UPDATE: Looks like menus can delay timers the same way battles can! Anubis (@Sibuna_Switch on Twitter) confirmed this and some other stuff in BDSP, check this post here: x.com/Sibuna_Switch/status/1835417318265921664 I suspect it's the same in DPPt and that you can do the same timer trick that I show at the end of the video to experience minimal delay, but TLDR if you want to experience minimal delays for Honey/Berry trees the best thing to do is to leave your DS/Switch on and don't do anything at all lol.
The biggest crime with honey trees in my opinion is that they never added Teddiursa as a honey tree encounter when its many pokedex entries state how much it loves honey
@sho829 then it could have been added post national dex. Or better yet, made it a Sinnoh native from the start. I just find it criminal that they introduce a honey mechanic and don't include the one pokemon that's personality is centred around honey
@Ospyro3em it is in the game? I checked. However it's only available in one location and the other requires having emerald in the ds slot. I'm guessing it is only in one location post game?
@@sippingthe Imagine you're boiling water for tea and the Muchlax is the finished drink. Everytime you get in to battle, it's like turning the stove off and keeps the water from boiling for a little longer.
When I was a kid, I went HARD trying to get a Munchlax. I had a roster of 8+ honey trees that I would slather every day, 3x per day (before school, after school, and right before bed). No Munchlax. I gave up after 3 months of failed attempts. Then 16-years-later, I dusted off my old copy of Diamond to play a nuzlocke...and got a damn Munchlax as my very first honey tree encounter...🙃
If I remember right only like 4 honey trees across the whole game can spawn munchlax (it's different for every person) and with only those 4 trees it's still only a 1% chance
That 'saving 60 seconds on the honey tree timer' reminds me of doing farming runs in Runescape. Everything runs on a gigantic schedule in Runescape, including when plants grow. Sometimes you can plant your crops right at the perfect time where the next 'growth' tick is in a few seconds. So you plant some seeds, water them, and then BOOM, they instantly become saplings.
Funnily the way this bug was described also reminded us of RuneScape, but the other way around where you just *miss* a growth tick and have to wait even longer for something to fully grow. Though at least it's impossible to miss multiple growth ticks like these honey trees oof
I'm so glad to finally get a concrete answer as to why my trees weren't giving an encounter after 6 hours - doing a professor oak challenge in BDSP has been awful because of the trees not actively giving encounters when they should. I would set alarms for exactly 6 hours from the last slather and then go exp grind my Pokemon needing to evolve and it would cause offsets of hours of time. Eventually I just gave up on the timers and would wait 12 hours instead. When I woke up and when I'd go to bed. Thank you
TheMasterZelda here, had a great time assisting Etchy in the making of this video! Very glad we finally have an explanation for what happened in that great speedrun you did :) Looking forward to you running it again
@@silentstorm5757 doudou2714 is partially right here, i was expecting the delay to be caused by something Etchy did specifically in his run - here, encounters were the prime suspect. From there on, it was only a question of figuring what exactly it could be. By using trials and errors along with a memory viewer, i was able to find the internal timer for honey trees and from there, able to deduce everything else. Etchy then proceeded to more accurately test my findings and here we are, with the theory proved
I have a huge issue with GF making things needlessly rare and scarce. And I'm not talking about shinies. I'm talking about how in Sun and Moon, you get exactly one set of Apricorn balls. Hopefully you save before using them. Im talking about how in SwSh you have you use 4 apricorns to have a ONE PERCENT CHANCE to get ONE apricorn ball. Im talking about the ridiculous encounter rates for some exclusive mons. Just... Why??? Respect our time please. I'm a game dev myself and you do have to be really really careful when working with probability and RNG.
There's something comforting with knowing that a mystery I could have had as a kid would be enlightened years, maybe even decades after, even if the mystery itself isn't completely life changing. It's still nice to know that the small things that you wonder about is something someone else out there wondered about as well.
It's Diamond and Pearl, now playable on a big screen, idk what more people were asking for! 🤷♂️ I absolutely loved playing Shining Pearl 15 years after I played Diamond So nostalgic! ☺️
@@LRM12o8 They could have AT LEAST fixed some of the existing bugs, not made it 1.5 times the original price for essentially the same code and content, added in the battle frontier that they had in Platinum (you know, one of the biggest things fans have been asking for over the past decade or so), added in a lot of the story and game fixes they had in Platinum in general, added in newer Pokemon from modern generations (Oreburg City is in a coal mining town, how the hell could they NOT add the Coalossal line), and generally keep consistent with the quality of past remakes, all of which (aside from maybe Let’s Go in some areas if you’re talking about specific aspects) did a great job at keeping the same magic of the original while expanding upon them and adding a plethora of new content.
@@ScubaShark8857 *"not made it 1.5 times the original price for essentially the same code and content,"* Like it or not, inflation is a thing. The prices of back then wont be the same today. *"added in the battle frontier that they had in Platinum"* Please no, that was a boring chore. Sure, it is interesting to play casually once or twice, but getting all the medals is an annoying chore. *"added in a lot of the story and game fixes they had in Platinum in general,"* What story fixes? It was a downgrade. Neither Charon nor Looker expand the story in any meaningful way, Charon is just there and Looker, instead of adding interesting Tag Battle segments against Team Galactic, is always conveniently distracted to be of any use. As for game fixes, BD/SP had them by default thanks to being in a better console. *"and generally keep consistent with the quality of past remakes,"* Besides OR/AS, the prior remakes were bad. FR/LG is just generic and HG/SS has "wasted potential" written all over it.
I never knew about the Munchlax only being in certain trees based on your ID as a kid. I just would get it as my first encounter on the same tree for both of my playthroughs. Wonder what those odds are.
This is similar to me always, and I mean always having Wurmple evolve into the same cocoon in gen 4. I restarted the game dozens of times as a kid, had both diamond and pearl. I evolved several at least once trying to get the other one, and I never got the alternate cocoon. The cocoon I never got through evolution was the one that is available in the wild in Pearl
Honestly even when this mechanic works as intended it’s still absolutely terrible. No idea why they thought that six hours was an appropriate amount of time to make us wait.
