The R/B/Y Safari Zone page has now been updated, including the calculator, to account for the RNG mechanics. As always, please let me know if you bump into any errors or glitches while using the calculator.

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Finally, after far too long, I have finished writing a full breakdown of the random number generator in Red, Blue and Yellow, and how it affects capturing in R/B/Y. I think it's pretty fascinating! Please take a look and tell me if you can't follow the explanation at all. (But one of the primary takeaways is: those annoying Pokémon in the Safari Zone that seem near-impossible to catch genuinely are way harder to catch than intended.)

The R/B/Y capture calculator has also been updated accordingly (a little while back) and is a fair bit more elaborate and sophisticated, thanks to the relatively intensive calculations involved in simulating every possible RNG outcome; please let me know if you have any issues with the new one, before I convert the other capture calculators to this new system.

I actually haven't yet updated the Safari Zone calculator; that's coming too, I promise, but I just needed to get this up first.

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Happy birthday to you,
you're all grown up, it's true.
On to legal adulthood!
Happy birthday to you.

The Cave of Dragonflies is eighteen years old today! They grow up so fast. Unfortunately I don't think websites can actually vote, even when they're legal adults. (But if you are, I hope you do.)

For the occasion, I wanted to finish writing about the R/B/Y RNG, but unfortunately that's just taking ages. Instead, I've now updated most everything in accordance with the Crown Tundra DLC, including the Pokémon List Generator, Favorite Pokémon Picker, Hangman and Number Game.

Furthermore, I've added a provisional Gen VIII Catch Rate Calculator. Please note that at the moment this is based on Gen VII mechanics - to my knowledge, the capture routine/ball bonuses have not been extracted, and the Switch hacking community is never anywhere near as interested in capture mechanics as I am, so who knows if/when that might happen. However, in-game observation suggests the mechanics are probably similar, except that during the story, before the Wild Area levels up to level 60, the catch rate is lowered massively if your Pokémon is a lower level than the opponent. I've made a wild guess at this modifier (a 0.15 multiplier to the X value) and how it might be applied, but for the moment it really is a wild guess based on really not enough data. I hope to do more in-game observations for this, but until then, I hope having a calculator with the Gen VIII Pokémon in it helps at least a bit.

Finally, there is also since yesterday a Twitter share link and a textbox with a copy-pastable summary on the results page for the Pokémon Fan Test. It's already seen more use than I expected, but in case you wanted to share your results but there was just a little too much friction, now's your chance. I'd like to spruce up my other personality test results a bit soon and probably add something similar there, for modern convenience.

Here's to TCoD's young adulthood!

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As usual I go impulsively do something entirely different from what I'm trying to work on on a sudden whim. This time, it's an overhaul of the Pokémon Fan Test, which has been grossly out of date for a long time and I've been meaning to update it for years. Thanks to 15 pointing out a bug that spurred me to actually go ahead and do it, and the lovely Cupcakedex for a bunch of help coming up with new questions/categories!

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Thanks to the couple people who reported it, the sharable link to your favorite list in the Favorite Pokémon Picker will now properly show the Isle of Armor DLC Pokémon like it should. Apologies for the error! I've also updated the Interactive Type Chart with the new existent type combinations in Gen VIII and accordingly updated a couple of things in the Fun Facts as well.

I've been working on some delicious R/B/Y mechanics, but it's taking a while because I'm trying to put it all in an understandable form. Soon!

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I've known for a couple years now that catch rates for Shadow Pokémon in Pokémon Colosseum and XD weren't actually identical to the usual catch rates for Gen III. Now, thanks to Patreon patron Pacguy64 for suggesting it, StarsMmd from Project Pokémon, and a lot of headaches over in-game testing that didn't seem consistent with the ripped data, the Gen III/IV Catch Rate Calculator finally has a Shadow Pokémon checkbox, which you should check when trying to capture Shadow Pokémon in the GameCube games.

