Hack Series: Pokémon Photonic Sun & Prismatic Moon

[Buffel Saft]

Well, that's what I get for not looking at all the documents. Silly me, and thanks!

Sorry if this is a bit of a silly question, but how does Island Scan work on Citra?

No problem! Island Scan works the same way as on a 3DS; Citra can emulate the 3DS camera with an actual camera, or just load an image file of a QR code to scan it without a camera. It's somewhere under emulation -> configure -> system IIRC.

 

[RainWinter]

Hey, cheers! That makes sense. 🙂

 

[Jk Howling]

Just wanted to say I FINALLY beat my hardcore nuzlocke of this. Been at this for about 3 months.

My ruleset was:
-only catch the first encounter per route/area
-fainting = death, must be permaboxed
-no healing items in battle
-set mode
-level caps (basically can't overlevel for important trainers/totems)
-a full party wipe = start over entirely.

It took 8 attempts total. My final Elite Four team was Incineroar, Mudsdale, VIkavolt, Florges, Dewgong, and Mega Lucario, and they utterly slayed in the final fights.
There's so many mons I never got to catch or use, I might literally play again. Love the game and its variety and the buffs to weaker mons- it feels like every run is different, and its awesome being able to ev train and teambuild for competitive-level enemies. Probably going to dive back into it lmao.


Side note, I noticed you changed Lopunny to Cute Charm/Scrappy with Klutz as its HA, but Buneary's is still Cute Charm/Klutz wi thLimber HA.. its kinda weird that Klutz turns into Scrappy and Limber turns back into Klutz. Maybe swap those, so Limber turns into Scrappy on evo? I also noticed that it still has a base friendship of 0, which I honestly never understood lmao. Maybe you could bump that up to 70 like other friendship evos, so it takes a little less time?

 

[Buffel Saft]

Just wanted to say I FINALLY beat my hardcore nuzlocke of this. Been at this for about 3 months.

My ruleset was:
-only catch the first encounter per route/area
-fainting = death, must be permaboxed
-no healing items in battle
-set mode
-level caps (basically can't overlevel for important trainers/totems)
-a full party wipe = start over entirely.

It took 8 attempts total. My final Elite Four team was Incineroar, Mudsdale, VIkavolt, Florges, Dewgong, and Mega Lucario, and they utterly slayed in the final fights.
There's so many mons I never got to catch or use, I might literally play again. Love the game and its variety and the buffs to weaker mons- it feels like every run is different, and its awesome being able to ev train and teambuild for competitive-level enemies. Probably going to dive back into it lmao.


Side note, I noticed you changed Lopunny to Cute Charm/Scrappy with Klutz as its HA, but Buneary's is still Cute Charm/Klutz wi thLimber HA.. its kinda weird that Klutz turns into Scrappy and Limber turns back into Klutz. Maybe swap those, so Limber turns into Scrappy on evo? I also noticed that it still has a base friendship of 0, which I honestly never understood lmao. Maybe you could bump that up to 70 like other friendship evos, so it takes a little less time?

Oh wow, congrats! That sounds absolutely brutal, especially with no healing items in battle. Good to see Dewgong of all things making it all the way to the end!

Really happy to hear that about the hack too - that's a big part of what I loved about Dray's hacks and definitely something I wanted to replicate with this hack.

Yeah that's a bit messy, I'll rearrange Buneary's abilities to match Lopunny's. As far as the low friendship goes it's pretty fun spamming full power Frustration early on, but once that drops off it's just annoying. I might bump up the base friendship on all friendship evos to emulate the gen 8 changes to them; if they're all base 130 friendship that'd have the same effect as lowering the requirement to 160.

 

[RainWinter]

Quick question: What's with the random HP losses and "[pokémon] lost some of its HP" messages after enemy pokémon's moves? I noticed this in Wilting Y too. Not talking about when they use something like Take Down, which hurts the attacker by design; sometimes they'll use whatever regular old move and lose HP afterwards. Or are all those trainers' pokémon holding an HP orb or whatever that item is called?

 

[Buffel Saft]

Quick question: What's with the random HP losses and "[pokémon] lost some of its HP" messages after enemy pokémon's moves? I noticed this in Wilting Y too. Not talking about when they use something like Take Down, which hurts the attacker by design; sometimes they'll use whatever regular old move and lose HP afterwards. Or are all those trainers' pokémon holding an HP orb or whatever that item is called?

Yeah their Pokémon will be holding a Life Orb, there are a lot of trainers that use one.

 

[Jk Howling]

Oh wow, congrats! That sounds absolutely brutal, especially with no healing items in battle. Good to see Dewgong of all things making it all the way to the end!

Really happy to hear that about the hack too - that's a big part of what I loved about Dray's hacks and definitely something I wanted to replicate with this hack.