Because back when we were kids, time felt meaningless, but that's what made these kinds of things feel magical and rewarding. Nowadays, it seems like everything has to be instant gratification, and Pokémon has lost a majority of its charm catering to this mentality. Shiny Pokémon have suffered the same fate too, now being obtainable in a matter of minutes in Scarlet and Violet, and are treated like a standard collectable by the community instead of these extremely rare trophies. Back then it was the most insane thing just to SEE a shiny at all, now it's common for people to complain if they haven't seen one in under an hour. That feeling of discovery and exploration is almost completely gone now, and honestly the only Pokémon game that has ever felt that way since Black and White 2 was Legends Arceus.
This would be a total non issue if Muchlax's encounter rate wasn't so comically low. Even a 10-15 percent increase would've alleviated this drastically.
@@Forged4War206 I played Platinum a lot as a kid and used the honey trees once, then never again. It has nothing to do with the "magic" of older games, the risk of waiting +6 real-life hours is not worth the reward of maybe getting a rare pokemon(or nothing, which is what I got).
to be fair, its also some of the most documented games in terms of bugs, only rivaled by N64 games like Mario 64 and the 3D Zeldas. so we might be experiencing some sample bias there, simply because these games are a perfect mix of old, widely played and beloved, and extensively examined by passionate fans.
The most silly mistakes happen in a lot of games. Like, I can't count the times I have seen errors in GBA fire emblem games that are not even really bugs, but rather the devs putting the wrong values into their correctly coded functions. Though yeah, Pokemon "Gen 0" are probably the most broken games the mainstream knows, so nonsense like this genuinely seems like an inherited legacy.
I don't think it would change that much for me, honestly, but this is still incredibly cool! The fact HGSS solved it, despite it being way less needed is so cool, honestly. Those games really were something else, uh?
I think I have a bug for you to look into: I was playing through White a few years ago, and I had just gotten to Clay's fight. I sent out my Sigilyph against his Excadrill, set up a Reflect because I fully expected to have to win with my Dewott. I stayed in for chip damage, not caring if Sigilyph went down... and Excadrill used Bulldoze, despite my being a Flying-type. Fast-forward to Marshal, I lead with Sigilyph to set up Reflect, and once that's up, I attack... and Throh uses Bulldoze despite my Flying-type, just like Clay's Excadrill before it. My hypothesis is that Reflect (and potentially Light Screen) somehow mask a Pokemon's secondary type from the AI, meaning Excadrill and Marshal both thought my Psychic/Flying Sigilyph was pure Psychic. I haven't seen this documented anywhere, so if you could somehow explore that, I'd be thrilled.
Every time you enter battle Palkia manipulates the space around you causing the world to freeze in place while you are battling, and then when the battle ends Dialga rounds time down to the last known minute and not knowing what to do with all this wasted time Dialga eats the leftover time as a snack that it shares with Celebi.
I think that the fact that this happens at all is crazy. How is anyone supposed to know that's what's been causing the delay this whole time? I always thought there was just a time frame where the tree gets a Pokemon and not that it was delayed this whole time.
@@ToluElswordCEO That's seriously the save message? I play JP Pokemon because... there's no good reason other than I can. And I don't remember the save message being any different.
I think in some games it’ll say the “a lot of data” part only if you moved pokémon in the PC, because it’ll skip re-saving the PC boxes if you didn’t change anything.
100% know this happened to me when I was younger, I remember it clear as day. I went hunting around the internet and found people complaining, but never an answer...
As a Heracross fan, the honey-tree mechanic is one of my *least* favorite mechanic in any generation. 6 hours of real-life time disrespects the player's time.
background timers being paused under certain circumstances can be found in other games (such as: baten kaitos 100% speedruns, where the evolution of cards have real time timers that get paused on menuing and in battle and requires the speedrunner to optimize these as much as possible), but it is insanely enlightening that this is the same thing happening and that it took this long to uncover. i feel like most of the issue is in the opaqueness of this timer quirk, and the fact that officially printed guide books didn't even have this information. as annoying as this research result is, it's always awesome to know that we can still very much learn from these old games by picking them apart. what's annoying is the fact that the best thing to do is... nothing at all. i sure do enjoy not playing video games! :T
Imagine counting time by minutes instead of seconds or millis. Then imagine the bug being present for the core game mechanic. Then imagine copy and pasting that bug over
But they saved two whole bytes! Granted, a day has 86400 seconds, so they could have gone with a granularity of 2 seconds instead of 60 and still only used the same amount of space.
I always forgot all about the honey trees whenever I played,and never known about this stuff until years later how dreadful these honey trees are,honestly,I'm glad I forgot about them XD but I feel feel bad for shiny hunters that wanted this fucking munchlax though
Really interesting video, kudos to you for testing it in so many ways, and kudos to MasterZelda for figuring it out! Reakky depressing that BDSP has the same bug -- it really felt like a soulless remake that didn't even have the QoL updates that Plat had, but man... the fact this bug is still in it takes the CAKE!
I started up a cute charm file and always assumed I was just wrong about when I'd done it as to why it wasn't showing up when I expected, I can't believe there was an actual reason to it and my shiny hunting while I waited was the real cause! incredible work y'all've done!
BDSP are, in fact, he most faithful remakes of any game ever made. All the bugs from 20 years ago somehow persisted, This may also make them the laziest remakes of all time...
Faithful, plus being playable on a big fat TV. That's all I was asking for from a re-release of a game I first played when I was 10/11, 15 years later. 😂 (I never in my life erased a Pokémon save file, because I didn't want to delete my Pokémon and I never got the alternate version of any generation cause a new Pokémon game cost two months worth of my pocket money. Thus I put hundreds of hours into my original Emerald and Diamond savefiles over many years, while only having played through the story once. And I encountered Driftloon on my Diamond playthrough without knowing that it only appears on Friday nights. I thought for a long time that Driftloon just always appears after you beat Team Galactic at the Windfarm.)
