Emerald hack: Pokémon Inclement Emerald: A Decomp Difficulty Hack [Version 1.13]

[Enrieszche]

Is it not compatible with PizzaBoy Pro for Android? When I try to play it crashes and says I should try turning off cheat codes, when I have none on.

EDIT: Also crashing on MyBoy. I'm using version 1.5 and I'm sure I patched the correct ROM.

 

[Garchomp_Master445]

Congrats! The USUM one is quite a bit harder than the XY one, but the general style of both is similar to this hack.

Thank you, Overall the game is incredible. The QOL Changes and the Modern Pokemon game features and everything is amazing, even if the Difficulty was a bit too much for me, i am used to just casual pokemon game playthroughs.

But now i got two more difficult Journeys i need to take. One in Kalos and One in Alola. But i still might return to Inclement Emerald when the Battle frontier is finished and when gen 8 and more Pokemon are added to try and obtain Every Pokemon and complete the Inclement Emerald Pokedex.

 

[floodryan123]

Is there a discord for this game?

 

[antimatter]

I loved your previous hacks, so it comes as no surprise that I'm really enjoying this one, even though Hoenn is probably my least-favorite region. However, there are two QoL changes I'd love to see:

- Change the Thief/Covet mechanics so that if a Pokemon is holding an item, the Thiefed item just goes into the bag (or maybe even if the Pokemon isn't holding an item?) Once money farming was added, I spent 20 minutes trying to steal Nuggets from Meowth and wondering why I was so unlucky before I realized that my Murkrow was holding an Eviolite.

- Press R to run from wild Pokemon battles. Before this was released, I'd been playing a lot of Radical Red, and this hotkey is such a small thing that makes such a huge difference once it becomes muscle memory.

Even without those changes, this is still an extremely well-done hack, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves going forward.

 

[yakyu]

After a lot of grinding, here is my Pokedex with all 752 Pokemon currently obtainable in Inclement Emerald:

.

I got 751 caught and 773 seen after beating the gym leaders with their legends, now I'm wondering which pokémon have I missed lol
Guess you traded Cosmog to have both final stages?

 

[SevenChurches]

Eh, I've been contemplating whether or not to vent now or until I finished the hack, but I feel like venting now. I'll list some gripes and suggestions, react however you want to. Keep in mind that I'm approaching this hack after over 75 playthroughs of Radical Red, the standard I have for QoL is quite high.

1. I think there should be a level cap all throughout the game. This was a major issue with the early versions of Unbound. For me, especially using some of the same Pokemon (to avoid tedious grinding), my levels would go up steadily. Since there's level scaling, it's easy for me to go well beyond what is casual. Currently I'm trying to make a team overhaul for the Matt battle on Mt. Pyre, and my highest level Pokemon is 84. That means I have to get everyone to 84 or do a completely overhaul where I bench those level 80+ mons and stop at, say, 60. There are pros and cons to that, but either way, it will involve A LOT of grinding.

2. The grind in this hack reminds me of early Radical Red. QoL stuff that looks great ends up still being tedious, but then RR makes further strides and grinding is almost a non-factor. So nature changing, IV perfection, the EV training, all that looks great, but on execution, there is still some things that need improvement. The nature changer, the chef, that's a cute gimmick, but compare that to RR where you can change your nature in every Pokemon Center. The convenience, the low cost compared to 10 Oran Berries, which costs the player time to mess with the clock or farm Orans from Gulpin (most of which have Sticky Hold). Or what I've done, get a bunch of Synchronize Ralts. Back to the chef, if I want to change a nature, I have to go through two distinct settings, compared to RR where it's much quicker. Excuse the RR comparisons, they're kind of inescapable for me.

3. One Lucky Egg? Really? At least have Audinos in different spots. I know the NPC that gives you an Audino has some funny dialogue about how the mon's basically an Exp punching bag. As if that's a bad thing, especially in a hack like this. I haven't gone through this thread, so perhaps you addressed some of these suggestions/criticisms. If so, sorry about the repetition. I've used the Training Band by the way.

4. This is minor in comparison, but could you tone down the double battles with random trainers? Some of them are harder than the Gym Leaders. I lost 4 times in Fortree Gym, none of those losses were to Winona. On the other hand, difficulty is easy to tackle as a player, just get a good team per obstacle. I could've gotten a better team to tackle the Flying-types in that gym. However, that would involve grinding, and I already did too much at this point. Perhaps my gripes are amplified by an awful sleep schedule, things like this make me take more breaks, bore me more, so maybe bad timing on my end to play this hack. Still, I've been sitting on this for a few weeks and I didn't want to wait more.

