Falinksedin's Miscellaneous Pokemon Undertakings Blog

[falinksedin]

[Obligatory warning of wall-of-text-y posts and excessive yapping]

I'm still working on the living dex from the other blog, but it's not my first foray into time-consuming Pokemon projects, and almost certainly won't be my last. As was probably clear from the living dex blog, I quite like yapping about these projects, so having somewhere to yap about said future ones felt like a good plan. I didn't want to repurpose the living dex one because I can't be bothered going back and changing a bunch of stuff with it, but I also don't want to make a specific new blog each time I take on something new, so I'll leave the dex one as is, and have this one as the general one for any and all other projects interesting enough to talk about going forward.

The living dex is still very much ongoing so I'll post more updates there once I have them (setting myself the slightly ambitious goal of being done by the end of March), but I've been taking a bit of a break from it after Hoenn left me a little exhausted. So, with that in mind, I've got two other things I'm currently looking at.

First (and the less interesting of the two), I'm finishing the game-specific dexes in Home. These are the ones where you get the shiny legendaries and mythicals for completing them. The living dex already ticks off most of the progress for these, but I want to knock them all out for completion's sake (I'm not actually that fussed on the shinies themselves, since I've never cared hugely for free shinies, but they're fun trophies). I already have the Meloetta, since I had a full living dex for Paldea previously. The rest are various stages of close-to-done, ranging from single-digit-numbers to hundreds of mons required. The process of completing these will look largely similar to the living dex but it works as a break because it feels mentally like I'm working on a different task lol. Writeups of them will be very uninteresting since I won't be imposing all the rules I did for the living dex - I purely care about grabbing the mons and getting them into Home, the only stipulation being no trading - but I'll do brief updates whenever I knock one out.

Second, and much more compelling, is shiny hunting. I made my shiny bingo at the start of this year and fully intend to do much better than last year (where I achieved a whopping 0/25), but progress has been nonexistent thus far as I've been preoccupied with the living dex. It feels high time to get something on the board, and I'm currently eyeing either shalpha Falinks, 5IV Timid Ocean Vivillon (who I swapped onto the board in place of Corsola since I last posted this image in the dedicated thread, as I want a shiny Vivi on account of my newfound love of Poke-lepidoptery, and Corsola was the one I was least attached to), or the HGSS starters (which is a hunt I've dipped into on and off previously, and currently sits at ~6000 mons seen).

So that's about it. I'll post updates for each of these below (I already have one very small one at time of writing that I'll just drop in the first post), as well as any other future projects (I already have some plans for stuff in the future, but those are for when I finish what I'm currently working on). Hopefully it's somewhat entertaining and/or helpful to people who want to try similar things themselves.

 

[falinksedin]

First (and only, at time of creating this blog) update is that I got the LGPE Dex Meltan. Quick summary of how these Home shinies work for those unaware:
In addition to the overall Pokedex of 1025 mons, there are several smaller dexes for each of the Switch games (which can only be checked on the mobile version of the app, because Home despises parity. The Switch version, meanwhile has specific dexes for each region, which as far as I can tell aren't available on mobile). These game dexes began with SV, being introduced after the Indigo Disk and rewarding a shiny Meloetta for completing the base Paldea + both DLC dexes in Home, and were subsequently retroactively added for all the other Switch games.

Unlike the main dex, which will tick off a mon as soon as any example of that species enters Home from any game, the game-specific ones require the mons to be from the relevant game. For example, bringing a Gengar you caught in Paldea into Home will tick off the Gengar entry in the SV dex, but not the ones in the LGPE, SwSh, BDSP, or PLA dexes.

So, for the sake of completionism (my brain likes seeing number go up), I want to knock all of these out alongside my main living dex, because it feels silly to have the main Pokedex complete but not the game-specific ones, and the shinies will make a nice little collection to mark what I've done. As mentioned, none of the living dex rules apply here except no trading, so I don't care about the balls I catch things in, or even having a living dex of them - for example, I could move a Quilava into Home, move it back to PLA, evolve it, and then move it to Home again. The name of the game is just ticking off every dex entry.