I noticed this when I was replaying platinum for a living dex! I didn't think too much about it because I also thought it was some sort of lag affecting my game
i encountered this bug in BDSP because i continued the story while i waited for the honey trees to spawn pokemon. it being hours off of when it was supposed to made me no longer want to even try to get the honey tree pokemon in game so i just transferred them from home after.
It's really interesting that it keeps track of minutes instead of seconds. Timestamps usually work by keeping track of the number of seconds that have passed, but because it was on DS, maybe they thought it would save on memory or CPU or something?
It’s most likely a bit of both. While I can’t speak to the DS in specific, you can usually define integers with different ranges that each use a different amount of bits. Thus, bigger ranges use slightly more memory. The savings in this case are minimal in ROM, but probably useful in RAM since you don’t need to allocate as much space to keep the variable in memory, and probably helps reduce the amount of time needed to make any changes to it. Pausing the timer during battle gives the space and computation time that would be devoted to updating it for other things. I don’t know how much DPPt actually needed to be optimized to run but this is such a ludicrously obscure bug that no one was going to find it in a reasonable time frame.
Dear void, core memory unlock moment. Munchlax, as a teen I encountered one the very first time I used honey, and assumed it was common, knocking it out on the expectation I'd find another. I tried 3 more times and basically erased the mechanic from my mind after that.
I mean.. since gen 4 is decompiled and ready to be read one could have "just" looked for this in the code to be 100% accurate but this is a more practical and mch more fun way to confirm. Cool video and I understand the effort you put into this.
Why did Gamefreak hate Munchlax so much? getting him was basically impossible and his spawn requirements were just ridiculous... 4 random trees in your game can spawn Munchlax so not only do you have to find those random trees by hand but also wait the tree timer and get lucky with a 1% chance of appearing on said Munchlax tree Imagine trying to shiny hunt for a tree Munchlax 💀
A bug? That wasted everyone's time? Introduced in Gen 4? Due to the advent of honey trees? You're clearly talking about Burmy's three forms, and gender-divergent evolution paths.
At this point, I'm pretty sure that ILCA was feeling *very* passive-aggressive when making BDSP. It's like they went "the fans say they want a faithful remake? let's give it to them."
it always warms my heart that we are learning things about these old gems many years after they were released. the science and experimentation is pure gold. thanks for the content
That is so strange, they can stop you from cheating by changing the time because they so accurately keep track of the offset, but then instead of updating the timer to match the offset away from the starting time, it updates using a completely different less accurate timer? I feel like that must have be programmed by an intern, lol.
The offset is a static value that gets added to or subtracted from the factory timer. All they have to do when you save the game is store the static value in the save file and when you load the game compares the saved offset to the one the current system is using and apply the penalty if the two numbers don't match.
@@alexstewart9592 Exactly! When I say accurately, I mean in terms of the static number used. Instead of ticking an integer number to keep track of the timer, they could just use another static number. First, check to make sure the system clock has not been cheated. Then, assuming everything is fine, subtract the time at which the event was started from the current system clock, and if it's equal to or less than 0, the spawn can happen. Much more simple, and extremely accurate. Of course it gets more complicated depending on how they keep track of system time, but only marginally. The standard is to use an unsigned integer and tick continuously upward. This number would then be worked backwards from to determine the actual date and time for the system. If they use a different method, they would of course need to include whatever other static numbers they need. Still much lighter and accurate than what is implemented.
I could never get those stupid honey trees to work. I half expected this video to be a proclamation that they never worked for anyone and it was a sham mechanic all along lol
I found a munchlax at the honey tree directly north of oreburgh completely randomly when I was 6. I will never forget it. I’ve never found a full odds shiny but I’ve found a munchlax
Game Freak (and I guess ILCA) really love developing their games by the ambient glow of an anglerfish Thanks to everyone for all of the research! This was a really neat watch!
The burmy I got from a honey tree was male and shiny. The luck on that was never replicated for me again in any pokemon game. The Shiny Mothim had to be on the team, even though it sucks.
I don't know how to put into words just how much I love this channel AAAAA Please keep making videos!!! This type of hyper specific infos on some of my fave games and the amount of effort you put into finding them make me so happy!
Munchlax took putting a snorelax from leafgreen with a lax incense in the pal park, breeding and hatching it. I had a munchlax from month 4 of owning diamond
I got recommended your two most recent videos and I decided to checked out your channel and subscribe since I enjoyed them a lot. Turns out you did a sort of fresh start with your channel and you've just come back. Good luck with your new videos, can't wait to see them!
Hey! Thanks for the research! It will help a ton of people for sure But, I have a question about HGSS : you tried this with the berry pot, but what about the Safari Guy who should call you after 3 hours? I heard a lot of people complaining because he hasn't called after 3 hours, sooo maybe it has the same bug And maybe GF used another system for the berry pot because it is in a menu (that breaks the timer)
Great info. I don't think I'd ever put it to practical use, but this explains a frustration of mine that I've had for ages, and I really am glad to know what it was now. Thank you.
Everyone else: *tries to get Munchlax the normal way* Me: *transfers my Snorlax through Pal Park or whatever it was called from my Gen 3 games to my brother's game and have him breed a Munchlax for me*
That was the way for me, except it interested me that wild came with leftovers 100% iirc, but it's easy enough to harvest multiples of those anyways across multiple games...
I never bothered too much with honey trees but I grew a lot of berries back in Diamond. To optimise this I would just have short sessions of watering, harvesting and replanting even on days when I didn´t have much time to play. I planned to do these at the same time every day (sometimes integrated into longer sessions), but realized that the events were gradually moving further back. I would just put that on me being late and fumbling around sometimes, but I probably lost some time to this phenomenon, too.