Other than that, I love the hack, I just want the grind to be less tedious.

 

[Buffel Saft]

Ah , so basically i'm just unlucky then. Also , i noticed that sometimes , in Battle Tent , random message appeared , not game-breaking though.
It's basically just like "1....2....Poof !" , something like that.

Yeah it's all just luck! That message is the trainer slide in system from the battle engine, the default settings for it add that string to some random trainers. Didn't realise it affected battle facility trainers, I'll clear it out.

Are the starters shiny locked?

Nothing's shiny locked! That nonsense started in gen 5 and wasn't added to this, I've always though that was a bad addition on Game Freak's part.

After a lot of grinding, here is my Pokedex with all 752 Pokemon currently obtainable in Inclement Emerald:

And here is a small list of minor bugs that I encountered along the way:

• Breeding Vivillon hatches another Vivillon instead of Scatterbug.
• Gourgeist evolves using a Dusk Stone instead of friendship like in the documentation.
• Meltan evolves into Melmetal when leveling up holding Metal Coat, which isn't in the documentation.

I've had an excellent experience with this hack and look forward to future projects and events, although I have to figure out what to do about my box space for this save in the future. Out of curiosity, how do you plan on adding more Pokemon to the game, especially legendaries and mythicals? Will they be placed in preexisting map areas, new map areas, and/or through events (like the ticket items in the base game)? I know ORAS adds some new specific encounters, but I haven't played it myself.

If it wasn't post-game content, then the TV Pokemon swarm news could be useful for adding new Pokemon. I also know that ORAS adds in a mechanic for mirage locations as well, but I imagine that could be more difficult to implement than what's worthwhile.

Oh wow, well done!
Thanks, I'll fix those bugs, should all be easy fixes. Have you got any box space left at all? I know the boxes won't hold the entire dex, but do they at least hold all the fully evolved mons? You might have to release some of the ones that are easily found in the wild.
More legendaries and mythicals will ideally get their own new maps, I'll just add them in as I come up with events for them. I've already assigned flags for them so there's no risk of them not working with existing saves. Next lot will be some combination of the lake trio, the beasts, Celebi and/or Mewtwo. I'll probably repurpose swarms for the Ultra Beasts as that's basically how they worked in Sun and Moon, they didn't have proper overworld encounters.

Is it not compatible with PizzaBoy Pro for Android? When I try to play it crashes and says I should try turning off cheat codes, when I have none on.

EDIT: Also crashing on MyBoy. I'm using version 1.5 and I'm sure I patched the correct ROM.

I don't know honestly, I can't test it on every emulator out there! I still don't know why some people are having these issues sadly. I'll try a different patch format next version and see if that makes any difference, though I wouldn't expect it to.

Thank you, Overall the game is incredible. The QOL Changes and the Modern Pokemon game features and everything is amazing, even if the Difficulty was a bit too much for me, i am used to just casual pokemon game playthroughs.

But now i got two more difficult Journeys i need to take. One in Kalos and One in Alola. But i still might return to Inclement Emerald when the Battle frontier is finished and when gen 8 and more Pokemon are added to try and obtain Every Pokemon and complete the Inclement Emerald Pokedex.

Thanks! Difficulty hacks definitely get easier as you play more of them; I know I had a hard time with Blaze Black back when I first played it. Hope you enjoy my other hacks too!

Is there a discord for this game?

Link's at the top of the first post, I guess I need to change the text colour.

I loved your previous hacks, so it comes as no surprise that I'm really enjoying this one, even though Hoenn is probably my least-favorite region. However, there are two QoL changes I'd love to see:

- Change the Thief/Covet mechanics so that if a Pokemon is holding an item, the Thiefed item just goes into the bag (or maybe even if the Pokemon isn't holding an item?) Once money farming was added, I spent 20 minutes trying to steal Nuggets from Meowth and wondering why I was so unlucky before I realized that my Murkrow was holding an Eviolite.

- Press R to run from wild Pokemon battles. Before this was released, I'd been playing a lot of Radical Red, and this hotkey is such a small thing that makes such a huge difference once it becomes muscle memory.

Even without those changes, this is still an extremely well-done hack, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves going forward.