Meloetta is already done because I had a full living dex for SV already sitting in Home before I even started the main living dex, so I sat down and worked out what needed to be done for each of the remaining games. SwSh would take the most work - about 100 mons each were required for its base game, the Isle of Armor, and the Crown Tundra (though I believe overlap does work here, so if I bring in, say a Hitmontop, that would tick off the entries in both the base Galar dex and the Crown Tundra dex. I'm not 100% on that but I think that's how it works; I'll revisit the theory when I get around to the SwSh section).

Then came BDSP, which was missing about 70 mons (fortunately, the requirements for these are the regional dexes, not the in-game national dexes. So while that still means a ton of mons are required for Galar and Paldea, which don't make the regional/national dex distinction in-game, Sinnoh uses its much more manageable 151-mon regional dex rather than the 493-mon national version. And I already had over half of that - all gen 4 mons - done thanks to the living dex).

PLA was missing a mere 20 or so mons. When I started my second PLA save for a second Enamorus, I moved the entire contents of my pastures through Home to the new save to get a headstart on the dex completion required to progress the game. In doing so, I ticked off almost every mon in the Hisui Pokedex. Some of the remaining ones are a little tricky, but it should be fairly manageable.

Lastly, LGPE was missing just 4 Pokemon - the birds, and Mewtwo. If you've read my living dex blog, you'll know that because I want to get my legendaries for the living dex in Luxury Balls, which don't exist in LGPE, I got these four from FRLG. As such, they're the only ones missing from Home (every regular mon was ticked off when the Kanto chunk of the living dex was moved in).

Naturally, I decided to start with the one that would be least work. The birds were already sitting there in my LGE save - they'd just never been to Home. So that took all of about two minutes. My main save Mewtwo, however, was long gone. As far as I remember, I traded it to someone in BDSP for apriballs (I don't even remember why I wanted them lol). So ironically, it had been through Home, but before these game dexes ever existed. Fortunately, getting another wasn't too much hassle. I'd started a LGP save for version exclusives for the living dex (take a shot every time I say "living dex" in this post), so it was just a case of finishing that. Spamming revives and full restores onto the underlevelled partner Pikachu as I sacked other team members to get through the gyms, then bringing over some level 100s from LGE to stomp the E4 and Champion was easy enough, then I just went to Cerulean Cave and Master Balled Mewtwo. It went into Home, and voila, the first of the gift shinies acquired:

This one was a bit long for how uninteresting this process is, but it was for the sake of doing a lot of explanation. The subsequent ones will probably be quicker lol. Not sure if I'll knock out another of these or some shiny hunting next. I guess I'll just post an update whenever I've got one.

 

[falinksedin]

As mentioned in the OP, I wanted to get my first shiny from this year's bingo card on the board, and I decided to start with what I figured would be a quick and easy one: shalpha Falinks. In case it's not clear from my name and pfp, I like Falinks. I liked the idea of a shiny one to use as a mega in Champions, but a regular one felt too straightfoward - I wasn't super familiar with ZA's shiny hunting but I knew it was very fast - so adding the stipulation that it had to be an alpha felt like a good way to move the level of challenge into the sweet spot for me.

I had nearly a full box of random shinies just from regular play in PLZA, but hadn't actually touched shiny hunting at all, so I had to learn the strats for this hunt. I knew the basics of the game's spawning mechanics: whenever you hit almost any load screen (the biggest ones being fast travelling, or going from night to day or vice versa), ALL Pokemon spawns are reset. Most wild areas are largely fixed spawns, so by repeatedly fast travelling to the wild zone you're already at, you can essentially do very fast soft resets on all of the area's Pokemon at once. I was also aware of doughnut hunting in DLC distortions being very fast, but I couldn't be bothered learning how doughnuts work, so resetting it was.

Wild Zone 16 is the Falinks zone, and it has 6 total at a time. Only 4 are actually visible from the entrance where you spawn in upon fast travelling (specifically at night - for some reason, them rendering in was much more inconsistent during the day), and running in to see the last two slowed me down a lot so I decided to only focus on the frontmost four in the name of reset efficiency (the back two would still be loaded and could be shiny; I just wouldn't see them. If they were shiny, they wouldn't be overwritten on reset because the game preserves shinies specifically, so I could run in and check them periodically). I did this for a couple of hours fairly mindlessly (resetting is not my favourite style of shiny hunting, but it's mindless enough that I'm fine with grinding away it while I watch a show or whatever), before I decided to do some rough maths.