Here I was, hopping I would get the answer as to why I haven't found a Munchlax in the trees for literally 17 years... Turns out I don't even suffer from this bug...
If you have 2 DS’s with the same initial time stamp (through hacked or other means), could you set one to an earlier time and one to a later time, so that you can skip the 6 hour waiting period for your speedrun? Just by swapping which DS the cartridge was in?
Nope, because it ALSO checks the DS MAC address. So you would have to take the wifi card out of one system and put it into the other lol. I'm gonna cover time travel mechanics more in-depth in a future video cause its pretty funky.
Time travel is hilarious. I can remember wanting to cheese BW2 so bad, so I looked it up and Gen5(Idk about Gen 4) only notices if you actually skip a day. If you just go to a time right before midnight and rush back into the game to let the day roll over inside of it, you successfully cheated.
@@Etch you could probably fake the mac address by hacking the ds would still require finding out how the mac address is retrieved and somehow faking that though, which is more of a time waste than dis- and reassembling two ds's ,-,
I feel like this is less a bug and more a coding choice to be able to store the time information in minutes (maybe for optimizations?) and the devs thought no one would notice because the odds of you running into this are very rare in normal gameplay, players wouldn't go check the tree at exactly 6 hours, they wouldn't even have the knowledge it takes 6 hours probably, the average player would probably go and back and check every once in a while.
9:48 I never knew that berries would just grow like that in real time. That’s the first I’ve ever seen it. As a kid I just assumed you’d have to leave the area or reload the game to get them to grow lol.
UPDATE: Looks like menus can delay timers the same way battles can! Anubis (@Sibuna_Switch on Twitter) confirmed this and some other stuff in BDSP, check this post here: x.com/Sibuna_Switch/status/1835417318265921664
I suspect it's the same in DPPt and that you can do the same timer trick that I show at the end of the video to experience minimal delay, but TLDR if you want to experience minimal delays for Honey/Berry trees the best thing to do is to leave your DS/Switch on and don't do anything at all lol.
I spent months trying to get Munchlax in Platinum on an actual ds lite. It was not fun.
I feel all your pain.
Now I'm no programmer, but reusing timing logic from the original for a remake on a different console screams rush job
@nicolask.3825 I mean on release, BDSP didn't have the title screen sequence or postgame. That was added into the game in a day 1 emergency patch.
The biggest crime with honey trees in my opinion is that they never added Teddiursa as a honey tree encounter when its many pokedex entries state how much it loves honey
Wait, what?! Man, that is a crime.
He eats it all too fast. U don't even get a chance to see him
To be fair it isn't native as a Sinnoh mon
@sho829 then it could have been added post national dex. Or better yet, made it a Sinnoh native from the start. I just find it criminal that they introduce a honey mechanic and don't include the one pokemon that's personality is centred around honey
@Ospyro3em it is in the game? I checked. However it's only available in one location and the other requires having emerald in the ds slot. I'm guessing it is only in one location post game?
Me, to my Pokemon: "Every 60 seconds in Sinnoh, a minute passes. Together, we can stop this."
Thank you for your service
So imagine a bus leaves the station every 21 frames...
I haven’t watched the video yet but this is hilarious without context
Super Mario reference?
General Speed Running reference, but most used with Mario.
can someone actually explain this bug with this analogy
@@sippingthe Imagine you're boiling water for tea and the Muchlax is the finished drink. Everytime you get in to battle, it's like turning the stove off and keeps the water from boiling for a little longer.
When I was a kid, I went HARD trying to get a Munchlax. I had a roster of 8+ honey trees that I would slather every day, 3x per day (before school, after school, and right before bed). No Munchlax. I gave up after 3 months of failed attempts. Then 16-years-later, I dusted off my old copy of Diamond to play a nuzlocke...and got a damn Munchlax as my very first honey tree encounter...🙃
If I remember right only like 4 honey trees across the whole game can spawn munchlax (it's different for every person) and with only those 4 trees it's still only a 1% chance
@@BorderFreak yea youre right and its dependent on your TID and SID which trees are munchlax trees
@@gobbagoo at least TID can be checked for pretty reasonably, but SID being a factor is just a slap to your face
@@BorderFreakIt’s less than 1%
Ah Fate. So fickle. On some days she is generous and on most days she is a troll.
Glad you got your Munchlax. Haven't caught mine
There's something humorous about the fact that gen 4, the games with the god of time as a Pokemon in it, has a time glitch like this
between this and the infamous 'saving a lot of data' message that takes forever, I'm convinced Dialga is just trolling us
@@archidiumDP also had an easily accessible void you can enter into. Up to you if you want to blame Palkia or Giratina for that haha
@@enemystand2981the void prob opened up from Darkrai stomping Dialga and Palkia too hard 😭
@@hobo_hobo_17 PMD Darkrai, obviously. DPPt Darkrai doesn't give a shit.
Pokémon iron(y)
There is another bug that secretly wasted people’s time…
It is called male combee…
I found a random shiny male combee in the bug catching contest is HGSS a few years ago
lmfao nice pun
@@Ryouski If it was me, I'd go out of my way to get him to level 100 out of spite for the RNG gods at that point.
that's ditto material
Speciesist, as is this game, and any fascist thing from capitalism, but normalized and needs to not be? Blame them?
I now imagine Dialga just messing with the space-time continuum to keep Munchlax locked in a honey tree dimension lol.
dialga, the gatekeeper of munch.
dialga doing its absolute most to prevent Etchy from getting a munchlax:
Or just to mess with people.
it’s punishment for eating all of dialga’s oran berries
That 'saving 60 seconds on the honey tree timer' reminds me of doing farming runs in Runescape. Everything runs on a gigantic schedule in Runescape, including when plants grow. Sometimes you can plant your crops right at the perfect time where the next 'growth' tick is in a few seconds.
So you plant some seeds, water them, and then BOOM, they instantly become saplings.
