Note: when you reference a string in your custom TLK from within the toolset you can just activate the "custom tlk" option and use numbers starting at 1: 1, 2, 3, etc. But when you reference a string in your custom tlk from within a 2DA file, you need to write the number with the correct offset, which is most easily done in hexadecimal: 0x80000001, 0x80000002, 0x80000003, ..., 0x80000009, 0x8000000A, 0x8000000B, 0x8000000C, 0x8000000D, 0x8000000E, 0x8000000F, 0x80000010, etc.