EBDB: The EarthBound Database

EBDB: The EarthBound Database is a game info database website for the Super Nintendo game EarthBound. I created the EBDB in 2004.

EBDB index page from 2006, as seen on archive.org.

EBDB was originally hosted on a server that no longer exists. Fortunately, it was captured by the Wayback Machine.

EBDB catalogs enemies, items, shops, and PSI (magical abilities) from the game, and shows their relationships (which shops sell which items, for example). While nowadays this sort of info would be in a game wiki, that was much less of an option in 2004, so I had to write the site myself.

In 2005, I worked with the EarthBound fan site Starmen.Net to make the EBDB part of their site; it’s been hosted there ever since.

Details for the Kraken enemy on EBDB, hosted on Starmen.Net.

EBDB on Starmen.Net.

Technical Details

I wrote EBDB in PHP, using a MySQL database. Data was mostly sourced from my own playing of the game, supplemented by data and tools from the EarthBound ROM editing community—see the Credits page on Starmen.Net.

Each region contains zero or many enemies, shops, and gift boxes. Each gift box is contained in exactly one region and contains zero or one items.Each shop is contained in exactly one region and sells one or many items. Each enemy is contained in one or many regions, drops zero or one items, and performs zero or many actions. Each item is contained in zero or many gift boxes, sold by zero or many shops, and dropped by zero or many enemies. Each action is performed by zero or many enemies, and uses zero or one PSI. Each PSI is used by zero or many actions.

Entity relationship diagram for EBDB.

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