Funnily the way this bug was described also reminded us of RuneScape, but the other way around where you just *miss* a growth tick and have to wait even longer for something to fully grow. Though at least it's impossible to miss multiple growth ticks like these honey trees oof
You can also have just harvested your plants, only for a growth tick to happen right before you can replant so now you have weeds in your patch
@@amyelnah8717that's why auto-weed from tithe farm is the goat
I'm so glad to finally get a concrete answer as to why my trees weren't giving an encounter after 6 hours - doing a professor oak challenge in BDSP has been awful because of the trees not actively giving encounters when they should. I would set alarms for exactly 6 hours from the last slather and then go exp grind my Pokemon needing to evolve and it would cause offsets of hours of time. Eventually I just gave up on the timers and would wait 12 hours instead. When I woke up and when I'd go to bed.
Thank you
Well fancy seeing you here hehe
I posted a video on how to use time zone settings on the switch to get fast honey tree encounters in BDSP.
If it was bdsp could you not just go underground and catch a munchlax there?
Funny that the bug persists in BDSP
faithful remakes
These guys just did a ctrl c and a ctrl v at the game's code and Imported this into unity.
@@internautaanonimoEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSYYYYYYYYY MONEYYYYYYYYYYYYY
@@internautaanonimo this is why the suction cups bug works in BDSP btw
@@robertlupa8273what is the suction cups bug
TheMasterZelda here, had a great time assisting Etchy in the making of this video! Very glad we finally have an explanation for what happened in that great speedrun you did :) Looking forward to you running it again
Nice work! How did you manage to figure out how the timer actually worked?
Why would you say your name? We can see it you clown 😂
@@silentstorm5757i think these type of timer are pretty often the issue when there is a slight delay with the expected timer
@@silentstorm5757 doudou2714 is partially right here, i was expecting the delay to be caused by something Etchy did specifically in his run - here, encounters were the prime suspect. From there on, it was only a question of figuring what exactly it could be. By using trials and errors along with a memory viewer, i was able to find the internal timer for honey trees and from there, able to deduce everything else. Etchy then proceeded to more accurately test my findings and here we are, with the theory proved
Ya made Pokémon game history bro
I can’t believe this all started from getting annoyed at the Munchlax% run several years ago
I have a huge issue with GF making things needlessly rare and scarce. And I'm not talking about shinies. I'm talking about how in Sun and Moon, you get exactly one set of Apricorn balls. Hopefully you save before using them. Im talking about how in SwSh you have you use 4 apricorns to have a ONE PERCENT CHANCE to get ONE apricorn ball. Im talking about the ridiculous encounter rates for some exclusive mons. Just... Why??? Respect our time please. I'm a game dev myself and you do have to be really really careful when working with probability and RNG.
What about the event Pokemon? I was never allowed to have a DS in 2007, so I can never get an (unhacked) Darkrai?? Wtf
There's something comforting with knowing that a mystery I could have had as a kid would be enlightened years, maybe even decades after, even if the mystery itself isn't completely life changing. It's still nice to know that the small things that you wonder about is something someone else out there wondered about as well.
Moral of the story: BDSP is a REALLY faithful remake.
Faithful is good, right?
@@sdgdhpmbp Yes, it is.
It's Diamond and Pearl, now playable on a big screen, idk what more people were asking for! 🤷♂️
I absolutely loved playing Shining Pearl 15 years after I played Diamond So nostalgic! ☺️
@@LRM12o8 They could have AT LEAST fixed some of the existing bugs, not made it 1.5 times the original price for essentially the same code and content, added in the battle frontier that they had in Platinum (you know, one of the biggest things fans have been asking for over the past decade or so), added in a lot of the story and game fixes they had in Platinum in general, added in newer Pokemon from modern generations (Oreburg City is in a coal mining town, how the hell could they NOT add the Coalossal line), and generally keep consistent with the quality of past remakes, all of which (aside from maybe Let’s Go in some areas if you’re talking about specific aspects) did a great job at keeping the same magic of the original while expanding upon them and adding a plethora of new content.
@@ScubaShark8857 *"not made it 1.5 times the original price for essentially the same code and content,"*
Like it or not, inflation is a thing. The prices of back then wont be the same today.
*"added in the battle frontier that they had in Platinum"*
Please no, that was a boring chore. Sure, it is interesting to play casually once or twice, but getting all the medals is an annoying chore.
*"added in a lot of the story and game fixes they had in Platinum in general,"*
What story fixes? It was a downgrade. Neither Charon nor Looker expand the story in any meaningful way, Charon is just there and Looker, instead of adding interesting Tag Battle segments against Team Galactic, is always conveniently distracted to be of any use.
As for game fixes, BD/SP had them by default thanks to being in a better console.
*"and generally keep consistent with the quality of past remakes,"*
Besides OR/AS, the prior remakes were bad. FR/LG is just generic and HG/SS has "wasted potential" written all over it.
I never knew about the Munchlax only being in certain trees based on your ID as a kid. I just would get it as my first encounter on the same tree for both of my playthroughs. Wonder what those odds are.
You should have bought a lottery ticket
@@Propane_Acccessories they really shouldve, because the lottery tickets also use your trainer id
Either you're lying or you have some extreme luck.
@@Infindox Dumb luck.
This is similar to me always, and I mean always having Wurmple evolve into the same cocoon in gen 4.
I restarted the game dozens of times as a kid, had both diamond and pearl. I evolved several at least once trying to get the other one, and I never got the alternate cocoon.
The cocoon I never got through evolution was the one that is available in the wild in Pearl
I thought Munchlax just had a wild haircut for like 5 minutes in the thumbnail
Honestly even when this mechanic works as intended it’s still absolutely terrible. No idea why they thought that six hours was an appropriate amount of time to make us wait.
