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This is a password generator for Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel (RKSF). It was designed for and tested against the English Steam release. I do not know if it works with other versions of the game. I believe the password system was changed between releases of the game (for example, I believe the existence of passwords for Iris Stages 2 through 4 is exclusive to the English Steam version). If you are playing a different version of the game, and you try inputting a password for Iris 2-4 and it doesn't work, then your version of the game probably doesn't support passwords for Iris 2 through 4—try generating a password for Iris 1 instead. If you find any other passwords generated by this tool that don't work, please email me at matsu@wildmatsu.xyz.
Going into this project, I knew that the first Rosenkreuzstilette (RKS) used the same passwords as Mega Man 4, and so the Mega Man 4 Password Generator could be used for generating passwords for RKS. Armed with this knowledge, I checked to see if RKSF used the same passwords as any of the classic Mega Man games. My hunch was correct; I discovered that it seemed to use the same passwords as Mega Man 6 (MM6). I am probably not the first person to discover this, but nonetheless, I was unable to find this information by searching the Internet, so I had to figure it out personally.
This password generator was made using the information on the Mega Man Homepage's MM6 Password Crack page. All credit to The Mega Master, Thump Chan, and Jim for finding and compiling that information. The site also has a JavaScript tool for generating MM6 Passwords, but I decided to create my own tool for several reasons. First, the names of the bosses and items are different, making the tool inconvenient to use for RKSF; the user must look up or figure out how the bosses and items correspond between the two games. Second, there are a few differences between the two systems that are more than just cosmetic; these are described in detail below. Third, the creator of the tool requested nobody rehost it. I don't know how he would feel about someone modifying it to support RKSF, but it is a small enough project I just decided to remake it from scratch rather than ask him if I could use his.
The correspondence between the two password systems is, for the most part, straightforward. MM6 begins with a stage select with eight robot masters to choose from, and RKSF begins with a stage select with eight members of RKS. The correspondence goes by their position on the stage select screen. Doris and Blizzard Man are both at the top left corner of the stage select screen; therefore, Doris corresponds to Blizzard Man in the password system. And so on.
MM6 and RKSF both have an optional item; the former has the Energy Balancer, and the latter has the Black Forest Treasure, enabling the use of Strudel in a manner similar to Beat. Therefore, it is no surprise that the Black Forest Treasure corresponds to the Energy Balancer in the password system.
Once the eight robot masters are defeated, MM6 will give you one last password. The rest of the game, consists of Mr. X's Castle and Dr. Wily's Castle, eight stages that must be completed in a linear order and in one sitting. By contrast, in RKSF, after the eight members of RKS are defeated, the game proceeds to a new stage select with four more stages for the members of Schwarzkreuz (SK). What MM6 does have, though, is four optional hidden items in four of the robot master stages; the letters B, E, A, and T. If they are all collected, Mega Man can use Beat as a weapon. RKSF doesn't have this. (Strudel, who is equivalent to Beat, is acquired by finding a single item, as described above.) Therefore, RKSF uses the support for the BEAT letters in the password system to represent the four SK members. Pamela is B, Eifer is E, Schirach is A, and the Refraktia twins are T. This layout is somewhat counterintuitive, as it goes Up, Right, Left, then Down, unlike the logical layout of the RKS stage select screen. Perhaps representing Eifer by the letter E was too cute for the developer to resist.
One effect of this is that there are passwords that are valid in MM6 but not RKSF. For example, in MM6 it is possible to have defeated Tomahawk Man and collected the letter B from him, but not have defeated Blizzard Man. This would correspond in RKS to having defeated Grolla and Pamela but not Doris. This is obviously impossible, as the SK stages do not become available until all members of RKS are defeated. Thus, if you generate such a password in the Mega Man 6 Password Generator, or bring one from MM6, it will be rejected as invalid by RKSF. My password generator does not permit the user to generate such invalid passwords.