At 20 Pokemon seen per minute (5 resets/min @ 4 Falinks/reset) it would take, on average, just over 17 hours to get the shalpha Falinks I was looking for (1/1024 shiny chance w/ charm * 1/20 alpha chance = 1/20480 shalpha chance; 20480/20 = 1024 minutes, or 17.066... hours). In the grand scheme of shiny hunts, 17 hours is pretty reasonable (and that number also doesn't take into the account the other two Falinks I was still technically resetting, just not actively looking at), but it's not the quick, chill hunt I was looking for to get my first shiny on the board, and with that in mind I was not having enough fun with resets to continue for another 15 hours (and that's assuming I don't get unlucky).

So I turned my attention to doughnuts - surely they can't be that hard to learn?

The answer is no, they, aren't. But they do absolutely suck.

I had assumed doughnuts were a bit like SV's sandwiches, in that the specific berries factored into specific effects. This isn't really the case. Instead, the effects just come from the overall flavour profile of the doughnut (ie. a predominantly sweet doughnut will just give the effects associated with sweetness, regardless of the specific berries used to make it). Therefore, you can basically just mentally block out all but the 5 berries that respectively give the most of each of the 5 flavours, since spamming those gives you the best chance of getting the most/strongest effects.

The chance of getting the effects. Because what I haven't mentioned thus far is that doughnuts are completely RNG. A sweet doughnut will give you the effects associated with sweet, but that's where your control ends. There are more effects associated with sweet than can be in the doughnut, so the specific ones you get are entirely random. Going with the sweet example, if you spam 8 Hyper Tanga berries (the best ones for sweet), you'll typically get any two (I did occasionally get just one) of the following four effects, Alpha Power, Sparkling Power, Humungo Power, and Teensy Power. Sparkling Power, if you roll it, then has a further roll for which of its 19 variants it will be (one for each type, and then an "all types" one. The strength of these powers is also RNG. I got at least one level 3 on most of my doughnuts, but at least from my experience, it's far from guaranteed.

So, here's the strategy for getting the Sparkling Power Fighting/All Types + Alpha Power doughnut you need to get an Alpha Falinks:
Hyper Tanga berries don't just grow on trees, so you can't just start looking for the actual doughnut you need straight away. First, you'll need 8 Hyper Kasib berries. If you're like me and only grinded distortions to get through the story, you probably don't have those either. So go grind random 4-star distortions (the only ones Hyper Kasib Berries appear in) until you have 8.

Hyper Kasib Berries are the best for the sour flavour. While sweetness gives effects relating to wild Pokemon's attributes, sourness affects the item loot tables from the big Poke Ball piñatas. So using the Hyper Kasib Berries, you can make a doughnut to get even more berries. Specifically, one with Item Power: Berries Level 3, which will force all loot to be berries, and Big Haul Power Level 3, which will yield more loot from every piñata. The problem is that this is also RNG. There are like 5 or 6 different types of Item Power, and various other secondary powers instead of Big Haul (assuming you even get an Item power as your primary), and if you don't get level 3, the doughnut is unlikely to even pay for itself. So we have to reset to make sure we get the right one.

So how do you reset?

Well, because PLZA doesn't let you disable autosave, and the game autosaves every time you make a doughnut, you have to use the backup save functionality. The game creates a backup save every time you heal at a Pokemon Center, which can then be loaded - regardless of how much further ahead your auto- or manual save was - from the title screen by pressing Up, B, and X. So by healing at a Pokemon Center right before you fast travel to Hotel Z and make the doughnut, you can exit to the Switch's home screen, close the game, boot it back up, load the backup save from the title screen, fast travel back to Hotel Z, and try again. It's essentially a soft reset with extra steps.

Do this until you specifically get the necessary Berries Lvl. 3 and Big Haul Lvl. 3 doughnut. Once you have that, go into a 4-star distortion and break every piñata you see (make sure to complete the research tasks to get the golden one too). This should give you both enough Hyper Tangas for the next stage, and refund the Hyper Kasibs you spent on the sour doughnut, so you can make another for next time.