Because back when we were kids, time felt meaningless, but that's what made these kinds of things feel magical and rewarding. Nowadays, it seems like everything has to be instant gratification, and Pokémon has lost a majority of its charm catering to this mentality. Shiny Pokémon have suffered the same fate too, now being obtainable in a matter of minutes in Scarlet and Violet, and are treated like a standard collectable by the community instead of these extremely rare trophies. Back then it was the most insane thing just to SEE a shiny at all, now it's common for people to complain if they haven't seen one in under an hour. That feeling of discovery and exploration is almost completely gone now, and honestly the only Pokémon game that has ever felt that way since Black and White 2 was Legends Arceus.
This is the one that does not respect your time, at all. At all. At aaaaallllllll.
This would be a total non issue if Muchlax's encounter rate wasn't so comically low. Even a 10-15 percent increase would've alleviated this drastically.
@@Forged4War206 I played Platinum a lot as a kid and used the honey trees once, then never again. It has nothing to do with the "magic" of older games, the risk of waiting +6 real-life hours is not worth the reward of maybe getting a rare pokemon(or nothing, which is what I got).
because they imagined that you sleep
Pokemon games genuinely have the worst, but the most interesting bugs. The amount of discovered manipulations, or exploits, is absolutely mental
to be fair, its also some of the most documented games in terms of bugs, only rivaled by N64 games like Mario 64 and the 3D Zeldas. so we might be experiencing some sample bias there, simply because these games are a perfect mix of old, widely played and beloved, and extensively examined by passionate fans.
The most silly mistakes happen in a lot of games. Like, I can't count the times I have seen errors in GBA fire emblem games that are not even really bugs, but rather the devs putting the wrong values into their correctly coded functions.
Though yeah, Pokemon "Gen 0" are probably the most broken games the mainstream knows, so nonsense like this genuinely seems like an inherited legacy.
@@PatManDX this becomes super obvious watching any speedrun of any game. they all have insane exploits.
is this implying that game programmers aren't that good at their jobs? or they need to hire better people to proofread their code?
@@johnmarkson1990nah, I'd argue that ACE and credit warping is way more extreme then most games every get...
I don't think it would change that much for me, honestly, but this is still incredibly cool!
The fact HGSS solved it, despite it being way less needed is so cool, honestly. Those games really were something else, uh?
I think I have a bug for you to look into: I was playing through White a few years ago, and I had just gotten to Clay's fight. I sent out my Sigilyph against his Excadrill, set up a Reflect because I fully expected to have to win with my Dewott. I stayed in for chip damage, not caring if Sigilyph went down... and Excadrill used Bulldoze, despite my being a Flying-type.
Fast-forward to Marshal, I lead with Sigilyph to set up Reflect, and once that's up, I attack... and Throh uses Bulldoze despite my Flying-type, just like Clay's Excadrill before it. My hypothesis is that Reflect (and potentially Light Screen) somehow mask a Pokemon's secondary type from the AI, meaning Excadrill and Marshal both thought my Psychic/Flying Sigilyph was pure Psychic. I haven't seen this documented anywhere, so if you could somehow explore that, I'd be thrilled.
Every time you enter battle Palkia manipulates the space around you causing the world to freeze in place while you are battling, and then when the battle ends Dialga rounds time down to the last known minute and not knowing what to do with all this wasted time Dialga eats the leftover time as a snack that it shares with Celebi.
I think that the fact that this happens at all is crazy. How is anyone supposed to know that's what's been causing the delay this whole time? I always thought there was just a time frame where the tree gets a Pokemon and not that it was delayed this whole time.
“saving a lot of data please dont turn your system off”
I loved getting this message after I played for less than 2 minutes since the last save! 🤣
@@ToluElswordCEO That's seriously the save message? I play JP Pokemon because... there's no good reason other than I can. And I don't remember the save message being any different.
I think in some games it’ll say the “a lot of data” part only if you moved pokémon in the PC, because it’ll skip re-saving the PC boxes if you didn’t change anything.
100% know this happened to me when I was younger, I remember it clear as day. I went hunting around the internet and found people complaining, but never an answer...
As a Heracross fan, the honey-tree mechanic is one of my *least* favorite mechanic in any generation. 6 hours of real-life time disrespects the player's time.
Like... one hour would be more than enough
background timers being paused under certain circumstances can be found in other games (such as: baten kaitos 100% speedruns, where the evolution of cards have real time timers that get paused on menuing and in battle and requires the speedrunner to optimize these as much as possible), but it is insanely enlightening that this is the same thing happening and that it took this long to uncover. i feel like most of the issue is in the opaqueness of this timer quirk, and the fact that officially printed guide books didn't even have this information. as annoying as this research result is, it's always awesome to know that we can still very much learn from these old games by picking them apart.
what's annoying is the fact that the best thing to do is... nothing at all. i sure do enjoy not playing video games! :T
Imagine counting time by minutes instead of seconds or millis. Then imagine the bug being present for the core game mechanic.
Then imagine copy and pasting that bug over
When they said "faithful remakes" they meant it 😂.
But they saved two whole bytes!
Granted, a day has 86400 seconds, so they could have gone with a granularity of 2 seconds instead of 60 and still only used the same amount of space.
The fact the bug persists in BDSP makes me irrationally angry.
When Munchlax asked for seconds, but it always gets zero.
Go figure the game featuring the deity of time would have such a bug involving time xD
Can't believe you didn't flex the shiny Shellos you found while you were grinding Pickup
I always forgot all about the honey trees whenever I played,and never known about this stuff until years later how dreadful these honey trees are,honestly,I'm glad I forgot about them XD but I feel feel bad for shiny hunters that wanted this fucking munchlax though
We are so here for the Etchy video essay era! 🎉
we need a collab! maybe for lgpe
Really interesting video, kudos to you for testing it in so many ways, and kudos to MasterZelda for figuring it out! Reakky depressing that BDSP has the same bug -- it really felt like a soulless remake that didn't even have the QoL updates that Plat had, but man... the fact this bug is still in it takes the CAKE!
Fortunately as a kid this bug never effected me. Unfortunately, it effected my honey as I'd always forgot i slathered a tree to begin with.
