The sixth-generation capture mechanics section is up, and so is its accompanying catch rate calculator. There is a tentative bit on it (we're not sure when the equivalent of the fifth-generation dark grass modifier actually applies); I'll be looking into that tomorrow with some in-game tests, but right now I've been up all night and really need to get to sleep already. I also didn't bother looking closely into exactly how all the fixed-point rounding works out; it looked basically the same as in the fifth generation, and the calculator assumes that, but I'll squint at it better tomorrow (unless somebody else does it for me first; magical's analysis is here).

The HP bar is not colored correctly at the moment (the green is right, although it's missing the darkest shade, but the yellow and red are just the fifth-generation colors). I made the audacious assumption that nobody cared enough to want to keep me up any longer than I already have been.

Oh, and the new ORAS mega/primal forms are missing for now. Need to get my hands on actual proper data on them, and again, I need to go to sleep.

UPDATE EDIT (12/15/14): Added updated legendary catch rates for OR/AS, as well as the new megas/primals.

UPDATE EDIT 2 (12/15/14): Made sixth-generation Pokémon actually work in the calculator (whoops), plus updating with new information on the "mystery terrain".

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The new type quiz is up. Don't expect it to have any correlation with your results in the old type quiz, which is still around. The new one focuses on how you relate to other people, which I think is a reasonably interesting thing to examine, and I think I've hammered together the result descriptions so that they're vaguely adequate by now.

I also randomly completed a feature I'd started to make for the Interactive Type Chart a long, long time ago: "Overall defense mode". Basically, it shows you the average damage multiplier of every type, or a subset you specify, against each type combination.

I've also been fixing some errors, such as some typos and making the HP bar in the R/B/Y Catch Rate Calculator turn yellow at exactly the right point. Mostly typos, though.

magical has found the X/Y capture routine, so the moment he's finished analyzing it I'm probably going to be whipping up a page and calculator for Gen VI capturing. Finally.

Somewhat relatedly, I've been thinking about writing an article that takes some actual R/B/Y (or possibly G/S/C) source code, explains how to read the assembly, and walks the reader through gaining an understanding of what the game is actually doing, both step by step and in the big picture. Basically it would be a kind of simultaneous basic introduction to how computers work, general look into the insides of the Pokémon games, and tutorial in how you, too, can analyze weird buggy game behaviour (provided you actually find the relevant code). I know 2007-me would have died for something like that, so hopefully there are some vaguely like-minded people out there.

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Happy birthday to you
Such a nice number, too!
Here's to twelve more, dear website,
and more pages to do.

The Cave of Dragonflies turned twelve years old today. That's the age I was when I started it. Maybe it will go off, become an independent being and start its own website.

I was going to have the new type quiz finished, but nope, that's taking a lot longer than it should. I've been trying to make the descriptions sound decent for like a couple of weeks and I still have to make the images. So please bear with me for a few more days while I perfectionist at it some more. The site doesn't mind if its birthday present is late. Unless it does go off and become an independent being, in which case I am sorry, site.

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The Favorite Pokémon Picker now uses the prerendered Pokédex sprites from Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire rather than screencapped models from X and Y. I at least think they look considerably nicer.

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I fixed a pesky bug in the Favorite Pokémon Picker, where undoing the same pick multiple times would fail to properly restore the previous state, resulting in possible duplication or deletion of Pokémon. Along with the fix, I added better detection of any errors - it should now immediately alert you and reset your state if either the internal Pokémon lists don't contain exactly the right number of Pokémon put together or if any Pokémon appears more than once across all the lists, which should cover all possible bugs in this unless some kind of sorcery is going on. If you do bump into one of these alerts during normal use of the picker, please let me know.

I also added a hidden-by-default explanation of how the picker works, which goes more in depth about both how it works and why it works the way it does. It should hopefully clarify things for the many people who have seemed to be confused by things like why "Pass" is equivalent to picking every Pokémon.

Finally, I made a tweak that should make things feel a bit more balanced. Before, if there weren't enough Pokémon left in the current round for a full batch, it would just shuffle the Pokémon and move on to the next round, so that the leftover Pokémon got shuffled randomly in with Pokémon you'd actually picked in the previous round. This confused people, since they'd start seeing Pokémon they'd already seen before without having seen every other Pokémon first. It was even possible for a Pokémon to happen to be "left over" for multiple rounds in a row, resulting in it only popping up after you've seen other Pokémon three or four times. Now, however, I've made it so that the leftover Pokémon from the previous round (if any) always appear at the very start of the next one, which should prevent the perception that some Pokémon just aren't appearing at all.

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As promised, the Website Tips have been rewritten to be more helpful and less annoyed, and the former Sections that Suck is now Page Pitfalls, also more helpful and less annoyed (the name always vaguely bothered me, and while the new one is admittedly less catchy, it's not as hostile and better reflects what the page is really about).

I should get around to those R/B/Y capture mechanics improvements and the new type quiz in the coming days.

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I've made a couple of usability improvements to the Favorite Pokémon Picker. The double-clicking shortcut now only works when you haven't selected another Pokémon, to prevent accidental double-clicking; there are now undo/redo buttons capable of going back and forth for up to three moves in history (I figured it was unlikely anyone would need a longer history than that, but I could lengthen it); and it should now behave a lot more nicely on smaller screens such as phones.

UPDATE EDIT: Also changed the highlight and selected marker to be circular rather than square. It looks way nicer this way, wow.

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If you follow my personal Twitter or Tumblr, you may have seen that last September I made a Favorite Pokémon Picker, a tool where you repeatedly pick out one or more favorites from a group of random Pokémon presented to you to eventually pin down your favorite Pokémon. It was just random tinkering and it had a weird bug I couldn't seem to figure out, so it was never on the site properly, but recently a few different people have contacted me about it asking if the sixth-generation Pokémon were going to be added and reporting the bug, so I decided to take a look at it again. I've now added the sixth-generation Pokémon (with X/Y model caps for all of them), there's a "shiny mode" where you compare the shiny versions of the Pokémon rather than the normal ones, I finally fixed that bug (or at least I'm pretty sure I did), and it's now officially on the site, located under "Fun" on the menu.

Still progressing on that other stuff; just threw this in since people were asking me about it.

(Oh, and the number game and hangman now also have the sixth-generation Pokémon in them. Somehow overlooked those when I updated everything else for X/Y compatibility. And the list generator has Diancie.)

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I've rewritten the affiliation and contact pages, now with 99% less tangential ranting about things that annoyed teenage me. Thanks to BLURSH for pointing out how incredibly unnecessarily lengthy and irritable they were and getting me to do something about it.

I'm in the process of doing 1) rewrites of all the website advice sections, since they also suffer from being unnecessarily irritated about everything, 2) that thing with graphs in the R/B/Y capture mechanics that I was talking about, and 3) a revamped version of the What Type Are You? quiz, which I've decided on questions and arranged the results for but still need to write descriptions and make result images for. (I'm still also planning to make a completely new personality test, but that one's still in the planning stages.)

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Continuing the trend of me doing silly tinkering nobody but me cares about, I've made some major improvements to my capture mechanics sections, including splitting the calculators off to their own pages so they're in a more obvious place instead of being buried under a bunch of math:

• Gen I Capture Mechanics, Gen I Catch Rate Calculator
• Gen II Capture Mechanics, Gen II Catch Rate Calculator
• Gen III/IV Capture Mechanics, Gen III/IV Catch Rate Calculator
• Gen V Capture Mechanics, Gen V Catch Rate Calculator

I've also made a number of improvements to both the pages and the calculators:

• The formulas on the later-game capture mechanics pages have been typeset with MathJax like the formulas on the R/B/Y capture mechanics page to make them more readable and nice to look at.
• There have been lots of text tweaks, mostly removing unnecessary references to the previously-written capture mechanics sections and revisions to make the text more concise and on-point and give more relevant information.
• This included excising large chunks of me showing my work in calculating something, on the assumption that anyone who cares enough about math to want to know how I derived something is probably also good enough at math to be able to do it themselves with a bit of thought.
• The calculators no longer have a "Calculate" button; instead, the result is shown from the beginning and is recalculated every time you change anything in the form.
• Since the calculators have been moved off to their own pages, they're no longer in close proximity to a list of what bonuses different balls give under what circumstances, so instead of making the user enter the ball bonus (and/or Apricorn ball modifier), the calculators now let you just pick the ball you're using and will then bring up options for any other relevant data that affects the ball bonus. This is also just generally more user-friendly.
• Now, if you've checked the "Show details" box, it will always show what HP IVs each result applies to, rather than leaving the header out if the result applies to every possible IV. I at least found it pretty counterintuitive how checking or unchecking the box would in some cases have no visible result whatsoever despite the claim that it's going to tell you about different HP IVs.

I have some ideas about improving the R/B/Y capture mechanics more with some fancy JS-generated graphs, but that'll have to wait; it's been way too long already.

By all means notify me if you find typos, glitches, something working weirdly, etc.

Believe it or not, I have still not forgotten about that personality test.

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The Cave of Dragonflies now (somewhat experimentally) has a dedicated Twitter account which will post about updates to the site. If you use Twitter, this is useful if you don't want to have to remember to check back - you'll see in your news feed when there's anything new. In practice I've previously tended to talk about my more interesting updates on my personal Twitter, but that would also come with everything else I tweeted about, which is not necessarily what you want. This new account will only post updates to the site and possibly requests for feedback or progress/sneak peeks at something new.

If you'd like something like this on some other social media site, I may consider it; just contact me.

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I'm, ahem, ever so slightly late with this, but I've updated the Battle Mechanics section to be up-to-date for the sixth generation. Let me know if there are any issues.

I also updated all of my catch rate calculators with a minor change: because the notion of what the average number of balls it takes to catch the Pokémon actually means is really pretty unintuitive, they will now instead tell you how many balls you need to have a 50% or 95% total chance of capturing the Pokémon. I'd love to hear some feedback on how understandable this is and how it could be more so.

Finally, I've also fixed several errors that were reported recently.

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So last Monday my R/B/Y Capture Mechanics article was posted to Hacker News and three popular subreddits and was read by about fifty thousand people, and because I am me my first reaction was to think it's clearly not good enough for all that attention and want to rewrite it immediately.

The most obvious change is that I've recruited the help of MathJax to format the various equations on the page, making them a lot more readable. I also replaced the catch rate graphs with new versions that have a better resolution on the X axis and actually look noticeably different as a result thanks to integer division, corrected a couple of small errors (an incorrect assumption about the Safari Zone that I never corrected once I'd researched the R/B/Y Safari Zone Mechanics section, and a claim that Raticate's catch rate was changed in the second generation when really it wasn't changed until the third), rewrote large chunks of the prose in the hope of making them easier to understand, moved some information from the "Real-World Examples" setion that really belonged in the "What It Means" section, and excised some calculations that I ultimately think were more confusing than helpful. I think it's a significant improvement, at least, and I hope you agree.

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Have you missed my sections about old game mechanics being hilariously buggy? Fear not, because I've put up another one: R/B/Y Stat Modification. It is about how in-battle stat modifiers function and interact in the first-generation games (spoiler: hilariously buggily) and even has a calculator where you can play around with this and fully grasp how ridiculous it is.

I've updated the Status Ailments, Stat Stages and Battle Mechanics sections to reference the new page where relevant; let me know if there's anywhere else that could use a link to it.

UPDATE EDIT (05/04/14): I added a bit about Rage to the stat modification page.

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I got an error report today pointing out to me that my Steel quiz hadn't been updated since the fourth generation and half of it was dreadfully wrong as a result. I've now updated not only it but also the Flying quiz to be correct for the sixth generation, and both those and the Yellow quiz and G/S/C quiz now have label elements around the answers so that you can click anywhere on the answer and not just the checkbox/radio button. (The latter two's actual content didn't need to change since they were specific to old games anyway.)

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Hope you had a good April 1st. Sadly, my website is not in fact psychic and the What Trainer Class Are You? quiz was a joke - the results were completely random. I hope you enjoyed it anyway and will forgive me for not giving you a proper personality test yet.

As always, I've added it to the April Fools' Day joke archive. I'm sort of torn on whether to just have the quiz linked from there or if I should also put it up under the Humour section or something of the like; let me know what you think in the comments.

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I said you'd get a personality test, and you've got one. Please take my amazing, all-new high-tech What Trainer Class Are You? quiz. :D

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Small update: I added Diancie's name (but not picture, since as far as I can tell there is still no Dream World art available for it) to the Zodiac, I added a bit about critical hits to the Stat Stages page after it was pointed out that it really made sense for it to be mentioned, and I rewrote the incense breeding theory after I got an error report about a small bit of it that made me look at it and realize it was still talking about the fourth generation like the sole exception to the rule that baby Pokémon are never normally found in the wild and contained my six-year-old writing. It's still exactly the same theory, just rewritten.

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Aaaand the sixth-generation Zodiac is finally up, after about five rounds of going painstakingly over every single day or even every single Pokémon species to make some unimportant change nobody but me will probably care about. I might fiddle more with the look of the Zodiac images later, but whatever; for now they're definitely sufficient. They're a bit bigger than before and use Dream World art, since X/Y don't have sprites and still shots of the models ripped from screenshots tend to look visibly subpar despite the general awesomeness of the actual animated models.

Because the Zodiac's numbers work out amazingly with the unreleased event legendaries from X/Y included, and otherwise I'd have had to update it with them later somehow anyway, they will appear as question marks in the Zodiac until they are officially released. This is partly for the sake of those who are avoiding spoilers and partly simply because there is no actual artwork I could use for them. As soon as they're released and have Dream World art, the Zodiac and the Zodiac images will be updated accordingly.

As always, please report any bugs or errors you might discover.

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Bit late with my usual new year's update since I was sick. Sorry for the lack of updates in December; I've been busy judging a contest, finishing unpacking a bunch of boxes that had been sitting around since we moved, and going to a zillion Christmas gatherings. I haven't been entirely absent, as I have been doing more of my silly fiddling with the Interactive Type Chart, but I haven't quite finished polishing it yet, and I know none of you want more type chart options so that doesn't really count. (I also updated the Ultimate Type Tool to have the sixth-generation type chart available a little while back, since it's still being offered as the non-Javascript alternative to the type chart.)

Anyway, because it wouldn't be a new year without them, my annual New Year's Thanks:

• Shadey, for marrying me. :D I think that has to warrant top placing for once. Also who allowed you to be so cuddly anyway. This can't be legal.
• Dannichu, elyvorg and opaltiger, for housing me around the Expo and being generally delightful people.
• The rest of our gang of Expogoers, for helping make every trip worth it.
• elyvorg again, for that one instance of epic nighttime discussions.
• elyvorg's friends, for playing Mafia with us.
• opaltiger again, for continuing to bug me about editing TQftL. Your efforts are appreciated! yes yes I'll do it honest no not the whip
• Psychic, for all the long Skype chats.
• Mewitti, for being even awesomer now than I thought she was when her site was inspiring me to make a website eleven years ago.
• Negrek, for the phrase "Characters and their delicious, delicious tears."
• Penn and Teller, for EXISTING IN REAL LIFE AND ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY THERE AND BEING ON A PHOTO WITH US and also putting up with the ridiculous number of books we had you sign, I know it was ridiculous.
• James Randi, for approving of my hugs.
• My dad, for lunches, the new server and letting me ramble about CSS.
• My mom, for lengthy walks, helping with all that unpacking and watching Breaking Bad with me.
• Game Freak, for making X and Y which are made of all of the awesome in the world how do you even.
• Tim Minchin, for being one of my favorite Judases and generally talented and hilarious.
• And last but not least, Vince Gilligan and the rest of the cast and crew of Breaking Bad, which is more or less my favorite thing in the world right now.

I will be getting on with that new personality test and Zodiac, honest.

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