Then we repeat what we did for the Hyper Kasib doughnut with the Hyper Tangas. The goal is Fighting/All Types Sparkling Power (obviously, if you're following this as a guide for some reason, you can aim for whatever type you like) and Alpha Power. I wasn't too fussed on levels for this part because the actual shiny hunting is easy enough anyway; it would just be nice to have some boosts, especially to the alpha chance. Even if you hit the 1/5 of getting the two powers you need (2 picks from 4 options, with Humungo and Teensy being mutually exclusive), there's still the further 2/19 for the Sparkling Power's type, making for a total chance of 2/95, or 1/47.5, of getting the exact doughnut you want (assuming they're all weighted equally - I have no clue if this is the case). So expect to reset for a while.

And reset for a while I did. The berries one actually was especially obnoxious - given that the pools for those effects are much smaller, it felt particularly bad that it took the best part of an hour to get. The shiny doughnut itself was about another two hours, but obviously I was more prepared for that one being a bit of a grind. In the end it was a Fighting Sparkling Lvl. 1 and Alpha Power Lvl. 2 doughnut. Not fantastic, but good enough, because I was beyond fed up of resetting.

I guess here is as good a spot as any to interject with my thoughts on this method. I hate it. Resetting for the doughnut itself to get the shiny pretty quickly afterwards is, on paper, not that different from something like radar chaining, where you're kind of just engaging with a different task to work towards a shiny. But radar chaining is A) remotely engaging; B) has an actual measurable sense of progress rather than pure RNG, and; C) still feels like playing Pokemon, since, y'know, you're encountering Pokemon. This is just a particularly complicated soft reset to go and speak to Diantha's nepobaby daughter a bunch of times in the hopes of rolling what I need to even be able to start encountering the creatures that are literally in the name of the game. That's my biggest issue: it doesn't feel like playing Pokemon to me, let alone shiny hunting.

I know it's still pretty fast to get shinies in the distortions without bothering with doughnut powers at all, but I wanted to try this since it's been the "method" everyone's been talking about since the DLC dropped (and I genuinely did figure the boosted alpha chance in particular would be helpful). I suspect the best way to engage with doughnuts is to just spam your Tangas, take what you get, and then pick a target (or targets), or just hop into any relevant distortion, based on the power you roll, rather than picking the target first. So more of a whimsical, see-what-happens method, a bit like how it was fun to just slap on a sandwich in the Union Circle and run around, just seeing what popped up. And that was fun - I imagine playing with doughnuts in this way would be too. But sandwiches are still pretty good for hunting a specific target, which is the key difference. If a method is actively bad and annoying to me for going after a specific shiny (arguably the main way people shiny hunt, at least prior to the open world games), I'm going to hold that against it.

Anyway, doughnut in hand, I reset for a Falinks distortion (yep, there's one more stage of resetting, lol), and headed in. I came out the portal straight into a big group of Falinks, which was ideal (if you don't have your target in sight upon spawning, you can shuffle the Pokemons' locations around by loading a backup save and re-entering the distortion). From there, it was just a case of fast travelling to the portal I was already at until I got my shalpha. I phased twice: a regular Falinks, and also a Hawlucha I came across while running away from aggroed Falinks. But eventually, towards the end of my sandwich, I got my shalpha. Unfortunately, as had been happening relatively often, because the portal was literally in the middle of the Falinks spawn area, it aggroed me instantly, so I didn't get the chance to save. No matter - I deployed my Gallade to KO the others and whittle away at the shalpha's health, then paralysed it with Ampharos before tossing balls.

I was wondering about what ball to catch it in - normally, I just like all my shinies in Premier Balls, but given that this whole hunt is about getting a cool mon to flex on the Champions ladder, maybe a rareball would be cool. As I looked through my options, I lingered on the Level Ball. It's an absolutely perfect match for a regular Falinks, in my opinion, but how well does it match the shiny? As I pondered this important dilemma, I suddenly realised my target was beating me senseless and I was about to black out. I quickly lobbed a ball just to get it out of the overworld for a second - it was still only showing two chevrons of catch likelihood - but to my surprise, the Level Ball I'd been lingering on succeeded, and shalpha Falinks was caught.