Thanks! I've actually been thinking about adding an instant run key for wild battles, didn't know RR had already done it! The Thief change sounds really good too, shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Eh, I've been contemplating whether or not to vent now or until I finished the hack, but I feel like venting now. I'll list some gripes and suggestions, react however you want to. Keep in mind that I'm approaching this hack after over 75 playthroughs of Radical Red, the standard I have for QoL is quite high.
- snip for brevity -

I don't mind criticism, though I would like to point out that some things that work in RR aren't necessarily going to work in this - Hoenn is not Kanto and is considerably less linear (assuming Soup fixed up the roadblocks? I still haven't played Radical Red, it's on the todo list).
1. A few people have suggested this (mostly people who liked it in RR funnily enough). I'm considering it as an option, but it will absolutely not be forced. Pasting this from an earlier post: a level cap doesn't work well in an open region.
If I add a cap to the open parts, what do I balance that around? Battling all the trainers? What if people don't want to do that? They'll never hit the cap and it may as well not even be there, so it doesn't help. If I pick some arbitrary cap, then people are punished for exploring and battling all the trainers, as they lose out on a lot of exp. If you hit the cap partway through a route but still want to go through it, any trainers you battle along the way suddenly give no experience for no reason. On top of that, the cap is largely meaningless past a certain point as most mons stop learning new moves and are fully evolved, so the cap isn't actually limiting the player in any meaningful way - the player's team at 70 will likely be the same at 80, just with bigger numbers. It'd be there solely to fix the problem you've run into, which is not something everyone will encounter. Replacing an entire team to deal with one fight is always going to be a massive grind unless I just hand you a bunch of perfect EV trained mons for free. This is not Radical Red and I don't intend for fights to be hard enough for that to be necessary.

2. The nature changer's not there to eliminate the nature grind, it's there as an alternative. Don't want to waste time getting a bunch of synchronize mons and finding good natures that way? That's fine, plant some berries and change them later. If you feel you absolutely need that perfect nature right now and haven't grown oran berries, best get some synchronizers (or mess with the clock). Important trainers aren't fully EV trained until Meteor Falls, so there's plenty of time to do either, and they're really not needed before that point. I much prefer the stat up/stat down menus over scrolling through a giant list of natures, as it makes even the useless natures available in case there's some bizarre strategy that requires one of them.
That said, Oran Berries should definitely be held by more Pokemon and more commonly than Gulpin; IIRC the monkeys had a 50% chance of holding them in gen 5 and there's no reason that can't be 100% in this.

3. There are three Lucky Eggs, though one is post game so that hardly counts, and the other is maybe a bit too late in the game. Audino's not in the wild yet as I wanted to find a nice way to have it appear on every route, without cluttering up the encounter tables - something like BW's rustling grass system but without the RNG and mindless running back and forth. I'm well aware that some people just want to grind massive amounts of exp/train many Pokémon and I'm working on a solution!

4. Honestly I think the problem here is that Winona is far too easy, especially if the gym trainers with gimmick sets are harder than she is!

Anyway I'm glad you're enjoying it other than that, I appreciate the feedback!

 

[MaskofKeter]

I got 751 caught and 773 seen after beating the gym leaders with their legends, now I'm wondering which pokémon have I missed lol
Guess you traded Cosmog to have both final stages?

I haven't beaten the Elite Four with their legendaries yet so I haven't seen all the Pokemon that I can. I actually had to trade for both Cosmogs since I beat the Elite Four with a level 100 team and got stuck with a level 100 Cosmog. Hope you can find that last one!

Oh wow, well done!
Thanks, I'll fix those bugs, should all be easy fixes. Have you got any box space left at all? I know the boxes won't hold the entire dex, but do they at least hold all the fully evolved mons? You might have to release some of the ones that are easily found in the wild.
More legendaries and mythicals will ideally get their own new maps, I'll just add them in as I come up with events for them. I've already assigned flags for them so there's no risk of them not working with existing saves. Next lot will be some combination of the lake trio, the beasts, Celebi and/or Mewtwo. I'll probably repurpose swarms for the Ultra Beasts as that's basically how they worked in Sun and Moon, they didn't have proper overworld encounters.

I kept one of each fully evolved Pokemon and have 42 box spaces left. Since most of the remaining Pokemon are legendaries, there probably isn't enough room to have a fully-evolved Dex up to Gen 7.

 

[Buffel Saft]

quote

Just quoting you here as I'm not sure if editing my previous post gives you a reply notification - scroll up a bit for my actual reply!

I haven't beaten the Elite Four with their legendaries yet so I haven't seen all the Pokemon that I can. I actually had to trade for both Cosmogs since I beat the Elite Four with a level 100 team and got stuck with a level 100 Cosmog. Hope you can find that last one!

I kept one of each fully evolved Pokemon and have 42 box spaces left. Since most of the remaining Pokemon are legendaries, there probably isn't enough room to have a fully-evolved Dex up to Gen 7.

