10606 FAQ

Pokemon Sapphire 10606 FAQ

Q: What's 10606?

A: Hasty 7/20/23/21/15/31. "10606" refers to the position of this Mudkip in Mountebank's list of the first 100k Mudkips.

Q: What do you mean 'list'?

A: The Mudkip's sex, nature, and IVs are 100% predictable based on the state of the RNG from the initial seed, which starts at soft reset (A+B+START+SELECT) and advances once per frame. This means that if we confirm Mudkip on a given frame, we will know our Mudkip, so for a little less than a year we have been routing and testing the game using a variety of Mudkips selected from this list. Credit to Mountebank (full explanation here: http://forums.pokemonspeedruns.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=398).

Q: Sup with your splits?

A: I am a scrub Mac user, so there is no timer available for me that I can start with a negative countdown, as you will see other runners do. In the past I have used an external timer in addition to my splits (on my phone) to time my resets, but current practice has us timing two inputs now instead of just one (see below). This would require too much arbitrary precision on my part starting the timers, so I just built my reset into the splits, and am hoping to be able to practice hitting a relatively precise millisecond (about a quarter of a second) for both the trainer ID manipulation and the Mudkip confirmation. As "official" timing goes by the in-game timer, which does not run during the intro, I am free to wait there as long as I like (this would in fact be necessary to manipulate the TID for a Mudkip that was, say, significantly farther in the list).

Q: Trainer ID manipulation?

A: A major problem in Mudkip manipulation has been some very unreliable variance in the advancing of the RNG state, which appeared to be affected by more than just framecount. Following some preliminary testing by Exarion, MKDasher determined that the game's RNG also advances whenever an NPC moves, causing runners to be late in the list when they were actually good on their timing. It advances when the player's trainer ID is generated (before or during the truck cutscene) as well. By ending the intro ("Well, I'll be expecting you later. Come see me in my Pokemon Lab.") at a certain time, however, we can aim for a certain "cluster" of IDs that all advance the RNG the same amount, thus controlling the TID variance. NPC movement cannot currently be manipulated.

This is useful because in the past, aiming for a single frame was extremely difficult because timing has to be precise, but the game would not always cooperate. As such in the past most runners have used Mudkip clusters which allow for variance within 5+ frames anyway. The benefits of this Mudkip are however so great that it is not good enough to take the average "runnable" kip.

Q: Why 10606?

A: Per Exarion: http://pastebin.com/pHyXAeYw