Glitches Annotations

There is around 170000 frames (47 minutes) of pure trading and candy feeding. In order to keep this movie entertaining, I will now start explaining glitches in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire

Although this TAS did not use glitches, they're still incredibly interesting and worth explaining. Contrary to what some casuals may believe, glitches do not inherently make speedruns unskillful or uninteresting. Oftentimes they do the opposite

The first major glitch in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire revolves around an item most players forget exists: Mail

Mail are items that can have a custom phrase written into them. The player is limited to a select few words from the games' Easy Chat System when writing a phrase

Mail can then be equipped onto Pokemon. The purpose of which is to send messages to other players when trading Pokemon

The game uses memory slots to keep track of the phrases written on Mail that is held by Pokemon. There are six slots dedicated to this to account for six party members

Since there isn't nearly enough memory slots to account for all 420 PC slots Pokemon cannot be deposited into the PC while holding Mail

What Mail glitches essentially do is edit memory slots separate from the aforementioned six slots to do funky stuff. The way this is done starts with one move: Thief

In a double battle, a poke can use Thief on their partner that's holding a Mail to transfer that Mail onto them. However, the data in the original holders' and the thief's' memory slots do not get altered during this process to account for the change in Mail being held

So essentially you have one poke holding Mail while not having Mail data in its respective memory slot and another that has no Mail while having Mail data in its memory slot. Taking off the "Mail" from the latter poke is what causes a major glitch: Tile Corruption

After taking off the "Mail" from the thief, the game attempts to erase memory from its memory slot. However, since there is none, the game instead alters memory from a completely different slot, the 255th memory slot in the game's memory

The reason for the 255th slot is a bit convoluted: Each party slot has a variable that points to which memory slot holds its Mail data. If the poke in the party slot has no Mail memory, that variable is 255

When taking off Mail, the game searches the memory slot based on that variable. So when a poke has "Mail" yet no Mail Memory, the game searches for the 255th memory slot when the player takes off the "Mail", resulting in one of the tiles on the map being corrupted

When the code for taking off Mail is executed on the 255th memory slot, it inadvertently changes one tile's value to 0, effectively making a blank tile with no collision checks allowing the player to access places they aren't supposed to

Since you can only corrupt one (map specific) tile per area with this method, this can't be used to skip huge portions of the game. RTA speedrunners, instead, use this method to manip and catch a level 35 Tentacool far before they have access to Surf

Tile Corruption can be done before even the second gym making Tentacool over 10 levels higher than its opponents. This combined with STAB Surf and its ability Clear Body saving boatloads of stat lowering animations makes it the fastest option to complete the game

Additionally, Tile Corruption can corrupt 9 more tiles. This process involves writing memory to the 255th memory slot by writing words into Mail. Since each Mail has 9 slots for words, there are 9 additional tiles that can be corrupted

In order to do this, all 6 Mail Memory Slots need to be filled while still having a poke that isn't holding Mail. This is possible because, as stated before, a poke that has its Mail stolen still has Mail Memory in its respective slot

Additionally, the Mail taken from the thief in the aforementioned steps turns into a corrupted Mail. When this Mail is equipped, it still writes memory into a Mail Memory Slot but instead has the properties of a normal item

When this Mail is deequipped, it doesn't delete memory from its respective Memory Slot meaning that you can have two Mail Memory Slots with data without even having one poke equipped with Mail. After giving Mail to 4 pokes, all 6 slots will then be filled

Giving Mail to the 5th poke results in the 255th slot being editable. The game has a variable that keeps track of which open slot to input Mail Memory into and when there is none, it is 255. Therefore, like last time, the 255th slot is edited

By inputting 9 words into a Mail as mentioned earlier, it is possible to edit 9 tiles to various different types of tiles (sand, water, dive spots etc). The types of tiles one can edit those tiles into are based on the location and the words available to input

Unfortunately, it is not possible (as of the making of this TAS) to edit any 9 tiles as one would like. Each map has a set of 9 tiles that can be edited this way meaning that skipping huge portions of the game by corrupting Waterfall tiles is not possible

However, the process of filling up all 6 Mail Memory Slots while having one poke without Mail and then trying to add even more Mail Memory is an integral part of another major glitch in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire: Item Duplication

After filling up all 6 Mail Memory Slots, the player then equips a poke with an item they wish to duplicate. Afterwards, they attempt to equip a Mail onto that poke, replacing the item. This process will fail due to there not being an open Mail Memory Slot

As a result, the held item of the poke doesn't change. However, the process that does *not* fail is the process of \"returning\" the held item to the bag. The item gets added to the bag despite the poke still holding it, effectively cloning the item

