Pokemon Black Any% FAQ Q: What are you playing on? A: A Nintendo DS (phat) w/ a capture board from https://3dscapture.com Q: Why is your movement strange? A: I am likely performing RNG Manipulation (or extremely cooked). Q: What is RNG Manipulation? A: RNG Manipulation allows me to force desirable outcomes wile avoiding negative ones. In BW1, it is extremely easy to do RNG manip, as you have a 1 second window to hit a particular seed. The downside is because the MAC Address is a part of the seeding process, everyone's DS has different seeds they can hit, and therefore need different seeds that do the same thing. Thankfully, there are an incomprehensible amount of RNG seeds you can hit, meaning finding a seed with desirable events is pretty trivial still. Q: What do you manipulate in the game? A: We manipulate A Snivy with good enough stats to get through the first 3 fights of the game, a Lillipup as our main for the majority of the run, (ideally) a Pidove on Route 3 for fly, and no other encounters up to Nacrene City to avoid having to shop/use repels as long as possible. This means the movement between catching Lillipup and getting to Nacrene is one long movement section. Dropping it requires me to shop early for repels, pick up a free Dusk Ball for catching a backup Woobat, and repelling to avoid encounters to Nacrene. Cut (we teach to Snivy) and Fly are the only HM we need to finish the game. Snivy is 5/31/21/23/24/28 with a Jolly Nature Lillipup is 31/31/31/23/31/31 with Adamant Nature. (Spa is completely useless) Snivy is not really used much in the run. The two "requirements" for me for a Snivy to be good is having 30+ ATK and 24+ Speed with a +Speed Nature. This allows Snivy to Speedtie N's Purrloin. This can save you half a turn if you win the last speedtie which is a nice cushion for getting to Lillipup manip if you get it. More importantly however, this speed threshold allows Snivy to speedtie both the Purrloin in the double battle leaving Straiton City when entering the battle. This can give Snivy a chance to kill the right Purrloin before it gets a chance to attack if it wins that speedtie (however a 3-way speedtie interaction goes anyway). After killing the first Purrloin, Snviy gets level 9 and then becomes faster than the remaining Purrloin. This can be helpful in shutting it down or providing a small assist in taking it out to Lillipup. All the other stats can be complete garbage, though higher the better. After Nacrene, we do not attempt holding manip as its no longer necessary (unless you wanted to do repel-less Pinwheel Forest, which I am not doing as its wholly unecessary). Once we get to Chargestone Cave however, we perform a new manipulation called Plasma Skip Q. Why Snivy? A. We need a cut user (cut is the only HM necessary to beat the game, though we do use fly for obvious reasons). Snivy best fits that role. That's all I can say without providing violent misinformation. Q: What is Plasma Skip? A: Plasma skip involves a S+Q Manip to manipulate Dust Clouds (known as Phenomenon) to block certain Plasma grunts' vision to prevent them from seeing you. Trainers cannot see through Phenomenon, which allows you to avoid the fight altogether. Dust clouds have a small chance to spawn every 20 steps, and will decide where to spawn out of a 11x11 grid (split into 4 11x6 "quadrants") based on what tiles are considered "valid". Clouds do not despawn unless you go into it, get an encounter, pick up an item, or talk to an NPC. The plan is to skip the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th grunts. This saves over a minute compared to having to fight them all, but makes certain end-game fights slightly worse as we miss out on some crucial ATK and SPE EVs (and EXP, which we make up for by picking up a candy in Iccirus City) Another thing I'm trying to do with Plasma skip is force the season to change after Twist Mountain. The main reason we play in Winter is because it makes Twist Mountain a trivially fast dungeon to get through due to all the snow instead of a much longer labyrinth. However, when playing in Winter, Route 8 becomes a series of slide puzzles to get through. With a Lillipup on the last day of a Winter month (April, August, December) and being finding a Plasma skip a little after 23:30, we can get the season to change to Spring after Twist Mountain but before Route 8. This saves ~4s if you can get the season to change before Route 8. You have 4 opportunities for the season to change after the dates rollover: 1. Leaving Brycen's gym (optimal as you don't have to go over the huge snow pile north of Iccirus to Dragonspiral Tower, saves a bit of time as elevation changes make you go slower) 2. Entering Dragonspiral Tower 3. Leaving the Nimbasa City gate to Route 4. 4. Leaving the Desert Resort gate towards the Relic Castle. Seasons only change when loading/reloading the overworld through a loading zone. Flying does not change the season. Q: So why don't you manipulate everything else in the game? A: As soon as you enter a battle, any chance of manipulating IVs of a Pokemon is near impossibe, as what's known as the IVRNG (where poke's IVs come from) starts moving at an alarming and uncontrollable rate. This is also why we cannot manipulate Pokerus in Gen 5) As soon as you enter a XTransceiver call, it becomes obnoxious to route through as you end up having to find clusters and (ideally) re-align the RNG somewhere later. As mentioned earlier, there's no point to holding manip past getting to Nacrene City. Q. Why did you choose the girl? A. In Gen 5, gender does not matter. I play as Hilda cause she's cute :) Q: What's WR? A: See: https://www.speedrun.com/pkmnbw1 or see right set of splits if there are some. Q: What's your PB/goal time A: See: https://www.speedrun.com/pkmnbw1 or see: Splits.