Deprecated Darkstar fourms

Basically, I dislike the current content of Final Fantasy and want to write my own ideas for the game. I wanted to add some new NPCS and Monsters as well. I see one server has custom monsters but when I search on a tutorial for custom npcs all I found was "You have to modify a lot of SQL and some dat files for the name to show up"

I have a good understanding of SQL and hex-editing. I just need to be pointed in the right direction please.

To make fully custom monsters, you'd have to modify actual DAT files for the game. The game actually has ID's and whatnot in the DAT files ahead of time, for instance, you can hack the DAT files, to rename monsters as they appear in game per zone dat file... But that would require each user on your server to download those modded dat files and install them. Which means, it wouldn't be compatible with Retail if they were to access that.

I COULD be wrong, but I remember I used to hack DAT files to name things "PLACEHOLDER" so I knew which monsters to kill...