I was pleased to have caught my target, but I couldn't escape the nagging feeling that I should have just done a Premier Ball, given that I wasn't happy with the Level Ball and there weren't any other rareballs that felt like a good fit. I knew this voice in the back of my head wasn't going to go away, so, regretfully, I booted PLZA back up and went through it all again. The resets for the sour doughnut to get Hyper Tangas. The resets for the sweet doughnut for the powers I needed. The resets for the Falinks distortion. I did get a lot luckier this time - the doughnuts didn't take anywhere near as many resets, and the one I ended up with was stronger: All Types Sparkling Lvl. 3 and Alpha Power Lvl. 2.

I headed back into Hyperspace and got to resetting. Falinks wasn't literally right in front of the portal this time, but it was a small map (the hills one) and I could see the group of them within about 3 steps in their direction, so it was straightforward enough. Sparkling Power Lvl. 3 also guarantees a shiny, for the associated research task of catching one, so I got a free shiny Mankey the minute I spawned in. He'll probably sit in my boxes indefinitely until I use him as trade fodder. No phases other than that this time, though - I just got the shalpha, straight up (I definitely was lucky both times in that regard; with Alpha Power Lvl. 2, the Alpha chance is only 20%, so 2 out of 3 total shiny Falinks being alphas is really good). I did make a save this time, but I didn't need it, successfully catching the shalpha in a Premier Ball, as Arceus intended.

With all of that said, it's now time to introduce my gigantic son(s?), Thermopylae:

Spoiler: Both of them together

First shiny on the board! It does indeed feel good to already have made more progress than last year lol. It was indeed a pretty straightforward one, even if it ended up being a method I didn't really like, but it made for a good warmup. I'll tackle something chunkier next for sure.

So that's it for my Falinks hunt/doughnut hunting review/first and probably last foray into PLZA shiny hunting. I did indeed run long with this but I'm not going to apologise purely because if I get in the habit of doing that, it'll be literally every post. I'm a yapper; it's a feature, not a bug. Here's the updated bingo card - not much for now, but it's a step, and hopefully progress is steady over the coming months:

Next up: I'm not sure. Probably knocking out the PLA Home dex, but I might do more shiny hunting if I feel like it, or I might just crack on with Unova for the living dex and there won't be any updates here for a while. I'll just see what I'm in the mood for, I guess.

 

[falinksedin]

Decided just to get PLA over with lol.

I had 27 Pokemon left to register in Home, most of which were fairly straightforward (for example, I had Wyrdeer registered, but not Stantler, presumably because I'd only ever bothered catching one and it had evolved before I ever moved it through Home. Stuff like that). So I rounded up those 20 or so (some also were able to come from my shiny boxes), and then the remaining ones could only be found in a mechanic I forgot how much I hated: space time distortions.

Space time distortions work based on a hidden timer, becoming increasingly likely to spawn in the longer you spend in an area, up to 40 minutes, at which point they're guaranteed. Fast travelling, entering anything with a loading screen (eg. caves or buildings), and resting all reset the timer, and it's paused whenever you're in a menu (which includes battling). They also can't spawn during certain weather conditions (this is especially bad, since the actual way the spawning works is that the game performs one single roll at the 5, 10, 15, 25, and 40 minute marks, so if it's thundering, snowstorming, or intensely sunny at that point, the roll is just skipped entirely and you have to wait for the next one). Essentially, the optimal way to get a space time distortion to spawn is to stand in the overworld doing nothing for 40 minutes.

I get that the idea is they spawn in the background while you're playing the game normally, but when you've already caught everything, there isn't really much to do except for stand around. You can't even shiny hunt much, since the way PLA's spawning works means that if the map doesn't generate any shinies when you first enter an area, you can't get more Pokemon without pausing (battling mons to KO them and make space for new ones) or resetting (leaving the area to reset all spawns) the timer. Locking game mechanics behind the better part of an hour's worth of AFKing is one of the game design decisions of all time for sure.

