This guide will explain what "Cards" are and how to apply them to your game.

This guide is written with the presumption that you're running a modded game. You can get started with modding using several paths, these are the main paths:

- Installing the BetterRepack SB (Skull and Bones) Patch.
- Installing the HF Patch.
- Applying plugins and mods yourself (Not recommended, there's a lot of dependencies and pitfalls, but if you're feeling adventurous, and don't mind some troubleshooting, go for it!)

This guide will still explain the base concepts, so will be of help to you even if you do not mod your game, just that you may not be able to load cards obtained from third party sites, and you won't be able to load Studio cards at all, as Illusion omitted that from the steam release.

Illusion, and by now several other Japanese adult gaming studios, save usergenerated content, like characters, studio scenes etc, to "card" files.

In short, this is seemingly normal PNG files, which contains data which the game can read after the image data ends. This data contains the values used to create the character or scene, like slider values etc.

This allows for very easy sharing of usergenerated content, both via the built in downloader and externally via third party websites.

It would not be an overstatement to say that this is the bedrock foundation for the communities around these games as of now, allowing sharing and improving upon eachothers works very easily in a streamlined fashion.

Example of card image:

Simply downloading this image, and placing it into your UserData/chara/female folder will be enough for the game to load the depicted character.

HoneySelect 2 supports cards made for AI Shoujo, so they may be added in the same manner. Cards made for Koikatsu does NOT work with HoneySelect 2!

There are several places where you may find character cards, the bellow is the most popular places, but you may be able to find other sources if you're looking around.

The fan discord server[discord.gg]
BepisDB[db.bepis.moe]
Kenzato[kenzato.uk]
Illusion Booru[illusioncards.booru.org]

Yes, that is the wonderfully brilliant idea allowing sharing characters in illusion games, the instructions for loading the character is contained in easily shareable PNG files!

Now then, you got yourself a PNG of a character you like, and want to add it to the game.

Quite simply go to the game folder. If you haven't patched your game with the SB or HF patch, there'll be a folder marked `Open Installation Folder` in the launcher to quickly get you there.
From there you can enter your UserData folder and locate your chara folder and the female folder under that.

If you've patched your game, you will see a button named Female to go straight to the female folder.

From there just paste your PNG image into this folder. If you have a patched game, you may place it in a sub-folder instead to organise the characters better.


Similarly you can install male cards to the male folder.

!!! The Steam version doesn't natively support studio, so you need to install one of the fanpatches to add support for this !!!

Same as Character Cards, Scene cards are simply PNG files, just with other data attached.

In order to install these, just open the game launcher and press `Scene Folder`, and that will take you straight to the scenes folder.

There are two very common ways users experience problems with cards.

HoneySelect 2 only supports cards made in AI Shoujo and HoneySelect 2. Attempts at loading cards meant for HoneySelect (HS1) willl NOT work, nor will loading cards meant for Koikatsu, PlayHome or any of illusions older games.

Some sites resample the card (resize, compress etc), and part of that process is stripping the image of extra data. This will of course cause the data to be lost and the card failing at loading.

Most services do have a 'Open original image' option, like Discord does, so you will need to use that to download if you find that you're missing card data.