how do cw cheats work? Can't figure it out

[LunaMoo]

User memory starts at 0x08800000, you really shouldn't be using scratchpad(0x00010000) for cheats, if you need a code cave just use 0x08800000 to 0x08804000, that's common practice when making cheats, you can also find lots of empty ram in game, or even double the ram by MEMSIZE flag in game param.sfo, through none of that is really needed for cheats, even fan translation projects/mods rarely would have to use it.

Either way cwcheat can't patch anything outside of user memory and it's 0 starts from 0x08800000, so if you use 0x00010000 as an address in cwcheat as you did above and want to jump to it, it will actually be "j 0x08810000"(0x0A204000).

And yeah 0's are important where the 32 bit has to store more values, ie the number on the start 0x2 is indicating code type(32 bit write, where for example 0x1 would be 16 bit write etc.) and is not part of the address, through in case of simple write cheats you could ommit 0's for value field, it's still a good practice to keep them and looks cleaner as well.