Each area has its own encounter table for distortions, and each encounter table has a sub-table of rare spawns, from which three and only three encounters will be generated for a given distortion. I needed Quilava, Porygon, and Porygon2, who were on the Crimson Mirelands table, Magnemite and Magneton, who were on the Cobalt Coastlands table, Shieldon and Bastiodon, who were on the Coronet Highlands table, and Dewott and Samurott, who were on the Alabaster Icelands table. All of these are part of the rare spawns subtables on their respective tables. So I'd have to do at minimum four distortions.

I went to the Crimson Mirelands and got to waiting. 40 minutes later, a distortion arrived, and I got lucky, getting a Porygon, Cyndaquil, and Quilava as my rare spawns. Had I not got the Quilava, the Cyndaquil would have worked (generally, the rare spawn tables include full lines, so pre-evolutions of something are available). And getting base Porygon meant I could dump it in Home, bring it back out, evolve it, and dump Porygon2 in afterwards.

Next was the Coastlands, and the Magnemite line were literally the only mons on the rare spawn table here. I could still get unlucky though: if I rolled all Magneton and Magnezone, I'd miss out on the Magnemite I needed, since PLA doesn't have breeding. Fortunately (after another 40-minute wait), I got two Magnemite and a Magneton.

Then came the Coronet Highlands. This was the one I was most nervous for. When you beat the game, the Hisui starter lines are each added to one area's distortion rare spawn table (like the Quilava from earlier; prior to the postgame, the Crimson Mirelands only has the Porygon line). The Rowlet line gets added to the Highlands' table, which is already the largest in the game, sporting 4 mons instead of three (both Sinnoh fossil lines). The grass owls take it up to 7, meaning that with just 3 rare spawns, the odds of seeing any given one mon in a single distortion are relatively slim. All I needed from here was Shieldon, but I was more likely than not to need multiple distortions to get it.

The weather in the Highlands was temperamental, and so it took over an hour for a distortion to spawn, since I missed several spawn chances due to snow and sun. Eventually, one came in, and I found the first two rare spawns pretty quickly: Rowlet and Rampardos. I was frantically looking around for the last one to no avail, and after what felt like several minutes, I finally noticed a tiny Shieldon at the edge of the area, and I caught it mere moments before the distortion ended. I guess my bad luck with how long the distortions took to spawn was evened out by the good fortune of getting what I needed first time from all of them. I was able to do the same with the Shieldon as with Porygon, dumping it into Home once, then evolving it and dumping it again to register the full line.

Last up would have been the Alabaster Icelands, but I was so fed up of waiting for distortions I decided it'd just be quicker to start a new save and get one as a starter. It took annoyingly long to get to the point of being able to box it, but eventually I did so, and was able to do the same evolving shenanigans as with Porygon and Shieldon. Ironically, I found out after this while sorting out the boxes between my saves that I had two Oshawott just sitting there, which would have saved me the time of getting one as a starter. Oh well.

With all of that taken care of, the PLA dex was completed in Home, and I received the shiny Enamorus as my trophy. With that, I think I'm finally free - I literally don't need to play PLA ever again. Which I probably won't, because it kinda just annoys me every time I boot it up at this point lmao.

Again, this was kinda long for how uninteresting these are to do, but I wanted to rant about space time distortions. Almost certainly back to living dex stuff now; I just wanted this over and done with so I didn't have PLA hanging over my head. The remaining two of these - BDSP and SwSh - will probably take a bit longer, so I'll probably just chip away at them in the background.

 

[falinksedin]

Unova living dex progress is well underway but I've been breaking it up with more of the Switch stuff and I've already managed to knock out BDSP.

Not a whole lot to say about this one: I just caught the 70 or so mons that weren't introduced in Sinnoh but were part of the regional dex, and as such hadn't been ticked off when I moved the Sinnoh chunk of the living dex into Home. The only remotely interesting one was Feebas, who I couldn't be bothered looking for and evolving the old fashioned way, so I brought in a Milotic from SV, bred it, then send the resulting Feebas back to SV to evolve via Prism Scale lol.

Also, something I found out through doing this is that you can buy the EV-reducing berries for 1BP each in the Battle Tower's shop. This makes for a very easy way to cheese friendship evolutions, since those berries also give friendship; you don't even need to grind the Tower - you can just exchange your Home points for BP.

