Topic: Pokémon Scarlet & Pokémon Violet

I know I'm reading way too deep into this, but I like to imagine that the machine scans the type DNA off of the materials you give it, imprints the data onto a CD and bada-bing bada-boom: TM.

Why you can't just keep the materials after it uses them under that logic I have no idea but a game mechanic is a game mechanic I suppose.

The guy inside the machine has to eat something

I just finished Area Zero (post game stuff) today and I have to say I am really impressed. This was the first time I genuinely felt like I am playing a JRPG rather than a monster collecting game. The music, the story, the party chat, the layout of the area ... this is something you'd expect out of games like Tales of and Final Fantasy but not Pokemon. I hope we will see more stuff like that in the future.

The Area Zero arc was definitely super well done. I felt like Arceus had all the components for a really deep and meaningful and dramatic story, bit it didn't quite bother putting all the pieces together. Area Zero was a bit of a shock but so satisfying.

Did a few Surprise Trades for the hell of it just before heading to bed and not only did I get dex fillers like Beartic and Donphan, I also managed to get both a Jolly Quaxly breedject AND a Beast Ball Charmander BACK. TO. BACK.

I love you Fuecoco, but I think I know which Paldean starter I'm going to be Masuda hunting for first in SV (Quaquaval's shiny is absolutely muah).

I spent way too long catching all the paradox Pokemon in area 0. But now I have at least two of each, so that's nice.

Edit: found a shiny marill! My second shiny so far.

Not sure how widespread this knowledge is, but I've discovered this morning that you can somewhat "sequence break" and access the western portion of the map before ever going to the academy in Mesagoza.

The way to do this is to go to the cliffside west of Los Platos. There's a point where you'll see some (seemingly inaccessible) Pokemon a few metres away: Deerling, Riolu, Toxel. If they're close enough to the cliff edge, you can aim your Pokemon at them and initiate a battle. Upon ending the battle, you'll end up on their side of the cliff. And then you can continue around South-Western Paldea. I managed to loop around to Cortondo on foot - I'm sure you could get much further if you wanted to.

However it seems the developers have had enough foresight for this not to break the game. You are seemingly unable to trigger any events out of sequence by doing this. At the very least, you can't initiate gym battles.

Why would you do this? If you want to get certain Pokemon earlier I suppose. But you might as well just go to Mesagoza and get access to Miraidon/Koraidon to make life easier.

Neat little discovery though.

A friend told me Azumarill is great for tera raids, so I went ahead and trained my shiny Marill to be a raiding machine and… It’s true! They’re a lot more consistent when I use him, I love him already.

@Eel I had an Azumarill on my team and it was OP

Found a random shiny cufant! That’s now 3

Quick question in regards to outbreak shiny hunting: if you make it to 60, start doing the picnic resets and all of those shenanigans but then decide to quit out of the game and come back later, does the game remember your progress and allows you to keep going so long as you don't kill the entire outbreak? I was doing a Tatsugiri one earlier on that lasted nearly 2 hours without a whiff of a shiny and I'm wondering if I can just come back to it later on when I'm more motivated.

I think the outbreaks get dispersed at midnight or something

The solution is probably very simple and I somehow glossed over it... but how do you get eggs in this game? In other words, how is babby formed?

@mr_somewhere Have two breeding-compatible Pokemon in your party amd start a picnic. Then after awhile eggs will sometimes appear in your picnic basket which you can collect. Some types of sandwiches help this process.

@FishyS Oh, that's interesting. I was aware food helped but I didn't put the two together. That's interesting, hopefully less faffing around than before. Thanks for the response.

So I was doing some surprise/blind trades because it's an easy way to get any of the starter pokemon.... and I ended up being traded a level 100 shiny ditto... but with an advertised website as its nickname and there is no way to change the name of a traded Pokemon with a nickname. 😖

These are generated using external sources. So most people release them out of principle.

@FishyS It’s hacked, so I’d release it.

huh, weird. Are hacked pokemon really so common as to run across one in 10 random trades? 🤔 And why even throw them out to a random person in a blind surprise trade. Are bots somehow doing surprise trades? Seems very problematic if so.

Most of what I got from the other trades were level 1 starters ( mostly Fuecoco) and some freshly hatched from picnics Charizards. Plus a couple pokemon from the starter area..So the level 100 was a shock. I'll happily ditch it though.

@FishyS yes, they likely have bots programmed to distribute the hacked Pokémon. It doesn’t help that a lot people also get rid of them the lazy way: by simply trading them again immediately. So you end up with a web of them going around and around.

As you might guess from the fact they include urls as the name, or sometimes as the name of the trainer, these are literally just advertisement for their websites. It’s shady all around and a problem that has existed ever since online trading was introduced to the series.

One would image they would’ve at least tried to prevent people from using urls in names/nicknames by now, but I suppose the Pokémon company doesn’t really care that much.