The basic rundown is that the actual capture formula is identical to the other Gen III games, except for Colosseum having a provision to make the tutorial Makuhita a guaranteed capture, but the actual catch rate values used for the Shadow Pokémon specifically are overridden to create a more sensible gradient from easier captures early in the game to more difficult captures later - thus, your second capture in Colosseum, Bayleef, Quilava or Croconaw, will be generously bumped up to a catch rate of 180 instead of 45, while lategame Tyranitar gets bumped down from 45 to 10, even lower than the legendary beasts who are at 15. I've implemented these overridden values into the calculator so that it'll use those values if you check the Shadow Pokémon box, and also listed them under the capture rate section on the Gen III/IV Capture Mechanics page.

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The Favorite Pokémon Picker now includes the new Pokémon and forms from the Isle of Armor DLC. While I was at it I also swapped out the actual Home icons (which had some artifacts around the edges especially in dark mode) for some higher-quality downscales of the full Home artwork. I think I went through it pretty thoroughly but as always, let me know if anything's off.

Some locations in the Gen II Locations trigger a server error at the moment, as in these locations the conditions that apply differ between Gold and Silver versus Crystal. I'm working on it but it's being a bit stubborn thanks to the way it's currently put together; hopefully I can get a fix in tomorrow, but in the meantime, I'm aware of it.

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There is now officially a Gen II Locations tool for finding encounter information for the original Gold, Silver and Crystal games. Technically this has been sort of working since the database update the other day, but I just made it work properly and put it on the menu.

Alongside this, I updated the location tools in general a bit; they're now finally within the site's main layout, and the UI is smoother to use with less clicking required. The update's not entirely perfect (I really want to also replace the autocomplete functionality, and make the forms take up less vertical space), but this'll do for tonight.

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The eighth-generation Pokémon, including the Isle of Armor DLC Pokémon, are now finally loaded into the database I'm working with behind the scenes, which means they're now available in the Pokémon List Generator. Huge apologies for how obscenely long it took to get this done; it was a massive headache and also blocked everything else I was doing. Onward to getting more actual stuff done!

While I was at it, the list generator should also be a fair bit faster now thanks to not running extra queries for every single Pokémon.

As always, please let me know if I've made a mistake somewhere; there was some manual work and behind-the-scenes tweaking involved.

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Sutoraiku High now has a permanent home on the menu with a bit of an accompanying explanation, and the April Fools' Day jokes page has been updated with the details of this year's joke.

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Hope you're all enjoying my ridiculous yet completely serious Scyther dating sim, Sutoraiku High. I've now upgraded the game's engine to the latest beta release, which contains a lot of new features including the ability to rapidly skip dialogue by holding down the spacebar (I suggest you don't overuse this too much, though, or you'll miss some of the lines that change depending on what you've done previously) and a log of what has been said.

Unfortunately, as the new engine's saves appear to be incompatible with the old engine's, this means any saves you had will no longer work. This shouldn't matter that much; it's not that long of a game, and especially with the handy spacebar skipping, so long as you remember the choices you made it shouldn't take long to get back where you were. However, I felt it was right to give you a heads up. If you're in the middle of a playthrough, you may want to hold off on refreshing the page.

Please let me know if there are any bugs or errors. (If you already played, you may have problems on mobile browsers that aggressively cache scripts and don't have an easy way to hard refresh like Shift+Refresh in desktop browsers. Unfortunately, you may have to clear your browser cache, which you can Google how to do.)

I'll try to do a proper writeup about it on the April Fools' Day page, as well as giving the game a more permanent home on the menu, sometime tomorrow.

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Last year, I released a demo version of my magnum opus, Sutoraiku High, a visual novel about drama, friendships, prejudice, bullying, total societal upheaval, and high school romance, with an anticipated release date of April 2020. I am happy to announce that today is April 2020, and accordingly, you can now finally play the full story of Sutoraiku High, complete with full-color character portraits, four in-game days of content, even more dramatic twists, eight endings, and obnoxiously complicated branching.