Anyway, here's the Manaphy:

I'll likely keep at this intermittently to break up the living dex, so not sure what will come next. Still got to do the SwSh one of these, and then I also want to get a PLZA living dex ready for the inevitable shiny Diancie or whatever.

 

[falinksedin]

And that's all of them (for now). Again, not much to say about this. I had completed the in-game base game dex years back for the Shiny Charm, but never bothered with the DLC ones, and a lot of what I caught for even the base dex was long gone without ever having touched Home. Lots of date skipping because of how SwSh encounter tables work. Surf encounters are also weird. It took me a while to work out that they're at fixed spots in the ocean rather than just anywhere like in previous games. Once that clicked, it was easy to just approach and run away from them to effectively reset for low % encounters. In terms of specific mons, Turtonator was only 2% as a hidden encounter at the Lake of Outrage so I thought it'd be annoying but I got it in like 4 tries. And Emolga is only available as a 10% encounter from berry trees in the Forest of Focus, and there's no real way to date skip to reset those. If you don't get it, you just have to come back tomorrow.

But that's that. I'll probably work on getting a PLZA living dex ready next for the inevitable one of these for that game. Stupidly, I cleared my boxes out in-game after completing the dex, so that one will pretty much have to be from scratch. Doubt I'll bother posting about it here. I know what's coming on this blog next, but it'll be a while, because it kinda sits downstream of living dex stuff. Speaking of, I'm hoping to finish Unova for that today as well.

Spoiler: more pictures

 

[falinksedin]

Bit of an update here I guess. In the post about the living dex finishing I said the next thing on here would be more dex completion, and that is the first big thing I have planned (I'm probably just gonna crack on with it and post the details/reasoning as to why once it's done), but I took a brief detour first.

I got to 7,000 resets in the HGSS starter hunt and had a "what am I even doing?" realisation. I wouldn't want a shiny not in a Premier Ball, I'm not particularly interested in a shiny Cyndaquil or Totodile, and if I were to have a shiny Chikky I'd want it to be female. All of that combined meant I didn't see much point in continuing, especially considering how tedious I find doing soft resets on DSes. So, while I do still intend to do more hunting in older games, the HGSS hunt was scrapped. Fortunately, this was right around the time that Mega Sol was revealed as Mega Meganium's ability, and I figured a fun substitution for the HGSS starters would be hunting a female shalpha Chikky to build a team around in Champions.

So, this evening, off the back of finishing the living dex, back to the doughnut mines I went. I actually had quite a lot of berries built up, due to reasons I'll explain briefly at the end of this post, so I was able to make 7 doughnuts per reset, which was pretty efficient. In the end, I settled on an Alpha Power Lvl. 3, Sparkling Power (Grass) Lvl. 2 doughnut. I reset for a distortion, and got to hunting. 1 in 683 for the level 2 shiny odds, 1 in 8 for the odds of being female, and 1 in 2 for the odds of being alpha with level 3 Alpha Power, all multiply together to be just shy of 1 in 11,000, so I was expecting this to take a while.

Never mind. After around an hour or so of hunting, I got my target. By my maths I was at about one third odds.

There were plenty of phases, too:

(About half of these total are alpha. Ignore Feebas and Snorunt lol)

Her name is Spearmint, in reference to Peppermint, my Meganium from my HG nuzlocke that serves as my main save these days.

Spoiler: More pictures

Here she is hanging out with Thermopylae:

And here she is all grown up and mega evolved (she's so huge lmao):

Very much looking forward to building a team with her when Champions comes out.

Spoiler: Updated bingo card

I know this is the second change I've made to the card, but I figure it's my card and I can do what I like with it lol

And one other thing I did, that I guess kinda fits with the previous posts on here, and also explains why I had such a surplus of berries, is that I finished a ZA living dex, ready to transfer into Home. Not much to say about it. Special Scans suck. Getting Rotom took about as long as getting every other mon combined. No shiny reward yet but I figured no reason not to transfer everything in today and I'll just get it if/when they add it.

Next post will be something more interesting for real. I'm going back to the catching grind now, will update when I get everything I need.