Just like Tile Corruption, this glitch can be done before the second gym and only requires a handful of Mail. This means that you can clone Rare Candies and easily get a level 100 poke before the second gym

Although RTA speedrunners obviously use this, they do not level up to level 100, as level 67 is perfectly adequate for Tentacruel to steamroll the game while saving time from less Rare Candy cloning and feeding

Additionally, this is also why it's faster to level up Tentacool to that level instead of a starter. Since Tentacool is caught at a much higher level than the starter is at the time it needs far less Rare Candies to reach its desired level

Speaking of the starter, it obviously needs to do all of the fights before Tentacool Instead of Mudkip, the starter for traditional RTA glitchless speedruns, RTA glitched speedrunners choose Treecko

As shown from this TAS, Mudkip cannot defeat Roxanne quickly without extra battles or candies. Treecko can, however, and it gets past the early game and ready for Tentacool far quicker than Mudkip can

However, in a RTA setting, Treecko struggles to defeat Roxanne consistently without extra battles. Therefore, RTA speedrunners use RNG manipulation to win the fight

In order to do this, they save and reset the game to reset the RNG values. Then, they must hit specific frames on each move selection to hit desired RNG values. Each input has a sizeable range of acceptable frames to make it feasible to hit consistently

The move Treecko uses to win is Bullet Seed. Each move selection input manips Bullet Seed to hit enough times. Geodude needs 3 or more hits, while Nosepass requires 2 turns: a 3 hit and a 5 hit. Nosepass is also manipped to choose Harden on the input before coming out

Usually, battle manips are not worth it in RTA speedruns. The first reason is parity. Since the parity of the input to initiate a battle determines the parity for the *entire* battle, battle manips must account for both parities which is not feasible in most cases

For example, let's say there's a window for crit frames on frames 300, 302 and 304. This window cannot be hit if the battle is on an odd parity meaning that frames 299, 301 and 303 must also be crits for the frame window to work for a manip consistently

RTA speedrunners cannot rely on always entering the battle at the same parity due to the difficulty of hitting 1 frame windows consistently. The Roxanne battle manip is designed such that Nosepass is always fought on even frames regardless of the starting parity

This is possible because Bullet Seed advances RNG differently depending on how many hits it is rolled to get. Since Geodude only requires 3 hits, it is possible to get away with hitting a different amount of times as long as its 3 or higher

With this in mind, there are 3 frames in a row (for both parities) that roll for 3 or more hits while advancing RNG to an even parity. This means that the odd frames advance by an odd amount to get an even parity while even frames advance by an even amount

As a result, Nosepass can consistently be fought at an even parity. With that, there are very close-by clusters of frames for the 3 hit and 5 hit Bullet Seeds, both with even parities. The 3 hit is a 3 frame window while the 5 hit is a 4 frame window

A 4 frame window that accounts for both parities would need to be 8 frames long which especially for the 5 hit, is simply too rare and would require a very long delay. This manip working regardless of which parity the battle starts with makes it consistent

The second reason battle manips are usually not worth it is that the required save and quit loses more time than the time saved from a guaranteed faster fight. This manip is an exception as the time saved from no extra trainers more than makes up the save and quit

Additionally, the manipped version of this fight saves nearly a minute over the non manipped version with either Treecko or Mudkip. The reason is that Treecko's 5 hit Bullet Seed does more than 16 damage to Nosepass. 16 hp being the hp range Nosepass is healed

This means that Treecko can kill Nosepass at a higher hp than its heal range, preventing Roxanne from using any potions at all. The average non manipped version of the fight involves Roxanne healing Nosepass twice before it can be killed

This is both consistently executable and time-saving making it more than worth it. However the cherry on top is the Rare Candy Pickup it enables at the end

RTA speedrunners catch a Zigzagoon before Roxanne and, at the input to close the battle manip it to Pickup a Rare Candy. This allows speedrunners to start cloning and feeding candies earlier and save time in some fights

Without this, speedrunners will need to wait until after Flannery to get a Rare Candy, from Route 111 and do some fights while not completely overleveled. Although this isn't terribly slow, it still loses time to being able to overlevel earlier

Rare Candy Pickup can be manipped from any fight but doing it after the Roxanne manip cuts out a save and quit and lets one save and quit kill two stones with one bird

It's important to note that, for this route, Zigzagoon is not an extra catch. 5 pokes are needed for the cloning glitch to work and, after Treecko, Tentacool, Abra and Wingull, one more is still needed and Zigzagoon fills that role

This is yet another speedrun category in which Zigzagoon is integral for. Simply put Zigzagoon is built different