The game is currently in open beta, as I anticipate expanding on it later with a couple of additional endings, more character expressions, and possibly music, additional art, etc. However, to honor the announced release date, I have chosen to make this initial full-story release in this form.

(Please note that this full version of the story contains a bit more violence and some darker themes than were seen in the demo. Let's call it a PG-13.)

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Remember the forums? The ones that have been really dead for a few years now? Well, technical issues have finally forced me to upgrade to some actually recent forum software, and since I did that I figured we might as well go for attempting to revive them a little. You can now sign up for the Forum Revival TV Tropes Mafia Revival, which I hope will be a lot of fun - or just enjoy the shiny new features, or complain at me about the bits that didn't quite carry over.

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The Favorite Pokémon Picker now has a "Dark mode" (click the link in the top right corner) for users who prefer to work on dark backgrounds. Unfortunately, the Home icons don't look amazing on dark backgrounds; I may see if I can get better results by resizing the larger Home images myself later. But for now, it's at least functional!

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Now that Pokémon Home has been released, the Favorite Pokémon Picker now uses its images for every Pokémon! The temporary Gen VIII picker is now officially retired, but you should be able to bring your state from there over to the new version of the picker using the import/export state feature. (Note that shortcode links are not compatible between the two - you need to import the state and then generate a new link.)

With this, two Pokémon forms from the sixth generation unavailable in the latest generations are unfortunately lost, as they don't have images in Home: Cosplay Pikachu and Eternal Floette. If they were on your list previously, they should silently disappear.

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I'd been hoping for an official release of high-quality art for the Galar Pokémon, but since that still hasn't happened, I've given up and am just making my temporary Gen VIII Favorite Pokémon Picker, which uses party icons, official for now. I didn't do so when I first made it because it was kind of rushed and half-baked and very much made as a temporary thing for the particularly desperate, but I've now made a number of fixes to it (thanks to @shake_the_sky on Twitter, who took me up on my persistent requests for corrections) and hopefully it's reasonably solid now.

It still will not clobber your regular picker state... but if you'd like to import your regular picker state into the Gen VIII picker, I've now also added an import/export feature to both the original picker and the Gen VIII one, allowing you to take your regular picker state and quickly import it into the Gen VIII picker. It's accessible in the same place the "Show debug information" link used to be, in the bottom right of the "Found favorites" tab.

Again, this Gen VIII picker is temporary, until there's a better permanent solution for images to use. The regular picker will eventually be updated with the Gen VIII Pokémon too, when there is a polished, consistent decently-sized set of images to use for it.

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And with that, another year has passed! I hope your 2020 lives up to the coolness of the year itself.

I need to be getting to bed, but I would briefly like to give my heartfelt thanks to...

• ...all of my friends, but a special shoutout to Psychic. I had a really rough time at the beginning of the year and I don't know what I would have done if she hadn't been there.
• ...Shadey, my husband, who I couldn't be happier to share my life with.
• ...my parents, whom I just love seeing and talking to and as I talk to more people about their parents I feel increasingly lucky with mine.
• ...my Patreon supporters, for chipping in to support the work that I do.
• ...everyone who indulged me as I wrote rambling commentary on the entirety of my ridiculous fanfic and followed along with it.
• ...everyone who played Sutoraiku High.
• ...elyvorg, who is extremely included under "all of my friends", but also in particular for her ridiculously thorough, really interesting Danganronpa V3 commentary, which I've been thoroughly enjoying this year.
• ...Hatari, for giving me something new and ridiculous to enjoy during my unemployment.
• ...Vince Gilligan, for Breaking Bad, which is still my favorite thing (I am now working on episode commentaries).
• ...all of you guys still visiting this website.
• ...my cat Birta, who is the softest embodiment of sunshine.

Here's to more content in this coming year! I am currently doing some Colosseum research, will try to get some kind of vaguely adequate Gen VIII Favorite Pokémon Picker working, and will revamp those last few reviews so I can move on to the later movies. Plus various other plans and bits of plans.

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