I remember old guides back in the day that would say that trees had a range, being 6-8 hours, It's kinda funny now knowing that wasn't the case
A game guide being wrong?! Unheard of! 😱
@@LRM12o8 I mean, if you really think about it, it wasn't exaactly wrong
I started up a cute charm file and always assumed I was just wrong about when I'd done it as to why it wasn't showing up when I expected, I can't believe there was an actual reason to it and my shiny hunting while I waited was the real cause! incredible work y'all've done!
BDSP are, in fact, he most faithful remakes of any game ever made.
All the bugs from 20 years ago somehow persisted,
This may also make them the laziest remakes of all time...
tbf it takes some effort to meticulously recreate all the bugs in a completely different engine.
Faithful, plus being playable on a big fat TV. That's all I was asking for from a re-release of a game I first played when I was 10/11, 15 years later. 😂
(I never in my life erased a Pokémon save file, because I didn't want to delete my Pokémon and I never got the alternate version of any generation cause a new Pokémon game cost two months worth of my pocket money. Thus I put hundreds of hours into my original Emerald and Diamond savefiles over many years, while only having played through the story once.
And I encountered Driftloon on my Diamond playthrough without knowing that it only appears on Friday nights. I thought for a long time that Driftloon just always appears after you beat Team Galactic at the Windfarm.)
Remember, if your honey tree takes longer than six hours to shake, you should seek medical attention.
I noticed this when I was replaying platinum for a living dex! I didn't think too much about it because I also thought it was some sort of lag affecting my game
i encountered this bug in BDSP because i continued the story while i waited for the honey trees to spawn pokemon. it being hours off of when it was supposed to made me no longer want to even try to get the honey tree pokemon in game so i just transferred them from home after.
i mean BDSP achived what they said, a faithful recreate of the games, recreate all the bugs :P
"it takes you one minute and thirty seconds to complete this battle"
yup, that's gen 4 alright
Imagine having this bug and not even having Munchlax at the end
If BDSP did anything exceptionally well, it's the fact that you can just go to the Grand Underground and Munchlax is extremely common down there.
I just know Dialga is laughing at Munchlax hunters
It's really interesting that it keeps track of minutes instead of seconds. Timestamps usually work by keeping track of the number of seconds that have passed, but because it was on DS, maybe they thought it would save on memory or CPU or something?
It’s most likely a bit of both. While I can’t speak to the DS in specific, you can usually define integers with different ranges that each use a different amount of bits. Thus, bigger ranges use slightly more memory. The savings in this case are minimal in ROM, but probably useful in RAM since you don’t need to allocate as much space to keep the variable in memory, and probably helps reduce the amount of time needed to make any changes to it. Pausing the timer during battle gives the space and computation time that would be devoted to updating it for other things. I don’t know how much DPPt actually needed to be optimized to run but this is such a ludicrously obscure bug that no one was going to find it in a reasonable time frame.
I still think male combee is the bug that wasted so many players' time.
🤣
There is a reason why I still love dppt...because we are STILL finding stuff out! It is fascinating!!!
Dear void, core memory unlock moment. Munchlax, as a teen I encountered one the very first time I used honey, and assumed it was common, knocking it out on the expectation I'd find another. I tried 3 more times and basically erased the mechanic from my mind after that.
As a kid I said f it and bought a action reply to spawn a munchlax in.
Still don't regret it
So fair tbh
I mean.. since gen 4 is decompiled and ready to be read one could have "just" looked for this in the code to be 100% accurate but this is a more practical and mch more fun way to confirm. Cool video and I understand the effort you put into this.
Why did Gamefreak hate Munchlax so much? getting him was basically impossible and his spawn requirements were just ridiculous... 4 random trees in your game can spawn Munchlax so not only do you have to find those random trees by hand but also wait the tree timer and get lucky with a 1% chance of appearing on said Munchlax tree
Imagine trying to shiny hunt for a tree Munchlax 💀
A bug?
That wasted everyone's time?
Introduced in Gen 4?
Due to the advent of honey trees?
You're clearly talking about Burmy's three forms, and gender-divergent evolution paths.
Of course BDSP wouldn't bring any of the quality of life updates from Platinum, but would bring back a 20yrs old bug.
At this point, I'm pretty sure that ILCA was feeling *very* passive-aggressive when making BDSP. It's like they went "the fans say they want a faithful remake? let's give it to them."
When I clicked on the video I thought you meant literal bug and we’re gonna talk about combee but I was happily surprised. Great video.
Proof that pokemon battles take place in an alternate universe in universe. thanks for the video.
it always warms my heart that we are learning things about these old gems many years after they were released. the science and experimentation is pure gold. thanks for the content
I really enjoy your explanations and sharing your processes (in both this video and the one about the Battle fans). Thanks for making these videos!
Finding answers to decades old questions is very cool to me, love the video.
That is so strange, they can stop you from cheating by changing the time because they so accurately keep track of the offset, but then instead of updating the timer to match the offset away from the starting time, it updates using a completely different less accurate timer? I feel like that must have be programmed by an intern, lol.
The offset is a static value that gets added to or subtracted from the factory timer. All they have to do when you save the game is store the static value in the save file and when you load the game compares the saved offset to the one the current system is using and apply the penalty if the two numbers don't match.
@@alexstewart9592 Exactly! When I say accurately, I mean in terms of the static number used. Instead of ticking an integer number to keep track of the timer, they could just use another static number. First, check to make sure the system clock has not been cheated. Then, assuming everything is fine, subtract the time at which the event was started from the current system clock, and if it's equal to or less than 0, the spawn can happen. Much more simple, and extremely accurate.
Of course it gets more complicated depending on how they keep track of system time, but only marginally. The standard is to use an unsigned integer and tick continuously upward. This number would then be worked backwards from to determine the actual date and time for the system. If they use a different method, they would of course need to include whatever other static numbers they need. Still much lighter and accurate than what is implemented.
