The Summoner PS2 Randomizer Project

What is a Summoner randomizer

A randomizer shuffles a game's contents so that no two playthroughs are the same. In most randomizers that means shuffling which items appear where, so you have to search the whole game for the thing you need instead of walking a memorised route. This project aims to go further:

• Entrance and door randomization — doors lead somewhere other than where they used to, so the map itself becomes a puzzle.
• Item and shop randomization — what you find, and what it costs.
• Encounter randomization — which creatures show up in which regions.
• Character and model swaps — who stands where, and what they look like.
• A one-hour mode — a curated, solver-validated route for racing.

Every seed has to be beatable. That is the hard part, and it is why a reachability solver is a prerequisite rather than a luxury.

Why Summoner, and why nobody has done this

Summoner launched alongside the PlayStation 2 itself in October 2000 — one of the few RPGs on the shelf that day, built by Volition before they became the Saints Row studio. It sold modestly, aged strangely, and got almost no modding attention in the twenty-five years since. The entire community toolset for the PS2 version amounts to a widescreen patch.

Which is exactly why it is worth doing. There is no prior art to lean on, and no documentation to read. Everything below was worked out from the disc.

What we've already cracked

Work started September 2026. Both discs are far more open than expected: the archives store their own filenames in plain text, and the game's data layer turned out not to be binary at all.

#Doors  — from a Summoner level script, verbatim

$Door: "cry_tombcen"
+Open sound: "Doors\Open_Stone_verylarge.wav" 20.0 1.0 1.0
+Close sound: "Doors\Close_stone_verylarge.wav" 20.0 1.0 1.0
+Locked: 0.50

// progression gates are expressed as level + flag pairs
+Trigger: "khosanistrng" "ready_for_end"
+Trigger: "TempleInt"    "unhide_madog"

What can be randomized so far

How the Summoner 2 disc differs

Summoner 2 (SLUS20448, 2002) is a different animal. Its assets live under /S2ASSETS/ instead of the disc root, its cutscenes are split into individual archives organised by region, and its boot executable SLUS_204.48 is only 1.8 MB — against 17.5 MB for Summoner 1.

Critically, it uses a newer VPP revision: same magic number, different header, and a 28-byte table-of-contents record where version 1 used 64 bytes. The old reader returns zero entries for these files. Decoding that revision is the current blocker for Summoner 2.

Its level scripts are readable already, though — arena, city-of-glass, cm1-wheel through cm7-lair, coral-grotto, endgame, galdyr-pass, halassar, highwater, indubal, khargathalan, mud-god-boss.

The one-hour mode

A normal Summoner run is a twenty-hour proposition. We want a mode a competent player can finish in about sixty minutes — roughly a 20× compression. Shuffling alone cannot do that, so the plan is a curated critical-path slice:

• Pre-satisfy the flag chain. The game gates progress with flags on doors and triggers. Anything that gates only optional content gets granted up front. This is where the hours actually come from.
• Critical-path doors only. Randomization is confined to levels on the solved route, so a seed can never strand you in a dead-end area.
• Combat floor removed — fights become traversal, not time sinks.
• Cutscenes bypassed — a large fraction of a casual run.
• Encounter rates cut in the overworld regions.
• Every seed validated against a reachability solver before it ships. An unbeatable seed is a bug, not a challenge.

How to play a Summoner randomizer

1. Own a copy of the game. You need to dump your own disc — we do not supply one. See the note below, and it is not a formality.
2. Run the randomizer against your disc image. It produces a new, size-preserving image with the shuffled data written in.
3. Play it in PCSX2 on a PC, or on real hardware via softmod such as FreeMcBoot with OPL, or on a modded console.
4. Share the seed. Identical seed plus identical settings equals identical randomization, which is what makes racing possible.

The project is in active development, so none of this is a release yet.

Roadmap

• DONE
  VPP format v1 decoded, full asset inventory of Summoner 1, working ISO pipeline, both discs dumped and hash-verified.
• NOW
  Decode .p3d level geometry to find door and teleport records — the blocker for entrance randomization on both games. In parallel, decode the VPP version 2 revision for Summoner 2.
• NEXT
  Build the flag graph and reachability solver so the critical path is computed, not guessed.
• THEN
  v0.1 “Chaos” — items, shops, audio, cutscene order. No lock risk.
• THEN
  v0.2 “Doors” — real entrance randomization within an act, checker-gated.
• LATER
  v0.3 the one-hour mode, then a raceable v1.0 with spoiler logs.

Summoner randomizer FAQ