Pokemon Black Any% FAQ (Late 2024 edition) Q: What's new? A: A recent discovery made by CasualPokePlayer (CPP for short) lets us skip an additional 5th Plasma Grunt in Chargestone Cave over our previous method of Plasma Skip. The gist is that we were really only allowed to skip every other grunt due to how phenomenon despawn. Phenomenon will only despawn if: - You go into the cloud (we will be stuck fighting the grunt after doing so) - You talk to or get seen by an NPC/Trainer - You pick up an item - You get a wild encounter. We already use a repel to get through Chargestone, so spending the time to drop the repel and get an encounter (or swap to bird in front) is not worth. Talking to an NPC/Trainer would undo our progress, so that makes little sense to do. We could've before picked up a Thunderstone that is between the 5th and 6th grunt, but due to how tight the repel steps are (we typically have to yolo tiles at the very end of the cave) it was deemed not worth it. However, the recent discovery is this: The pushable crystals in Chargestone Cave are considered NPCs. This means that you can talk to them to despawn the cloud (this is not a joke, I'm serious). This means, after we skip Grunt 5, we can talk to a crystal before pushing it to remove the cloud and carry on to skip the 6th, and talk to one more stone to skip the 7th. Skipping this additional fight saves roughly 20 seconds in a vacuum, but that is under these conditions: - You can still go encounterless to the end of the cave. You end up having to yolo about 20 tiles of cave at the very end unless you repel. If you elect to repel, that is an extra menu and costs about 10 seconds. - You lose ~5s if you don't find an 11th hour seed (assuming you are going for the 5 second timesave by having the season become Spring as you exit Brycen's gym) 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, and 5th-7th grunts. This saves roughly a minute and a half 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) 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: 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 take 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.