Pokemon White 2 Any% FAQ:

Q. What are you playing on?
A. Phat Nintendo DS w/ Capture card from https://3dscapture.com

Q. Goal?
A. WR would be nice :^)

Q. What do you manip in the run?
A. Tepigs IVs/Nature, Pidove spawn, Psyduck (w/ Damp) spawn, Drilbur IV/Nature, and Trainer Skip (read below).

Q. Why Drilbur?
A. Excadrill is very busted

Q. What route are you currently doing?
A. Clown Candy skip. By manipping the hidden grotto on Route 6 to produce a Rare candy on the 256th step of my manip since starting the game, we can skip having to talk to all the clowns in Castelia city to get a rare candy. This saves ~25 seconds in general but with the added benefits/risks
+ Burgh is much safer and less likely to need to heal for because Drilbur only needs to see Dwebble and Leavanny, so we can lead Pignite and kill Swadloon with FC right away then carry the fight as normal
+ Dont have to ride an elevator or enter useless buildings to talk to clowns (or talk to the final one to pick it up)
- Charles is a worse fight. Need to Metal Claw Archen and Slash 2x Sigilyph. If Metal Claw misses Archen the fight is really bad.
- Rood's Swoobat drops to a 1/16 and both Herdier and Swoobat hit harder

We pick up the Candy as soon as we get to Driftveil but don't use it until after we fight Rood. After Rood everything pretty much aligns with the normal route, so from the Drilbur split to Clay it's gonna look like I'm ahead. You can't accurately judge the pace of the run compared to my PB until after Clay, where things line up again. 


Q. What is Trainer Skip?
A. Trainer skip involves using RNG manip to spawn phenomenon in front of trainer's vision so mandatory trainers become skippable. Phenomenon are the shaking grass, rippling water, shadow spots, etc. that you may see in the overworld in Unova. Trainers cannot see through them. We use this to skip 2 trainers, a male swimmer on Route 21 and a ranger in Seaside Cave.

A video demonstration of the skip: https://youtu.be/hYVKKzdSe18
 
Q. How do dust clouds spawn?
A. You probably didn't ask that but I will answer it anyway. Dust clouds have a 10% to appear every 20 steps. The cloud can spawn anywhere in an 11x11 grid centered around the player that is considered valid. This grid is split into 4 11x6 "quadrants". The game will first pick which quadrant to spawn the cloud in, then gather a list of all the available tiles, starting from the top left of the quadrant to the bottom right going left-to-right. Then the game picks a random number between 1 and the number of "valid" tiles and will spawn the phenomenon on that tile. The logic is the same regardless of the type of phenomenon. Phenomenon do not count tiles that have things such as trainers on them as invalid, but will stop the cloud from spawning under a trainer's feet if it detects something on it. NPCs can also delete clouds by walking over them. 

Q. How did you find the manip?
A. We only recently learned exactly how dust clouds are generated (we were slightly wrong before, but we only missed ~4% of phenomenon by the old logic), and more importantly, where they decide to spawn. The logic was originally researched by ABTwisty and Lincoln to create a tool for a similar skip in Chargestone Cave in BW1. In BW1, you can use this tech to skip multiple Plamsa grunts that are otherwise mandatory. I then yoinked the source and adapted it for BW2 to start hunting for seeds that worked the best. This process has been going on for a couple months probably at this point. This particular skip is not new to BW2 however, as werster had executed this exact manip in BW2 for his Complete PWT run, with much more manual testing (and under the requirement he can manip a Crustle with good IVs/Nature). Since the tool created by Twisty/Lincoln, 

Q. Will you be executing it in runs?
A. Yes

Q. How much timesave?
A. Depends on the efficiency of the manip (how much you need to change the clock, the second, the movement required, etc.) and what you're comparing against. There is a spinner that we full yolo and if we get seen by her, we get a shortcut to Seaside cave, but she has one extra poke which net loses us 5s over getting past her and fighting the male swimmer instead. This manip saves about 13sec compared to fighting the mandatory swimmer, or 19 sec for hitting the spinner. The current world record (Minnow 3:08:28) hits the spinner while 2nd place (Scoa 3:09:46) got past the spinner, so I will be saving that much against them comparatively. 


There are more strats in White 2 that have recently been developed, however they each come with risks/benefits that aren't as clear as Grotto Candy or PP Up. If you're curious about them, see here: https://pastebin.com/L2NwzzXF