Anamnesis changes FFXIV characters on your own client for screenshots

What it changes, and the boundary it stays inside

The README is careful about the scope, and the careful part is worth quoting. Anamnesis is a standalone tool that is used to modify certain client-side values and allow the user a greater degree of flexibility for making creative and interesting screenshots. In short, it allows its users to temporarily change their race, gender, looks, equipment and so on in game without actually making any changes visible to other players. The tool also allows users to create their own poses. That last clause is the design constraint. The values it edits are the ones the game keeps locally for rendering your own character, and the edits are not broadcast, so the only thing that changes is what you see. The tool is for producing images, not for changing a character in the shared world. The audience is therefore Final Fantasy XIV players who make screenshots and pose mods. That is a large and active community, and it is the reason the tool exists in this particular form. The lineage explains the name and the design. Anamnesis is the successor to Concept Matrix, which the README links, and its acknowledgements thank the people who worked on all iterations of Concept Matrix and SSTool, calling them the foundation Anamnesis is built on. It also credits PerchBird for research into game memory structure and Havok skeletons in game, which is the kind of groundwork that does not get written down anywhere else.

A Windows-only .NET desktop application

The prerequisites section lists exactly two things, and both are hard limits. The first is the .NET 9.0 Desktop Runtime x64 installed on the computer. The README says Anamnesis will only work with 64-bit versions of Windows, and that support will not be added for 32-bit versions, citing the fact that Final Fantasy XIV no longer supports 32-bit operating systems as of Patch 6.15. The second is Windows 10 or 11. The README is explicit that there are no plans to add support for older versions of Windows that Microsoft is not in turn supporting, or for other operating systems. That is a narrow platform target and it is deliberate. The tool talks to a 64-bit process running a DirectX game, so 64-bit Windows with the matching desktop runtime is the only configuration the maintainers support. The project metadata is consistent with that. The primary language is C#, and the repository root has an Anamnesis.sln solution, a global.json file that pins the SDK version for the build, and a RemoteController directory with a RemoteController.SourceGenerators sibling, which is the shape of a modern .NET application that uses source generators to produce its communication types. The tool runs against a live game session, so the runtime has to be present before anything else, and the user logs into the game first.

Installation is downloading and extracting

There is no installer and no package manager entry. The installation instruction is to download the latest build from the releases page, then simply extract it to your location of choice, log in to the game, and run the tool. That is a portable application, and it is the right call for something that has to run alongside a game client. There is nothing to register, nothing to put on the PATH and nothing to clean up later. The releases page is the source of truth, and the download button in the README header links to the latest release directly. For usage, the README points to the official wiki over at xivmodding.com, describing it as largely outdated, and to the GitHub hosted wiki of the repository itself. If the answer is not in either of those, the project asks you to join them on Discord and ask there. The gap between the two wikis is a real annoyance for anyone planning a workflow around the tool, so the Discord channel is where the current practice lives. That is a fair summary of how a community maintained tool documents itself. The art assets are also in the repository, under an ArtSource directory, with the download button image used in the README header taken from there.

Pose files and shared directories: how poses actually travel

The repository contains pose files at the root level, and they are the most interesting artefact to look at if you want to understand how the community shares work. GroundSit_Default.pose and GroundSit_OnKnees.pose sit next to the solution file. A pose is the joint configuration that the tool applies to the character, and having a small set of them committed at the root shows how the format is intended to be shared and reused. The tool also has a RemoteController directory and a matching source generator project, which is how the pieces that talk to the game are kept in step with the types they exchange. The .gitmodules file and an UpdateSubmodules.bat script sit at the root, so the project carries external dependencies as submodules with a Windows script to refresh them. Other root files give a sense of the workflow. Scripts/ and UpdateExtractor/ suggest tooling for pulling content out of game updates, and galleryLinks.txt is a plain list of links, which in this community is a pointer to where poses and mods are posted. There is also a Lib/ directory and an Anamnesis/ directory for the application itself, with ArtSource/ for the assets, so the tree separates the tool from its supporting material rather than mixing them.

Releases are frequent, and forks are explicitly out of scope

The release history shows a project that ships often. The recent tags are v7.57.0.1 on 2026-10-18, v7.57.0.0 on 2026-10-15 and v7.56.0.2 on 2026-10-01. The last push was on 2026-10-20, shortly after the newest tag, and the repository is not archived. The version scheme is worth noting because it explains the shape of a release. A three part version with a fourth component in the patch position, where 7.57.0.0 and 7.57.0.1 differ only in the last part, is the pattern of a build number for a game version. The tool has to be re-checked against each new patch of the game, because the memory layout it depends on can move. The maintenance credits reflect a small group. ergoxiv is listed for features, quality of life, updates and maintenance, and chirpxiv for updates and maintenance. The original authors are credited separately as developers who have since moved on to different projects, with Yuki for main development, Luminiari for project management, code contributions and wiki curating, Peebs-miqo for wiki and tip curating, and AsgardXIV for animation work. The README also carries an explicit warning about forks. The project says it actively encourages people to contribute to the project with their forks to improve the tool overall, while stating that builds done via forks are not supported, and that if you received a release of the tool from any repository other than imchillin/Anamnesis you should raise the issue with the person who packaged the build, since it will inevitably contain code the maintainers are unfamiliar with. That is a sensible security stance for a tool that runs alongside a game client.

Localisation through Crowdin, and a licence detail to check

Translation is handled through Crowdin, with a badge pointing at the Crowdin project and a list of translators credited in the README. Maxunit for German, Arianishka for French, wozaiha and ShadyWhite for Chinese, ajiiisai for Spanish, ModernTiger for Korean, RageShoTT for Italian and Murakumo-JP for Russian. That list is a useful signal about who the tool is for. The audience is international, and the maintainers treat translation as a first class part of the project rather than an afterthought. The licence is stated in the README as the MIT License, pointing at the LICENSE file for details. The repository's own licence field, however, records Other, with the note that it is a custom licence GitHub cannot classify and that the LICENSE file holds the terms. That mismatch is the kind of thing to resolve by reading the LICENSE file before you redistribute a build, because the README text and the repository metadata disagree. For an individual player, MIT terms mean you can run the tool, and the practical constraints are the ones in the prerequisites: the .NET runtime, 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, and the game itself. The project is hosted under the xivtools topic, which is the tag the FFXIV modding community uses for this family of tools, and its documentation lives on xivmodding.com rather than on a site of its own.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Anamnesis if you make Final Fantasy XIV screenshots or pose mods and you want to change your character's appearance and pose locally, on 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 with the .NET 9 desktop runtime installed. Do not adopt it expecting a server side effect, because the changes are client-side and are not visible to other players. Before you redistribute a build, read the LICENSE file rather than the README summary, since the README says MIT while the repository licence field records a custom licence, and only take builds from the imchillin/Anamnesis repository, because the maintainers do not support forked builds.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. imchillin/Anamnesis on GitHub
2. Issues
3. README
4. Releases