**OLD** [Plat Any%] F.A.Q.

Pokémon Platinum - Any% speedrun - F.A.Q. (as of January 15th, 2018)
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Q. What are you trying to achieve ?
A. I'm trying to finish Pokémon Platinum as fast as possible without any rule limitation, i.e. reaching the game credits.

Q. What is the route about ?
A. I'm using Werster's amazing route created in 2016, with minor (maybe major ?) adjustements. The draft is as follows :
	> using Chimchar up to getting the Bicycle (benefitting its offensive attributes & Taunt)
	> catching an Abra to skip the fourth badge & HM02 Fly
	> catching an overleveled Tentacruel near Sandgem Town to finish the game with it.
I'm using a different seed that Werster's, which allows me to add two interesting route changes : 'extended manipulation' and 'resetless Tentacruel manipulation'.

Q. How do you get an overleveled Tentacruel so early in the run ?
A. I'm using a 'map distortion glitch', specific to Gen IV which is called 'tweaking'. Doing certain movement on the fastest gear of the Bicycle, at very specific places, can allow me to break the maps and to bypass/go through normal game limitations. It's used several times in different places of the run, you'll see them when i get there (no spoil).

Q. What is a seed & why is it important ?
A. It's basically how the game sets up the RNG (the randomness). Depending on what time and date you start the game at, it will create a specific value which will be an initializer for the random. From there, most of the overworld random events (NPC behaviour, random encounters, etc.) can be foreseen as long as a certain movement is followed. My special setting allows me to manipulate a decent Chimchar acquiring Pokérus fairly early in the game, with an Abra encounter after Jubilife City & a close-to-god Tentacruel when i'm coming back to Sandgem Town. This also allows me to get the Choice Specs later in Celestic Town without changing the clock manually. Side note : this seed is the only one that can produce such succession of events, being WR competitive.

Q. What is an 'extended manipulation' ?
A. In Pokémon Platinum speedruns, the perfect manipulations usually end after Oreburgh Mine. This comes from after Jubilife Galaxy double battle : the RNG advances through the long cutscene and an additional seed-dependant advancement is made when receiving the Fashion Case. These two lead to a very difficult way of 'extending' the manipulation after this point. My seed tends to make that happen, which allows several goodies :
	> could skip (on very serious attempts) buying and using some of the Repels from Jubilife Mart, which also ensures skipping the Pokémon League shop.
	> manipulate the 3 spinners past Jubilife City to be dodged 100% of the time very quickly
With this extension, the manipulation ends in Eterna Forest.

Q. What is a 'resetless Tentacruel manipulation' ?
A. Werster's seed was primarily designed to get Chimchar, Pokérus and Abra (and a convenient early game). In order to manipulate a Tentacruel, he needs to save and manip that Tentacruel from a different seed, which involved switching the time and date of the console. He also has to switch the date again to get the Choice Specs in Celestic Town.
My setup has all these elements lined up from the start of the game, so that all the game can be done without saving and resetting at any point. Unfortunately, this raises up several problems :
	> Chimchar has slighly worse stats (-Defense nature, lower Special, slighlty lower Speed)
	> the early game manipulation movement is slower
	> Tentacruel manipulation can only be done once (no 1st try catch => reset after one hour of run).

Q. How do you catch the Tentacruel ? Do you use a Master Ball ?
A. No. Master Ball can be obtained thanks to TID/LID manipulation (Lottery in Jubilife), but my seed doesn't allow that. Anyway, it's very slow to get it, and catching a Tentacruel with a Net Ball is decent enough (~16%). I'm also trying to manipulate the seed of the fight itself (depending on when the fight starts) to lead me to a favorable scenerio (a catch at least, or even better, a catch turn 1). This is the most tedious part, because the fight seed generation depends on an intern parameter (the in-game framecounter) which undergoes lags (mostly predictable) throughout the entire run.

Q. How do you solve this laggy parameter problem ?
A. I studied the underlying mechanics of the lags and came up with a home-made program that is 'supposed to' predict what the lag will be depending on what occurs during the run. It's still in testings as i do my runs, since i have no proof that the emulator (on which i did my tests) has exactly the same lags as the console has. I just know my program can be close to simulate that.

Q. Why do you choose the girl ?
A.	1) She's cute.
	2) Lucas talks slighlty less in cutscenes
	3) It's required for my early game manipulation to work
	4) She's cute.