There are a few more details to cover. The first is Rosenkreuzstilette Weißsilber (RKSW), the bonus game where you play as Pamela Arwig. RKSW does not use a new password system, and the primary difference between RKSF and RKSW is that Pamela cannot collect the Black Forest Treasure. But that's no problem—simply leave that box unchecked, right? It's not that simple, though. Since you are playing as Pamela, the boss of Pamela's stage has been replaced. You would think that this would have no bearing on the password system, but this is not the case. Once Pamela's stage is cleared, the password system not only marks the stage as cleared, but also marks the Black Forest Treasure as acquired.
This means if you try to use a password for Freudia as Pamela, it will only work half the time. RKSW will reject any password from RKSF where Pamela's Stage is cleared but the Black Forest Treasure is not acquired, or vice versa. The purpose of this seems to be to confuse players who attempt to game the system by reusing passwords from RKSF in RKSW. The password system is meant to be opaque; players are meant to write down passwords the game gives them and use them to pick up where they left off later, and nothing more. To make this convenient for users of this tool, I simply added a radio button that lets you choose whether to generate passwords for RKSF or RKSW. If you pick RKSW, the checkbox for the Black Forest Treasure is hidden, and it is automatically set to the correct value based on whether the user marks Pamela's Stage as cleared or not.
MM6 seems to have an entire duplicate set of passwords, which the Mega Man 6 Password Crack page describes as Scheme 2. I could not tell you what purpose this serves. Perhaps there was planned to be another optional hidden item that was cut, and the support for it was left in the password system. Or perhaps changes were made to the password system between the various releases of MM6 on different platforms and in different regions. Perhaps it is just meant to confuse users of the password system and discourage attempts to crack it. As the second set of passwords is entirely pointless for MM6, the MM6 Password Generator at The Mega Man Homepage simply generates passwords for the Scheme 1. However, RKSF actually makes use of both Schemes 1 and 2, as passwords store whether the player is playing Arcade Mode or Story Mode. Scheme 1 is for Story Mode, and Scheme 2 is for Arcade Mode. This is one of the primary new features of this tool over the MM6 Password Generator.
The MM6 password system has four layouts of dots. The four layouts are: Scheme 1 with the Energy Balancer (EB), Scheme 1 without the EB, Scheme 2 with the EB, and Scheme 2 without the EB. If you defeat a boss, only one dot will move... but get the EB, and the game will switch your password to a different layout, and so every dot will move. The purpose of this seems to be to prevent players from cheating and acquiring the EB by moving a single dot from their current password. In RKSF, this also has the (possibly unintentional) effect of preventing players from switching between Story Mode and Arcade Mode by simply editing their password.
There is one more major difference between the MM6 and RKSF password systems to note, and it is the introduction of passwords for Iris Stages 2 through 4 in the English Steam release. As the MM6 Password Crack page describes, there are four positions Bubble 1 can occupy, and six positions each of the other four bubbles can occupy. This means for each layout, 28 positions are spoken for, leaving eight positions unused. RKSF makes use of two of these unallocated positions in order to offer passwords for Iris Stages 2 through 4. Bubble 2 and Bubble 3 each have one new possible position. I'll call these two new positions the "Iris Positions." If Bubble 2 is in the Iris Position, and Bubble 3 is not, the player will start on Iris 2. If Bubble 3 is in the Iris Position, and Bubble 2 is not, the player will start on Iris 3. If both Bubble 2 and 3 are in their respective Iris Positions, the player will start on Iris 4. All other bubbles are expected to be in the correct positions as well (all members of RKS and SK should be defeated) or the password will be rejected. If neither bubble is in the Iris position, but all members of RKS and SK are defeated, then the player will start on Iris 1 as expected.
Lastly, a few dot positions seem to be different from the values listed on the MM6 Password Crack page. I do not know why this is. It could be that the page is wrong, or that there are differences in the password system between different releases of MM6. It could also be an error or an intentional change on the part of [erka:es] (I cannot fathom why this would be changed intentionally though.) They are listed below.