would be sold for if it was available in a store. Leave this to “0” as this item won’t be available in stores.

Consume:

If you set this option to “yes”, the item will disappear after it has been used. If you set it to “no”, it will remain in your inventory even if it’s used repeatedly. In our case, let’s select “no”.

Animation:

This is the animation that will show up if the item is used in battle. In our case, we’ll leave it to “none” as the key can’t be used in combat.Common Event:

This will set if you’d like to call up a common event after using this item. Common Events and Switches will be explained in a future article.

Once you’re done, your item should more or less look like this:

Click “OK” to leave the database, create a new chest and this time around put the “Magic Key” into it. Launch your game and open the chest: