Let's Abuse RNG to Catch a Shiny Pokemon | Tech Rules Bits

okay so disclaimer we're gonna be RNG manipulating a shiny pokemon today and that's cool but you should know that this video is going to be more about how the process is done and why it works and while I do explain the process this isn't a guide so if you click this video expecting a guide sorry hey everyone welcome to another episode of tech rules bits I know it's not been very long since the last tech rules bits but this is actually a follow up to the last video I did the one about RNG in that one I asked if you wanted to see a livestream of me putting this information to use to catch some shiny pokemon and there was some feedback but in the end I decided not to do that as I was kind of putting the pieces together on how I wanted to do the stream I realized there's a lot of things that need to be explained for it especially for someone who'd say doesn't know how shiny pokemon are decided from a technical standpoint which I would imagine as most people so instead we're gonna do a quick video on it well hopefully quick and this way I can not only explain what I'm doing better but I can take it a step further and actually give you some in-depth information about it there's a lot of interesting things about this process and I really want to you know have the chance to talk about it a lot of the things we're gonna talk about in this video is going to use information from the RNG video by the way so if you find yourself confused at any point I recommend watching that one to get a better idea of what we're doing or don't if you don't want to it's probably fine feels like I don't even know what I'm talking about I have the time anyway either way the goal of this video is very simple to catch a shiny pokemon without modifying the game or the system running the game in any way the only things we're allowed to use are the information we can salvage from the date of the game gives us meaning things at stores in removable storage and pure rng manipulation in the game I've decided to use for that is Pokemon ultramoon a seventh generation Pokemon game on real 3ds hardware unfortunately playing it on a real 3ds means it's going to look like this yeah what you're looking at is a combination of Wi-Fi video streaming and the relatively low internal resolution of the 3ds but I still feel it's important to use a 3d essence that are just an emulator for the sake of legitimacy you know the sake of confirming that this works on any old 30 s lying around I mean you could argue that since I'm using custom firmware to capture the 30s screen I'm already compromising the legitimacy of it but shut up and also the screen will look better when we actually get into a fight it's just zoomed out areas like these that look this bad even if we were using a capture card it wouldn't look much different mm-hmm okay I won't lie it would look a little better not much but things would look a little more human and yeah I know pokemon sword and shield is a thing why don't you use pokemon sword and shield that's what I'm playing right now show me how to do it for that I don't want to 4/4 or well less like five specific reasons one sword and shield doesn't have the national dex whereas with Sun and Moon there's a way to manipulate a shiny out of basically Benny Pokemon too while you can safely say that this game has reaches the end of life so to speak sword and shield are still getting updates and any methods I show you could easily be patched out since they're still updating the game 3 and this one's kind of a big one Nintendo absolutely terrifies me when it comes to making videos on their more recent games they've made it explicitly clear they don't particularly like creators like me and want their newest games as far away from us as possible that's why I'm refusing to even use any sword and shield footage I'm not convinced they don't have some sort of auto matching system to take down switch hacking videos it's the same reason I didn't talk about firing them 3 houses when that game came out I didn't want to give them a good reason to take down a video and then a month's effort is just wasted for I'm not even certain there's a legit way to manipulate RNG and sword and shield just yet well it depends on what you define as legit there's a way to manipulate it but I think you still need data that you can only get from either using custom firmware or getting help from someone else who has custom firmware 5 I don't remember what 5 was and 5 seems like an excessive amount of points anyway so let's just move on as far as which shiny pokemon we're gonna go for I figured since we're doing this in the ole Ola region I should probably pick a Pokemon within a lowland variant you know get something that's exclusive to this series and Dugtrio no question doctor eeeh I don't even have to think about it a lowland Dugtrio is downright majestic so that's what we're going with so our goal for this video is to catch a shiny Dugtrio let me go over what stars need to align so to speak in order to make a shiny poker appear but first I'd like to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video I know I've already talked about Skillshare a few times on my channel but in my defense it's an excellent resource you know it's hard sometimes to try and pick up new things because if you're anything like me things are kind of busy and hectic all the time so it's wonderful that Skillshare can help me learn from the professionals in the subjects I'm interested in at my pace at anytime I want or maybe even not interested in there have been a few times where I'm just browsing classes and see something that I've never tried before and I can decide then and there this is something I want to try for example this class creative nonfiction write truth with style since the whole point of tech rules is to explain very technical things in a simple but interesting way this course ended up being right up my alley and I recommend it for anyone that wants to add some Flair and style and their explanations or writings and of course it's all available to you at an extremely affordable price less than $10 a month for a membership not to mention Skillshare is giving away another two free months of premium membership to the first 1,000 people who click the link in the description below and after that it's only around $10 a month you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain so give Skillshare a try today anyway on to the explanation alright so I guess the best place to start would be explaining how Chinese work a good portion of this video is probably going to be cheered explanation and exposition by the way so feel free to skip to the timestamp if you're not into that I would still really really recommend listening if you're not familiar with the stuff though because otherwise you're gonna be pretty confused about what we're doing and even if you think you know how this stuff works I recommend you watch anyway because I don't know please shiny pokemon are simply extremely rare variants of already existing pokemon usually with a different color and like a little extra animation when they're called in to battle the chances of any given Pokemon being shiny used to be around 1 in 8,000 but I think from X&Y onward they change that to around 1 in 4,000 definitely makes our job easier but that's still approximately a 0.025 percent chance of finding one but obviously we don't have time for that let's just exploit the game's mechanics and force it to give us a shiny so what do we need to know to do that well let's start with the easiest method which would be through eggs the thing that you need to know about eggs in Pokemon in general is that whether or not they'll be shiny depends entirely on the trainer hatching them in other words a Pokemon encounter that would yield a shiny for one person would not yield a shine for another one because it's based off of some hidden values exclusive to the trainer this is where the whole secret ID thing comes in eggs are special though because instead of the shininess of the Pokemon being decided during the encounter an egg will only run the shiny check when it's hatched that means if you were to trade the egg to a trainer with the correct hidden values and let them hatch it for you that Pokemon will be shiny and that brings us to the most important question what are these hidden values and how can we use them to essentially solve Pokemon shininess it's trickier than you may think this part we're gonna talk about in particular is why I wanted a lot of people not to skip the explanation even if they think they already understand how it works a lot of people seem to think that there's a value stored in the game called a trainee shiner trainers should a trainer shiny value okay and Pokemon have a hidden value called the Pokemon shiny value and if those two numbers are identical then the Pokemon is shiny that would have made things much easier in the past if that was the case but unfortunately it's not if you knew that awesome but if you thought it was the shiny value thing you're not really at fault for thinking that either because that's how we choose to express the algorithm that decides whether or not a Pokemon is shiny I actually hang on that was a very confusing sentence here let me explain it this way every Pokemon you're going to encounter is going to have a unique Pokemon ID which is the final missing piece for this algorithm let me just read it off to you I actually have it written down here what the game will do is take your trainer ID your real trainer ID I should mention which is confusingly different from the trainer ID you see in the game and we'll do an exclusive or operation with it and the trainer secret ID which the game goes out of its way not to tell you exclusive or simply put means your to compare the numbers in binary form and look for differences different means one same means zero then you're gonna take the result of that operation and do another exclusive or with the highest 16 bits of the Pokemon ID meaning we're gonna convert that to binary and use the first half then we take that number and do an exclusive war with the remaining 16 bits and if the number is lower than 16 then that pokemon is shiny if it's not well it's not and that's the algorithm simple right no no it's not I mean if you're a programmer who has experience with this stuff I guess yeah it's simple but the average pokemon player is not going to be interested in learning how to do this in fact looking at the algorithm I just realized there's quite a bit to unpack here and I'm not sure where to start I guess I'll start by saying the biggest issue with this algorithm is that it makes it really hard to know what the Pokemon ID would have to be to make it shiny because you know even if you were to know your trainer ID and secret ID you would still have to essentially plug in different Pokemon IDs until you find the one that would lead to a shiny and that goes for the other way around too even if you know the ID of your egg how in the world are you going to find a trainer to hatch it for you then has the exact id's you need on that note what would even be the exact id's you need how would you figure that out you get the idea it's really really hard to work with an algorithm like this which is why there needed to be a simpler way to express it one that didn't require you to combine all your information with the pokemons information to even know what will be shiny and what won't and that's where this trainer shinee value comes in it's just a made-up algorithm the game doesn't use it but we use it to help us understand what will be shiny and what won't here's how it works we do the first half of the algorithm meaning we take our trainer ID and our secret ID do the exclusive war operation but instead of doing the rest of the algorithm we just do a bit shift right by four that literally just means we're going to take the last four bits off our number convert that back to decimal and there you go your trainers shiny value what do you do with this number you compare it to the pokemon shiny value which you get by doing the exact same thing with the pokemon half of the algorithm just take the result and remove the last four bits if the trainer shiny value in the Pokemon shiny value match then that Pokemon will be shiny simple as that and even if you don't necessarily understand that that's fine a program can easily tell you what your shiny value is if you just punch your numbers into it there's like a thousand that'll do that too it's not hard to find one that goes for both the trainer and pokémon shiny values with that in mind let's go back to our egg hatching method if we can just find out what the ID of the Pokemon is then we do the algorithm and boom we have a shiny value now all you need to do is find someone with a matching trainer shiny value and ask them to hatch the Pokemon for you which is the thing that people actually do there are huge communities of people who post the shiny values of their eggs and if a trainer sees an egg on the list that matches their shiny value they'll hatch the Pokemon for them the only thing that you have to do is post your egg shiny value and wait but we're not doing that method yeah it's easy but it involves waiting and just hoping this on with the right values comes your way and I don't know if I've already made this clear or not I want my shiny Dugtrio now so instead we're gonna use some good old-fashioned RNG manipulation so with that absolute mountain of knowledge in our possession we can finally begin this is a new safe thought well not new new it's based off of a completed safe file I got off of Pokemon project org but the trainer data has been completely rewrote so I have no idea what any of my hidden values are that means our first step will be to find our trainer shiny value which I'll just shortened to TSV from here on because I'm tired of saying it if you remember we need our real trainer ID and our secret ID to do so and we already established that the game doesn't want to give us one of these and the other is weird thankfully you know who does know those IDs our Pokemon see they have to retain those values in their data so they can tell who their owner is so we just have to get it out of them and I realize now that it sounds like I'm proposing some sort of Pokemon interrogation torture scenario and that I regret phrasing it that way but we can't live in the past so moving on um luckily for me I own a digital copy of the game so extracting these values is as simple as doing a specific process in the game and copying the resulting saves to my PC that process is emptying out my first two boxes catching 6 Pokemon putting them in the first box saving resetting the game saving again backing up that file to the PC moving the six Pokemon for bucks one two bucks to making sure to retain the original order by the way saving yet again and backing up the new save file to the PC as well from here all I have to do is plug these two saves into a program called key save and it'll perforce a key which will allow me to view the hidden data of the Pokemon I put in the box now if I had a retail version instead it would have been fine but instead of just using my safe file I would have had to use a battle video against another trainer a little more inconvenient but still completely doable and with that out of the way it's time to catch that shiny Dugtrio tits you can hear me rubbing my hands together maniacally in that sentence obviously the first step will be to go someplace that the trio can actually appears so we're gonna head to the vast Pony Canyon and on our way there I guess I'll go ahead and explain the process so in the RNG video I demonstrated how to use user input to manipulate Jen ones are in G and give us the exact same seeds every time essentially we could do extremely specific actions that extremely specific times so that we always get the perfect R in GC that does exactly what we want well I guess more accurately we can predict exactly what it will do unfortunately Sun and Moon based pretty much all of their RNG off an initial C that they pull when the game starts up completely independent from player input in other words manipulating that initial seed is going to be practically impossible and besides that since the games are in G's based on a timer that did I mention that no no I didn't okay so this game has a timer and that timer gets changed by literally anything going on in the game NPCs messes with it animations messes with it it's a pain but we'll get to that essentially though we need a way to determine the R and G without starting the timer remember the clock hands from the last video yep that's what we're gonna use if you didn't watch that video long story short is we can use these clock hands to determine the initial rmgc which is fantastic because going from the main menu to file select only advances the timer by one frame if these clock hands didn't exist I have no idea how we would do this process but aside from that one frame the timer won't advance at all until the file is actually loaded so we can do this as many times as we've won so we know exactly what position the timer is we'll just have to remember you know every time we back out and go back in that's one frame advancement but the process is so much easier than it sounds like I promise we just observe the clock hands a bunch of times and put the results into something called the 3d srg tool which is easily the most impressive program I've ever seen as far as orangy manipulation is concerned not only is it able to accurately predict this game's RNG to a tee but it also considers the various factors that could cause the game's timer to fluctuate there was a lot of love and care put into this thing and it kind of blows me away honestly okay this is the area that Dugtrio appears in I need to stand in a very specific way to cause the least amount of NPC interference as possible thankfully there's a post on a forum called pokey RNG that shows exactly what the best spots are granted it's for the original Sun and Moon so there are some differences here and there but otherwise it'll work okay let's boot up 3d ice RNG tool and put in our shiny value now I do have a shiny charm so I'm gonna check this box but just know it's not required I'm just using it to speed up this process a bit okay so let's save reset and now it's clock hand time I am terrible at this so I'm just gonna pull out my phone and record the screen also I'm aware that I'm already capturing the screen for the video but I don't trust that capture not to lose frames from time to time and I kind of need to make zero mistakes with this if I do make a mistake I have to reset and start the entire process over again let's just get nine o'clock hands that seems to be the max we'll need okay now that I have the recording we're gonna do start position and I'm gonna click the picture that corresponds to the first frame of every clock hand I recorded so that's 15 that's a 2 [Music] and there's our scene now if we look at our main window we can see that our initial seat has already been inserted by the tool which is nice so now all we need to do is put in where we are and which Pokemon we're trying to catch and of course we want it shiny so we're gonna check the shiny only box once we do this the tool is going to calculate which Pokemon I'll get for every single frame I can start an encounter on and show me which frame I need to find a Dugtrio with the same psv as my TSV or in other words a Dugtrio whose shiny values match my shiny values oh there's actually a frame where I can get one 9 seconds after we start that one's gonna rush me a little bit but I don't want to wait 9 minutes which is what the next frame is gonna be so let's go with this one now we switch over to our time calculator which is again conveniently auto filled by the tool and we'll get the final piece of information we need in this case it looks like we'll be setting our Aeon timer for 540 frames what's the on timer well it's this convenient tool over here that can simulate the game's timer to a pretty accurate degree we just need to put our time into this field and start the timer at the same time we load the save file so here we go ok so wait wait 9 seconds doesn't give me enough time to explain what I'm doing at all hang on hang on ok it's fine I missed that frame entirely ok sorry I didn't really think that one through what I was trying to do is open my bag on the exact frame I was targeting and used the honey to force the Pokemon encounter but you saw that I messed it up so I get a reset the game again and do the hands thing all over again alright give me a sec ok our new initial seed let's search again whoa that's a lot of shiny duck trios also you might've noticed some of these frames are marked essentially the timer is so sensitive that a character can blink and the timer will freeze momentarily meaning it's gonna be really hard to hit any frames shortly after a character blinks but that also means that frames where a character blinks are really easy to hit so that's why those are starred we want to go after those if they're not out of our way but otherwise we should just aim for safe frames this one's 11 minutes away but it's also next to other frames that'll give us the Pokemon we want so I'll go with that 7:13 okay and now we wait by the way we want to wait with the menu what beep why beep uh hang on why did I put in 713 frames that's very clearly nowhere near 11 minutes okay sorry I got tunnel vision while explaining I'm idiot clock time I just want you all to know that it takes like 5 minutes to do these clock hands every single time I know that doesn't seem like a lot but that's five minutes per mistake it adds up okay dad this one okay now that the timer is actually set up properly I can point out that I need to open up the menu pretty soon after starting up the game and keep it like that until it's time to hit the target frame doing so stops your character from doing its idle animation which you guessed it messes with a timer once we open this bag though the timer will stop so we can take our time actually finding and selecting the honey once we had our target frame but as you can see this process involves a lot of waiting so I guess I'll get back to you when it's time to hit the frame hey welcome back target frames coming up so I just have to hope I'm able to hit this exact frame a few frames off and it won't work thankfully this timer is about to start assisting me by doing some rhythmic beeping which actually really helps me out so fingers crossed hey that Philip any close let's see what we get okay you are not a shiny Dugtrio in fact you're not a duck trio at all that means we have to try again but before that I still want to catch this card Bank and check something see while we didn't hit the frame exactly I still want to examine this Pokemon and find out what frame we did land on that way we can adjust accordingly okay so let's plug these stats into search parameters and see if we can locate this Pokemon in our R and G lists okay found it these are the two frames I potentially could have landed on so I was either four frames early or 10 frames early I'm hoping it's the four frame one that would mean I'm at least hitting within the margin of error which has to do with timer fluctuations and just human error itself but if I was ten entire frames off then some adjustment is definitely going to need to be done I guess we won't find out until we try again you know the drill by now so I'll just start skipping to the relevant parts okay this one's rough those question marks mean a blink frame is going to happen shortly before them meaning it may be impossible to hit them guess I'll go for the only safe one that one was good that one was good that has to be within the four frames uh goal bed okay let's see which frame this thing belongs to whoa okay that's way off so I seem to be consistently hitting 10 frames or so earlier than what I'm intending to that can be for a lot of reasons like load times or NPC interference but at the very least it's consistent the error margin I'm allowing myself is four frames off in each direction so if I just aim ten frames ahead of my actual target frame I should start hitting within my error margin so let's do that okay here's a nice set of frames to use I'm gonna go with the latest one since I seem to be hitting early pretty consistently remember I need a factor in my calibration so instead of aiming for frame one 7502 we're instead gonna aim for one seven five one two twelve people call that twelve young timer actually has a feature that's supposed to make these adjustments for you but I can't figure out how it works it seems whatever number I put in just gives the same irrelevant result it's fine I'll just set my target frame to 110 frames ahead it's literally just as easy nice okay I got a good feeling about this one show me the SHINee excuse me okay uh that's a shiny coal pad okay hang on the battle can wait I need to find exactly where in my target frame a shiny gold bed exists two frames after my target frame was a shiny coal pet maybe this is a side effect of the shiny charm I don't know like maybe it just makes a cluster of frames shiny frames and that's how the charm increases your chances whatever I guess it's not important the important part is that I hit two frames light I'm keeping this one though I only brought one container of honey so I'll have to go back to the Pokemon Center to get some more but I am NOT resetting a shiny gold bed so give me a sec okay I'm back in my spot with another container of honey let's save and keep going since we were only two frames off it looks like we're hitting exactly in the range we need to it should hopefully only take a few more timpz and we'll see our shiny Dugtrio [Music] yes okay come on [Music] please yes okay we got it okay hi welcome back shiny Dugtrio let's catch it select the quick ball and with that our shiny Dugtrio is what no okay no this is fine not sure why I'm panicking it's actually fine let's just throw another one okay are we cool now ah does the quick ball not work if you throw another of course it doesn't why would it work like that oh great ball of in yeah go on break out of that stop no it was a taunt I didn't mean it okay you know what no risks no risk that did I did not let RNG come into play this far I'm not gonna let it come into play here I'd like to see you break out of that please don't actually I didn't mean that I only have one master ball okay well that was a bit more dramatic than it needed to be but shiny Dugtrio has been caught let's take it back to the Pokemon Center and I'll wrap up the video so I'm looking at my timer and it looks like the entire process took around two and a half hours which for something as unlikely as finding a shiny variant of the exact Pokemon you want is pretty good on the subject of the shinies I did want to keep the shiny Dugtrio but the shiny goal bed I mean I like how it looks but I think it'd be more fun if I gave it away what are you all thank you do you want the shiny go bet its nature is gentle which not amazing for a goal bit but if you just want a shiny you could have it tell you what tell you what tell you what sword and shield is going to add go bet and one of their DLC update so I'm pretty sure if you own pokemon sword or pokemon shield then I encourage you to join in the giveaway that I hopefully remembered to make before the video goes live in the description below I'll connect it with Twitter and DM you if you win and when that update releases the shiny goal that is yours as for the rest of you I hope this was an interesting lunch in some way and I hope to keep an eye out for more tech rules you [Music]

Channel: Tech Rules

Views: 466,270

Keywords: Pokemon USUM, Ultra Moon, Hacking, RNG Manipulation, Explained, 3DS, Dugtrio, Golbat, TSV, Trading, Legit, Luck, Shininess, Pokemon Sword and Shield, Highlights

Id: zMuddTT3iS4

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020