Alright, question time!
I would like to make two locations in my ROM hack.... well unique. A desert and a Volcano. But in Fire Red this appears to be more difficult. I know that I can just insert tiles but I have already made a bit of progress and don't want it to go to waste. For the desert I intend to use the sand tiles in the game already but the problem occurs when wanting wild Pokemon to appear. How could I make it so that wild Pokemon appear on the route without using wild grasses? (By the way I am using Advance Map). The problem with the volcano is that there are no lava tiles, how could I get lava tiles in Fire Red?
Also, at the beginning of the game I would like the Nation Pokedex to be given to the player immediately, how would I do this?
To make the sand pokemon-y, have a look at the settings for cave tiles and copy them over to a sand-tile clone. I believe it's just a change in the background byte of the tile to 00 01, however I'm not on my laptop at the moment to check this.
Hope this helps!