Yeah that's a bit messy, I'll rearrange Buneary's abilities to match Lopunny's. As far as the low friendship goes it's pretty fun spamming full power Frustration early on, but once that drops off it's just annoying. I might bump up the base friendship on all friendship evos to emulate the gen 8 changes to them; if they're all base 130 friendship that'd have the same effect as lowering the requirement to 160.

Thanks! I'm now doing it again with the same ruleset, but also banning setup moves this time just to make things interesting. Hoping it doesn't take me another 3 months haha. Already excited to be using some mons I never got in my previous runs, like Chimchar.

Bumping up all friendship evos to 130 sounds nice tbh. Definitely makes it less tedious to evolve things. I never realized how many little QOL things gen 8 changed or added.

One other thought I had is maybe giving the Cottonee line access to Synthesis? Dunno if its possible to give tutor access, but by levelup in the high 30's or low 40's could be neat.
Priority recovery sounds fun for the line, and while it might be a bit strong, I don't think it'd be overpowered if given a little later game. And it's not unheard of, with Sableye and Comfey (and HA Meganium)

 

[Buffel Saft]

Thanks! I'm now doing it again with the same ruleset, but also banning setup moves this time just to make things interesting. Hoping it doesn't take me another 3 months haha. Already excited to be using some mons I never got in my previous runs, like Chimchar.

Bumping up all friendship evos to 130 sounds nice tbh. Definitely makes it less tedious to evolve things. I never realized how many little QOL things gen 8 changed or added.

One other thought I had is maybe giving the Cottonee line access to Synthesis? Dunno if its possible to give tutor access, but by levelup in the high 30's or low 40's could be neat.
Priority recovery sounds fun for the line, and while it might be a bit strong, I don't think it'd be overpowered if given a little later game. And it's not unheard of, with Sableye and Comfey (and HA Meganium)

Good luck with round 2 (or round 9 I guess?)! Chimchar should do well if it doesn't get caught out by some random coverage move on something.

Good suggestion! I didn't even realise Cottonee doesn't get Synthesis, seems like something that should be fixed. It'd probably be fine getting it around the time the tutor makes it available; Whimsicott's great at exploiting the AI but it's not super strong as is.

 

[Jk Howling]

Some other thoughts I had:

-Maybe give Cubone and Exeggcute a way to evolve into their Kanto counterparts a bit earlier? Having to wait til the ultra wormholes is pretty brutal, and your changes to Kanto Marowak (and Exeggutor's addition of Earth Power) look really fun to play with ;w;

-Change Inkay to evolve just by levelup? I like the idea of its gimmick evolution method but its a bit annoying/unintuitive to figure out on emulator, and still a little annoying on console if you get it wrong the first couple tries.


Also I'm sure you get bugged about it quite a bit so feel free to ignore this lmao, but any updates on the Emerald hack? Super hyped for it! So many solid looking romhacks in progress these days, its wild how far the tools and resources for them have come.

 

[NuclearNecro]

Heyo, I ended up getting an idea for a both good and sorta cute balance change:

- Grant Minior access to Head Smash, as well as Acrobatics via level up. Currently Minior has a pretty messy time if you wanna go either fully physical or fully special, especially because its level up movepool has access to no physical Rock type move, or special Flying type move. For now I'm gonna focus on the physical side of things. If you wanna get a decent physical Rock STAB move for Minior, you gotta wait all the way until Route 17 for Rock Slide, which is about 20 levels away from where you get it in the wild. Otherwise the best option you get for physical Rock STAB is Rock Tomb. Acrobatics is a similar story, but you gotta wait until Route 15 and the Sharpedo Jet to get that one, which is not as major, but considering you have NO Flying STAB options until that points really stings. Giving it Acrobatics at a close point you catch it would let you use one of its STAB options earlier. As for Head Smash, it works as both a viable move for it (reducing its health via recoil lets it activate Shields Down faster, as well as dealing a truckload of damage thanks to it also getting Shell Smash), but also a cute little attack that somewhat makes sense for it (since it's based off of a meteor, it would make sense that it would smash itself right into the enemy Pokemon like the real thing).

Hopefully these end up making sense.

 

[Buffel Saft]

Some other thoughts I had:

-Maybe give Cubone and Exeggcute a way to evolve into their Kanto counterparts a bit earlier? Having to wait til the ultra wormholes is pretty brutal, and your changes to Kanto Marowak (and Exeggutor's addition of Earth Power) look really fun to play with ;w;

-Change Inkay to evolve just by levelup? I like the idea of its gimmick evolution method but its a bit annoying/unintuitive to figure out on emulator, and still a little annoying on console if you get it wrong the first couple tries.


Also I'm sure you get bugged about it quite a bit so feel free to ignore this lmao, but any updates on the Emerald hack? Super hyped for it! So many solid looking romhacks in progress these days, its wild how far the tools and resources for them have come.