That's a bit of a shame. I can clear some junk out of the Pokemon data to make more space, but it might come down to contests vs box space - removing contest stats or simplifying them would free up some space for more Pokemon. Either way it'll break existing saves.

 

[SevenChurches]

I don't mind criticism, though I would like to point out that some things that work in RR aren't necessarily going to work in this - Hoenn is not Kanto and is considerably less linear (assuming Soup fixed up the roadblocks? I still haven't played Radical Red, it's on the todo list).
1. A few people have suggested this (mostly people who liked it in RR funnily enough). I'm considering it as an option, but it will absolutely not be forced. Pasting this from an earlier post: a level cap doesn't work well in an open region.
If I add a cap to the open parts, what do I balance that around? Battling all the trainers? What if people don't want to do that? They'll never hit the cap and it may as well not even be there, so it doesn't help. If I pick some arbitrary cap, then people are punished for exploring and battling all the trainers, as they lose out on a lot of exp.

That's fair. Like most playthroughs of Emerald, I would go through all the optional spots and battle, thus gain Exp along the way. When I beat Norman, I was around 55. At Winona, my team was at 75, after going through all the pre-Fortree water routes that are optional. It's something I can easily avoid and it obviously cost me.

I'm too sensitive about natures, I want to get the right ones immediately.

 

[Buffel Saft]

That's fair. Like most playthroughs of Emerald, I would go through all the optional spots and battle, thus gain Exp along the way. When I beat Norman, I was around 55. At Winona, my team was at 75, after going through all the pre-Fortree water routes that are optional. It's something I can easily avoid and it obviously cost me.

I'm too sensitive about natures, I want to get the right ones immediately.

Yeah I did the same, those levels are about what I'd expect for that. I don't mind adding caps to the late game, as long as people are choosing to have them (and the issues that come with them). Will likely be added to the intro sequence later.
Understandable! I used to do the same but now I'll settle for anything that isn't outright terrible.

 

[Enrieszche]

Please do that. I'd really like to play this game, looks very good :(

 

[NoMoreStars]

Could I maybe implore you to implement Pret's RTC reset function? I just got past Norman but my RTC is pretty much totally broken. Daily events like the Mauville Game Corner daily bottle caps event being totally broken for me and checking the bedroom clock shows it being about 12 hours off. I'm not getting any "battery run dry" messages at the save file screen so I think it could have to do with the fact that I migrated from playing on an emulator to my 3DS using the virtual console injects. I'd just like to have a way to fix my save file so that I can continue collecting bottle caps without having to reset all my progress. I understand enabling the RTC reset function could seem a bit cheaty, but I hope you'd at least consider it. I tried editing my save file first with a little bit of poking and prodding at my save file in a hex editor but I think I'm a bit in over my head in that regard.

 

[Rayquaza Master 384]

Do you have an idea of when the Gen 8 functionality of Rare Candies for Lv. 100 Pokemon will probably be added? I made the mistake of getting the starters from the Game Corner after obtaining my final badge and so I can't evolve any of them.

Edit: Just realized I missed the Odd Keystone in the Sandstrewn Ruins, is there another way to get it?

 

[ablahblah987]

This is a great hack. I was reluctant to try it because I never particularly liked the RSE games but this hack is a considerable improvement over the original. It has a lot of things that make Radical Red likable but I'm happy to not play through Kanto again for the 1000th time. I think I'll give this a second go when the generation eight Pokemon are added.

 

[yakyu]

I haven't beaten the Elite Four with their legendaries yet so I haven't seen all the Pokemon that I can. I actually had to trade for both Cosmogs since I beat the Elite Four with a level 100 team and got stuck with a level 100 Cosmog. Hope you can find that last one!

Got a second Cosmog a few hours ago, it's already the missing Solgaleo and made it to 752 too!
Turns out I already had a save state copy just waiting for that moment but I forgot due to a lot of crazy stuff happening at work haha

 

[DrDre0607]

Yeah it's all just luck! That message is the trainer slide in system from the battle engine, the default settings for it add that string to some random trainers. Didn't realise it affected battle facility trainers, I'll clear it out.

Nothing's shiny locked! That nonsense started in gen 5 and wasn't added to this, I've always though that was a bad addition on Game Freak's part.

