Pokemon Diamond | Any% FAQ Q. What are you doing? Playing Pokemon fast. I've always wanted to get into it and now I have an excuse to now that I have a hold of a DS with a capture card. How did you get a hold of a DS with a capture board? Loopy does DS installations occasionally over at 3dscapture.com. I've always put of learning Pokemon DS speedruns because I didn't have one (you can play emulator but I never found it the same). This summer Loopy had begun another run of DS capture boards and I also stumbled upon a Phat Nintendo DS on reddit for sale and the stars aligned. All in all it only cost me ~$150USD to get everything I needed (I already had a bunch of the carts from my childhood). Not too bad if you ask me. Q. So what's going on? I'm speedrunning Pokemon Diamond Any%. It's a pretty simple run that gets a lot of the fundamentals of Gen 4/5 speedrunning into a neat little hour-ish long bundle. It has low-barrier to entry RNG manipulation and one major glitch. With both, grinding out this category should allow me to quickly get better at movement and understand some basic concepts for later categories and games I take on. Q. RNG Manipulation? What's that? In the context of Gen 4 there are two events at the beginning of the game when timed correctly give you the same seed every single time. - When you start the game (to the second) - When you clear the TV prompt taking about the Red Gyarados at the beginning of the game (to the frame, the game runs at 30FPS). Once I'm past those two events, there are two main ways to check my seed - My Trainer ID is 14093 - The NPCs in Twinleaf act in a very specific manner. Then, knowing my seed, I know exactly the stats of Chimchar, and how to navigate a decent chunk of the game with no encounters. Q. What are Chimchar's Stats Chimchar's IVs are 29 HP 31 Atk 24 Def 30 SpA 15 SpD (-) 31 Spe (+) Naive Nature Chimchar is better than the other starters because its the fastest of the 3, and going first matters for going fast and not taking hits. Q. Why not manip Chimchar to have perfect IV's? Because not only am I depending on the RNG manip to find a good Chimchar in a reasonable amount of time (this route actually takes the most direct route to get to Chimchar AND it has good stats, major W), I am also depending on it to be able to navigate through the region with as few encounters as possible. There is a limit on how many seeds there theoretically can be (and man's patience to figure out how to navigate the entire route without encounters), and as such you can't have your cake and eat it to. What else are you manipulating? Once I have the starter in hand, the only thing I need manip for is no encounters. In order to keep the manip for no encounters however, every step that I take has been meticulously plotted out. Taking any extra step or running when I should be walking (or vice/versa) will ruin the manip. Top runners will typically hold manip Eterna city, when you get access to the bike, but with my skill level so far, I will be happy with making it to Roark without breaking manip (eventually I would like to learn extended to go the distance once I'm comfortable with that part of manip). Once we get to Eterna and get the bike, we can then glitch to the Hall of Fame, essentially wrong warp to the end of the game. How do you wrong warp in Pokemon? In Gen 4, there is a unique glitch called Tweaking, or sometimes referred to as the Void glitch. To explain this glitch simply: the game loads areas in chunks like Minecraft. If we race over specific loadlines in specific patterns, we can screw up the game and cause it to not load in certain chunks right. We can then use this to get out of bounds from the Poketch building in Jubilife and walk meticulously to the Hall of Fame room. If you've ever watched someone use the void glitch to get Event Pokemon like Darkrai or Arceus, it's the same glitch, but with a B-line to the Hall of Fame instead. In a not-as-extreme case, we can use tweaks to skip a cutscene with Lucas after the bike trail where he gives us the Vs Seeker and the Dowsing Poketch app, as well as going through the lower gate. These tweaks can be difficult however, as there are a couple different setups depending on how good you are at pulling off the tweaks. The first and third tweaks are not as bad though, as you typically have the bike trail constantly pulling you down, so for the quick up and downs you have to pull off, this makes execution much easier. The second bike trail tweak is the one I've been tripped up the most on in practice. The Jubilife tweak has a backup you can pull off if you don't feel confident in going for the fast tweak or fail the fast tweak too many times. What's your goal time? I don't know. Guess we'll see how the first couple go and hopefully I can get a time I'm satisfied with. Long term I would like to join the sub hour club, but we'll see how long I'm entertained by this category before I want to move on. While I work on running this game, I'll likely be looking into running the next category I want to run. Why did you pick the girl? Lucas talks less as the Professor's assistant than Dawn. Also for this specific manip, because of an extra text box after the catching tutorial, it is almost impossible to keep manip after this point (don't ask how I know). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9pD4oLiFyo if you need a side-by-side. Is there a difference between Diamond and Pearl speed wise? In this category: no. In Any% glitches there's slightly less text in Spear Pillar when Cyrus is talking about Dialga vs Palkia, but we're not running that right now. Why did you name you and your rival one character? Less text to render = more fast Is there anything else you can manipulate in the game? Yes, but nothing that benefits this run or is RTA viable. Battle RNG is typically moving too fast to bother to try and manipulate, so there is always a chance to die at specific fights. Which fights are the hardest? We'll find out together, but none on paper seem to be bad or warn me of any super scary fights according to the notes I'm riding with. Most of my practice has been spent on memorizing and being able to execute manip, as that will be the biggest means of keeping my time down, along with getting good tweaks at the end. Fights may get harder as I begin to whittle down on resources to make the run faster, like skipping the mart in Sandgem Town at the beginning of the route, but skipping that means I need to re-learn 90% of the manip, which I'm not ready to commit to. I may move on before then, and come back when I've (hopefully) lost some muscle memory on the original manip path before I go for the advanced one, but we'll see how I'm feeling. Do you catch anything other than Chimchar? Nope, Chimchar gets Rock Smash and Cut since he will no longer be necessary to complete the game at that point (assuming I don't hit a spinner on the way back to Jubilife, which is unlikely.) Did I miss a question? Ask away in chat. I always try to explain things a little more in-depth than some, because I believe if I can explain it to a 6 year old, then I have a good understanding of the topic, and if I'm wrong, please correct me.