Sure, might as well! I suppose I should do that for Pikachu too; maybe level up holding a Strange Souvenir? Would give that thing an actual use.
Just looked up the Citra's evo method for Inkay and I see what you mean, that's incredibly janky. I'll give at an alternative method as an additional option, but won't replace the existing one.

I don't mind at all haha. Emerald's almost done, I'm currently creating the standard version (and double checking all the rebalanced changes are actually there this time!) and adding a few more small events. Once those are done I just need to finish my test playthrough (which is at Mossdeep), fix any bugs I find along the way, and it'll be ready for release. Yeah it's amazing what you can do with the decomps and CFRU, feels like it wasn't that long ago that adding the PSS to gen 3 was a big deal!

Heyo, I ended up getting an idea for a both good and sorta cute balance change:

- Grant Minior access to Head Smash, as well as Acrobatics via level up. Currently Minior has a pretty messy time if you wanna go either fully physical or fully special, especially because its level up movepool has access to no physical Rock type move, or special Flying type move. For now I'm gonna focus on the physical side of things. If you wanna get a decent physical Rock STAB move for Minior, you gotta wait all the way until Route 17 for Rock Slide, which is about 20 levels away from where you get it in the wild. Otherwise the best option you get for physical Rock STAB is Rock Tomb. Acrobatics is a similar story, but you gotta wait until Route 15 and the Sharpedo Jet to get that one, which is not as major, but considering you have NO Flying STAB options until that points really stings. Giving it Acrobatics at a close point you catch it would let you use one of its STAB options earlier. As for Head Smash, it works as both a viable move for it (reducing its health via recoil lets it activate Shields Down faster, as well as dealing a truckload of damage thanks to it also getting Shell Smash), but also a cute little attack that somewhat makes sense for it (since it's based off of a meteor, it would make sense that it would smash itself right into the enemy Pokemon like the real thing).

Hopefully these end up making sense.

Hey! Ah yeah I forgot the Acrobatics TM was moved somewhere stupid in USUM, poor Minior! It was solid when I played through Moon, but only because of that TM. Will be a bit of a pain to edit all 14 forms, but I agree it needs to be done. Not sure if Minior even has a head, but if Corsola can use Head Smash then surely Minior can. It'll probably KO itself most of the time but I do like your reasoning for it!

 

[고양이애재]

Hi Buffel, just finished Eternal X and I loved it. Now playing your Moon hack, sorry if this is ask before me.

To enable mega evolution, is checking the box in the editor enough or do I need an item like a mega ring too? I didn't have one in my key items, does it work with just the mega stone held by pokemon?

고마워요

 

[Buffel Saft]

Hi Buffel, just finished Eternal X and I loved it. Now playing your Moon hack, sorry if this is ask before me.

To enable mega evolution, is checking the box in the editor enough or do I need an item like a mega ring too? I didn't have one in my key items, does it work with just the mega stone held by pokemon?

고마워요

Hey, happy to hear that! Checking the box is enough; the key item used is the Z-ring, so you just need to give the Pokemon its mega stone.

 

[고양이애재]

Ok, thanks for your help

 

[Ryry2892]

Hello not related to the issues being had but where in this game do you get diancie? I can't see anything in the documentation where to get it.

 

[Buffel Saft]

Hello not related to the issues being had but where in this game do you get diancie? I can't see anything in the documentation where to get it.

Hey, it's a very rare SOS ally for Carbink in certain places. It's in the "wild pokemon locations" document.

 

[Ryry2892]

I checked that document several times, can't believe I missed that! Sorry! Thanks very much!

 

[Buffel Saft]

I checked that document several times, can't believe I missed that! Sorry! Thanks very much!

No problem! Don't forget you can use ctrl + f to search the docs, makes it harder to miss things!

 

[NuclearNecro]

Alright, I should have probably posted this earlier, but might as well do it now:

Add an alternate evolution method to Dusk Lycanroc. Currently it's one of the most pain-in-the-ass evolutions to get due to its strict time, as you have to be up at either 5 PM for Photonic Sun, or 5 AM for Prismatic Moon, and the latter is especially brutal. The only way to make it easier is by editing your system time, and even then it's a crapshoot on if it even works. My solution to this is to make them evolve via evolutionary stones, Dusk Stone for Photonic Sun, Dawn Stone for Prismatic Moon (or just Dusk Stone for both).

Also I'd like to notify that the docs still don't show Sunflora having Drought as its hidden ability, even though it has it.

 

[KarebuKupa]

Curious to see why Incineroar didn't get a speed bump, Primarina being slow fits with it's motif but I figured Incineroar would be faster (maybe swapping it's Spe base with its SpA attack base? 80 is better than 60), or maybe even adopt Torracat's base speed of 90.

Was there any particular reason you decided not to do that?