I like that the thumbnail kinda makes Munchlax look like he has a sick 80s perm.
Enjoying seeing your come up in the space man
Let’s goooo!! We finally figured out what happened with the Munchlax run!!
I could never get those stupid honey trees to work. I half expected this video to be a proclamation that they never worked for anyone and it was a sham mechanic all along lol
I found a munchlax at the honey tree directly north of oreburgh completely randomly when I was 6. I will never forget it. I’ve never found a full odds shiny but I’ve found a munchlax
I always hated that it applied penalties when you changed the time. It’s literally punishing players for living in a place with daylight savings time.
if theres one thing you can say about BDSP, its that they are certainly pokemon games. that much is not in doubt
new viewer but i'd love a vid explaining the munchlax run! i adore the kinds of videos that dig into weird speedrunning routes/tricks
Game Freak (and I guess ILCA) really love developing their games by the ambient glow of an anglerfish
Thanks to everyone for all of the research! This was a really neat watch!
The burmy I got from a honey tree was male and shiny. The luck on that was never replicated for me again in any pokemon game. The Shiny Mothim had to be on the team, even though it sucks.
I don't know how to put into words just how much I love this channel AAAAA
Please keep making videos!!!
This type of hyper specific infos on some of my fave games and the amount of effort you put into finding them make me so happy!
Munchlax took putting a snorelax from leafgreen with a lax incense in the pal park, breeding and hatching it. I had a munchlax from month 4 of owning diamond
These kinds of experiments are really interesting! I'm really glad you did this work!
I got recommended your two most recent videos and I decided to checked out your channel and subscribe since I enjoyed them a lot.
Turns out you did a sort of fresh start with your channel and you've just come back. Good luck with your new videos, can't wait to see them!
Thank you!!
Hey!
Thanks for the research! It will help a ton of people for sure
But, I have a question about HGSS : you tried this with the berry pot, but what about the Safari Guy who should call you after 3 hours? I heard a lot of people complaining because he hasn't called after 3 hours, sooo maybe it has the same bug
And maybe GF used another system for the berry pot because it is in a menu (that breaks the timer)
Great info. I don't think I'd ever put it to practical use, but this explains a frustration of mine that I've had for ages, and I really am glad to know what it was now. Thank you.
What really baffles me is the fact that this bug exists EVEN IN THE REMAKE.... like... how?!
Awesome video. Great to know this for the next time I try to hunt a Munchlax.
Everyone else: *tries to get Munchlax the normal way*
Me: *transfers my Snorlax through Pal Park or whatever it was called from my Gen 3 games to my brother's game and have him breed a Munchlax for me*
Yeah but I don't think that works in a speedrun? As in it wouldn't be "official"
That was the way for me, except it interested me that wild came with leftovers 100% iirc, but it's easy enough to harvest multiples of those anyways across multiple games...
absolutely loving your videos and can't wait for more!!
it's impressive that they managed to code such a long checkable delay and forget the most basic part of how time works lol
I've been trying to find a Munchlax for MONTHS to shiny hunt. I have run into this glitch multiple times. Really interesting.
I never bothered too much with honey trees but I grew a lot of berries back in Diamond.
To optimise this I would just have short sessions of watering, harvesting and replanting even on days when I didn´t have much time to play. I planned to do these at the same time every day (sometimes integrated into longer sessions), but realized that the events were gradually moving further back.
I would just put that on me being late and fumbling around sometimes, but I probably lost some time to this phenomenon, too.
now you have to redo the munchlax run
Love when someone posts a 15 minute video that includes a full explanation in one screenshot on 3:25
it's ironic that this video wastes time when talking about something that could waste time
Thank you so much for posting this, i was about to dip at the 3 minute mark lol
I love it sincerely when someone timestamps the info so we all don’t waste our time 👑
Here I was, hopping I would get the answer as to why I haven't found a Munchlax in the trees for literally 17 years... Turns out I don't even suffer from this bug...
The amount of salt at 12:13 is incredible!
Very comprehensive explanation of this neat glitch! Great video and well done!
Dude love seeing how well these videos are doing! Keep it up :D
can I do this on the trees at my nearby park
yes but doing so increases the encounters of wild pokemon called "cops"
@@foreverpainful oh cool i love growlithe
If you have 2 DS’s with the same initial time stamp (through hacked or other means), could you set one to an earlier time and one to a later time, so that you can skip the 6 hour waiting period for your speedrun? Just by swapping which DS the cartridge was in?
Nope, because it ALSO checks the DS MAC address. So you would have to take the wifi card out of one system and put it into the other lol. I'm gonna cover time travel mechanics more in-depth in a future video cause its pretty funky.
Interesting!! Looking forward to the video!! Swapping the wifi card to time travel probably isn’t worth it haha
Time travel is hilarious. I can remember wanting to cheese BW2 so bad, so I looked it up and Gen5(Idk about Gen 4) only notices if you actually skip a day. If you just go to a time right before midnight and rush back into the game to let the day roll over inside of it, you successfully cheated.
@@Etch you could probably fake the mac address by hacking the ds
would still require finding out how the mac address is retrieved and somehow faking that though, which is more of a time waste than dis- and reassembling two ds's ,-,
I feel like this is less a bug and more a coding choice to be able to store the time information in minutes (maybe for optimizations?) and the devs thought no one would notice because the odds of you running into this are very rare in normal gameplay, players wouldn't go check the tree at exactly 6 hours, they wouldn't even have the knowledge it takes 6 hours probably, the average player would probably go and back and check every once in a while.
Why did they change it for HGSS then? It must have been a mistake of some kind that was caught later.
9:48 I never knew that berries would just grow like that in real time. That’s the first I’ve ever seen it. As a kid I just assumed you’d have to leave the area or reload the game to get them to grow lol.
This is pretty interesting! Well done on your experiment!
that date you set at 4:23 will be my 67th birthday!
Happy Early 67th Birthday!
thanks for the effort etchy :) 🔥🔥