Jonot's Blog

Recently I’ve been getting back into Pokémon. Specifically, I’ve been playing Pokémon Blaze Black 2 Redux, which is a rom hack of Pokémon Black 2, which adds more difficulty, and also allows you to catch every Pokémon in the game (not including Pokémon added after generation V)

I enjoyed the increased difficulty of the game, but something that stood out to me was shiny Pokémon. If you aren’t aware, shiny Pokémon are rare variants of Pokémon that have a different color. Usually 1/8192 (or 1/4096 in newer games) of Pokémon are shiny, but this rom hack changed the rate to 1/512. In addition, there are many legendary Pokémon in the game, which can only be caught once, meaning if I wanted them shiny, I would have to do it then. This combination of easier access and fear of missing out made me want to do shiny hunting.

The main way that people hunt for a shiny legendary is to save right before the encounter, and then reset the game until you see a shiny. At a certain point, you might want to keep track of how many times you had to reset the game, to keep track of how long it took you. This is the topic of this post.

Of course, there are plenty of ways that you can count something on a phone or a computer. The most obvious way that I thought of was to use the calculator app. Using the equals button will repeat the last used operation, so you can repeatedly use that to count how many times you have reset the game.

This approach has the obvious benefits of being simple and already installed. But there were some downsides. First of all, if you close the calculator, or need to calculate something else, the value you entered will be gone. This isn’t a major problem, but I thought it was worth noting. Another issue is that when using picture in picture mode on the iPhone, it will cover the number in the calculator app. If you move it to the bottom, then it will cover the equals button. No matter where you put it, it will cover some important information. You actually can double-tap the video to make it smaller, but I thought that this was still sub-optimal. The reason that this was important to me was because shiny hunting is a tedious process, and can get boring if you don’t have something else to do.

But the most important issue to me is that the button that you have to hit is small. If you aren’t paying attention, which you probably arent, since you’re busy shiny hunting, then you can easily accidentally hit another button, which will completely remove your count. In addition, if you were watching something in picture in picture, you might not even notice that you did this until several encounters later, when you don’t remember what you were at. And what’s the point of counting something if you cant count it?

The next problem that I had came when I wanted some more information about my luck. In the original games, certain Pokémon are shiny locked, which means that you can’t aquire them shiny. The documentation for the rom hack I’m using said that these were all removed, but I wanted to verify this. I thought that if I had a 95% of encountering a shiny by a certain point, but still hadn’t, it would be safe to assume that the shiny locks were present. A formula that you can use for the probability of encountering a shiny after n resets can be determined by the following formula:

def shiny_chance(resets, chance):
	return 1-(1-chance)**resets

An easy way that I could get this formula working was to use Desmos. I can display this formula with a variable, and create an action to increment it on a click. This worked for my goal, and if you were wondering, the shiny locks were in fact removed. But this wasn’t optimal either. The touch targets are still small, and information is still not saved. It’s also akward to set up, especially on mobile.

At this point, I began looking for other solutions online. I found many, but my main issue with them is that they don’t let you set the shiny rate yourself. It lets you set factors that affect the rate, like what game you are playing, if you have the shiny charm, if you’re doing any special methods, etc. But they don’t let you enter your own number. This made them unfeasable for my usecases of a rom hack that changes the shiny rate.

After that, I decided that I would create my own shiny Pokémon counter that fixes all of my problems. You can access this here.

The first thing that you will notice is the large sprite at the top of the screen. This is mainly here to make the website look nice, but it also means that it will be the only thing covered by picture in picture.

Another thing that you will notice is the fact that the increment button is very large, so it’s hard to miss it.

In the top right, there is a settings button, which lets you change what Pokémon is being hunted, what game it is in (this will only affect the sprite used) and the shiny rate, which can be changed manually.

All of the important information is stored in browser local storage, so you don’t have to worry about coming back later.

There are a few flaws that I think this has. It doesn’t provide sprites for any of the newer games, and the rate will probably not be helpful with any methods were the shiny rate changes over time.

Overall, I hope that this project is helpful to someone.