Engine Limits

This page collects important hard capacities and supported gameplay limits in the original engine and Star Rod’s current compilers. It is not an exhaustive list. A field may be wide enough to store a larger number while normal engine code deliberately clamps or indexes it more narrowly.

Player and Inventory

Limit	Value	Reason
Badges owned	128	PlayerData has 128 acquired-badge slots.
Badges equipped	64	PlayerData has 64 equipped-badge slots.
Star Pieces held	222	The field is one byte, but ordinary inventory and pickup code clamp it to 222.

Maps and Collision

Limit	Value	Reason
Models in a loaded map	256	The engine model list has 256 entries.
Unique collision vertices	1,024	Each triangle stores three 10-bit vertex indices; Star Rod rejects larger tables.
Maps with encounter-defeat history in one area	60	EncounterStatus has defeatFlags[60][12].

NPCs, Items, and Battle Actors

Limit	Value	Reason
Ordinary NPC slots	64	The world NPC list uses MAX_NPCS = 64.
Ordinary NPC ID storage	Signed byte	A live Npc stores its ID as s8; negative values are reserved for special lookups.
World or battle item entities	256	Each item-entity pool has 256 entries.
Enemy actors in one battle	24	Enemy actor IDs run from 0200 through 0217.

An API which accepts an s32 npcID does not enlarge the ID stored by an NPC. It allows the call to accept special negative IDs as well as ordinary list indices.

Visual Effects

Limit	Value	Reason
Loaded code per effect	4 KiB	The engine maps one physical 0x1000-byte page for each loaded effect.
Simultaneously loaded effect types	15	The engine owns 15 effect-code pages and 15 shared-data records.
Live effect instances	96	The engine’s effect-instance pointer table has 96 entries.

The effect virtual addresses are spaced by 0x2000, but that spacing does not provide 8 KiB of writable code. Star Rod rejects a rebuilt effect whose padded code blob is larger than 0x1000 bytes.

Event Scripts and Messages

Limit	Value
Labels in one event script	16
Nested event-script loops	8
Nested switches	8
Local variables	16
Local flags	96
Message-variable buffers	3
Encoded characters in one message-variable buffer	31 plus terminator

The local variable and flag capacities apply to each Evt context. Child and parallel scripts may share or copy state depending on how they were started.