Oh wow, well done!
Thanks, I'll fix those bugs, should all be easy fixes. Have you got any box space left at all? I know the boxes won't hold the entire dex, but do they at least hold all the fully evolved mons? You might have to release some of the ones that are easily found in the wild.
More legendaries and mythicals will ideally get their own new maps, I'll just add them in as I come up with events for them. I've already assigned flags for them so there's no risk of them not working with existing saves. Next lot will be some combination of the lake trio, the beasts, Celebi and/or Mewtwo. I'll probably repurpose swarms for the Ultra Beasts as that's basically how they worked in Sun and Moon, they didn't have proper overworld encounters.

I don't know honestly, I can't test it on every emulator out there! I still don't know why some people are having these issues sadly. I'll try a different patch format next version and see if that makes any difference, though I wouldn't expect it to.

Thanks! Difficulty hacks definitely get easier as you play more of them; I know I had a hard time with Blaze Black back when I first played it. Hope you enjoy my other hacks too!

Link's at the top of the first post, I guess I need to change the text colour.

Thanks! I've actually been thinking about adding an instant run key for wild battles, didn't know RR had already done it! The Thief change sounds really good too, shouldn't be too hard to implement.


I don't mind criticism, though I would like to point out that some things that work in RR aren't necessarily going to work in this - Hoenn is not Kanto and is considerably less linear (assuming Soup fixed up the roadblocks? I still haven't played Radical Red, it's on the todo list).
1. A few people have suggested this (mostly people who liked it in RR funnily enough). I'm considering it as an option, but it will absolutely not be forced. Pasting this from an earlier post: a level cap doesn't work well in an open region.
If I add a cap to the open parts, what do I balance that around? Battling all the trainers? What if people don't want to do that? They'll never hit the cap and it may as well not even be there, so it doesn't help. If I pick some arbitrary cap, then people are punished for exploring and battling all the trainers, as they lose out on a lot of exp. If you hit the cap partway through a route but still want to go through it, any trainers you battle along the way suddenly give no experience for no reason. On top of that, the cap is largely meaningless past a certain point as most mons stop learning new moves and are fully evolved, so the cap isn't actually limiting the player in any meaningful way - the player's team at 70 will likely be the same at 80, just with bigger numbers. It'd be there solely to fix the problem you've run into, which is not something everyone will encounter. Replacing an entire team to deal with one fight is always going to be a massive grind unless I just hand you a bunch of perfect EV trained mons for free. This is not Radical Red and I don't intend for fights to be hard enough for that to be necessary.

2. The nature changer's not there to eliminate the nature grind, it's there as an alternative. Don't want to waste time getting a bunch of synchronize mons and finding good natures that way? That's fine, plant some berries and change them later. If you feel you absolutely need that perfect nature right now and haven't grown oran berries, best get some synchronizers (or mess with the clock). Important trainers aren't fully EV trained until Meteor Falls, so there's plenty of time to do either, and they're really not needed before that point. I much prefer the stat up/stat down menus over scrolling through a giant list of natures, as it makes even the useless natures available in case there's some bizarre strategy that requires one of them.
That said, Oran Berries should definitely be held by more Pokemon and more commonly than Gulpin; IIRC the monkeys had a 50% chance of holding them in gen 5 and there's no reason that can't be 100% in this.

3. There are three Lucky Eggs, though one is post game so that hardly counts, and the other is maybe a bit too late in the game. Audino's not in the wild yet as I wanted to find a nice way to have it appear on every route, without cluttering up the encounter tables - something like BW's rustling grass system but without the RNG and mindless running back and forth. I'm well aware that some people just want to grind massive amounts of exp/train many Pokémon and I'm working on a solution!

4. Honestly I think the problem here is that Winona is far too easy, especially if the gym trainers with gimmick sets are harder than she is!

Anyway I'm glad you're enjoying it other than that, I appreciate the feedback!

So I'm guessing that means that pokemon that you buy from the Game Corner can be shiny as well?

 

[GeminiRift]

I've been having a lot of fun with this game, but I keep having random crashes. I'm doing a bug only run, and it was going well for a while (after 6 or 7 crashes in the beginning), but it randomly crashed again. I lost a few hours of progress.

I'm using mGBA, and after not crashing since the May fight, it crashed when fighting the Aromatisse (I believe it used Misty Terrain).

So in addition to reporting the crashes, I would also like to ask if there is a way to cheat in some rare candies so I can at least save some time having to grind all over again.

 

[SevenChurches]

Yay, though I barely scratched the surface of the buffed mons. I didn't try out many mons that can be caught past the early routes. With not wanting to grind too much and hitting level 100 by the E4, I just stuck with a small pool of mons.

More playthroughs should see more experimenting, I intend to do Monotype runs.

 

[Hexx17]

is shinx supposed to not get any damaging electric attacks until 14? that seems like an over sight