I've been grabbing what chances I've managed to test a claim made by speedrunner Werster, namely that Dusk Balls don't get a bonus in lit indoor areas at night. As best I can tell, from in-game tests as well as looking at the code where I had it on hand, this is true in Gen V (for which Werster made the claim), but not in either Gen IV or later gens. I've updated the Gen V Capture Mechanics and the text of the Dusk Ball activation option in the Gen V Catch Rate Calculator accordingly.

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Happy birthday to you,
a tough year, but we're through.
You're nineteen, dear website!
Just look how you grew.

The Cave of Dragonflies is nineteen years old today, and to celebrate that milestone, it now has a proper dark mode in the redone Roar of Time style. The old one still works, but the new one is mobile-friendly and uses dropdowns. I tried to strike a bit of a balance between retaining the general aesthetic of the style and updating it to look a bit nicer; I'm not entirely sure I've struck the correct one, but hopefully it's at least usable as a dark mode style. I may fiddle with it more at some later point; right now I just need it out.

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I've been a bit behind on putting my fanfiction up here for a while, often owing to wanting to make revisions that I then never get around to making. I'm resolving to actually get some of that done in the coming days; to start with, here's a set of three Morphic shorts written for a bingo event.

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The Favorite Pokémon Picker now has more granular settings for Pokémon forms. You can now separately include regional variants, other alternate forms, Mega Evolutions, Gigantamax forms, other battle transformations, aesthetic variants, and gender differences, as well as being able to choose only to include "major" differences like before. There are some subtleties and quirks to this, because there isn't really one clear classification of forms, but this is a best effort at something that'd make sense and cover most cases for this common request.

Let me know if I've accidentally misclassified some forms, etc.; I'm pretty tired and did this all manually.

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With some more testing work (and the help of several friends), I've been able to confirm a few things about capturing in Gen VIII raids, and have updated the Gen VIII capture calculator accordingly. The main big conclusions for now are:

• This was already the common wisdom as I understand it, but we've confirmed that status does not apply to raid captures - the status has been healed by the time the capture is performed.
• Quick Balls never get their bonus in raid captures (which is to say, they are equivalent to Poké Balls). The turn counter ticks up before you can attempt the capture, so that even if you beat the raid in one turn, it counts as turn 2 by the time you actually throw the ball.
• Conversely, this means Timer Balls do always get a bonus, equal to 1 + (1229/4096 * turns it took to beat the raid).
• Raids do not count as "mystery terrain", and thus the grass modifier is not active.
• The difficulty modifier corresponding to catch difficulty 4 in event raid data is in all likelihood 0.5, or else 0.6.

There are still more tests to be done, and I would really like to be able to extract those multipliers from the game itself, but this is some good progress.

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I am incredibly frustrated that it took this long to get this up, but I've put up a Gen VIII capture mechanics explanation as well as an updated, accurate version of the Gen VIII capture calculator.

Max Raid capturing is unfortunately still a little up in the air, as we don't yet know some things about how they work. Most crucially, we've had no luck so far extracting the difficulty multipliers for raids, which are straight multipliers to the catch rate dependent on the particular raid in question, whether it's a Gigantamax raid or not, and whether you're the raid host or a guest. (This is not the same as the difficulty level, which you may have seen in data rips; each difficulty level corresponds to a multiplier, but we don't have the multipliers themselves.) Right now, the calculator lets you input a multiplier if you check the raid box, but obviously you won't know the multiplier either, so this isn't super helpful at the moment. I've been working on conducting in-game experiments to tease out some of the uncertainties here, but ideally we want to find the actual lists of multipliers in the game data, which hasn't worked out yet.

I will be continuing these tests in the coming days and hopefully getting to the bottom of some of the questions here, but in the meantime, this is accurate to regular battles (and should be to raids if you actually do know the multiplier). The big new additions are:

• the difficulty modifier, which for non-raid battles is 0.1x if your Pokémon is a lower level than the target prior to completing the story and 1x otherwise
• the low-level modifier, which multiplies the catch rate for Pokémon below level 20 by (30 - level) / 10
• the Catching Charm item, which doubles the chance of critical captures

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Hope you all enjoyed yesterday's jokes! I've now reverted the Favorite Pokémon Picker so that Pokémon other than Scyther can be your favorite and done a little writeup of the joke here.

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I've been talking for years now about rewriting my Pokémorph fanfic Morphic. I'm pleased to announce that I've now published the first chapter of the rewrite, with a much-improved plot and premise that I trust will please all fans of the story.

Additionally, I've made some sorely needed updates to the Favorite Pokémon Picker! It should now much more accurately reflect your true favorite Pokémon.

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I've updated the Gen II Capture Mechanics and Gen II Catch Rate Calculator to incorporate a couple of additional (relatively) newly-discovered quirks in Gen II's capture routine:

• Kadabra, Tauros and Sunflora all incorrectly get a Heavy Ball bonus of +40 in Crystal (but not in G/S), because the game fetches their weights from the wrong ROM bank and ends up with junk data that it interprets as a massive weight.
• Level Balls skip the entire HP and status part of the calculation and make the final capture rate just the intrinsic capture rate with the appropriate level multiplier. This means that Level Balls are actually one of the best balls in the game even if your Pokémon isn't higher-leveled than the opponent - effectively they always act as if you've lowered the Pokémon down to zero HP. While all other balls cap out at a 1/3 chance of catching a Pokémon at full health, Level Balls are guaranteed to catch a 255-catch-rate Pokémon at full health - again, even if your Pokémon is lower-leveled. This is not a glitch - by all appearances it's intended behaviour! The game specifically checks if you're using a Level Ball and then if so skips most of the calculation. (However, this is not the case in HG/SS.)

The Level Ball thing kind of just blew my mind. Please do play around with the updated Gen II calculator.

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I've fixed a bug on the location data pages where setting conditions would recalculate the average experience and effort points incorrectly - each successive table would retain the numbers from the previous table on the page and add to them, giving bizarre results. Thanks to the person who reported this!

I'm going to do some Favorite Pokémon Picker work in the near future to allow more granular options when it comes to forms; look forward to that whenever I manage to get around to it.

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2020 is finally at an end! It's been a rough year for most everyone on one level or another, but here's to a better 2021. It'd take a lot for it not to be, right?

This year, I would like to extend my traditional thanks to...

• Jackie and Chibi, for the chats, RP, motivation, affection, and great times. You're incredibly special to me. Love you.
• elyvorg, one of my very best friends, who is lovely and deserves everything and I cannot wait to read more of her thoughts on fiction.
• Negrek, for the Thousand Roads community, great talks, Nate, and generally being cool.
• Cupcakedex, for the new Pokémon Fan Test, encouraging me to be on the Lass Podcast, the delightful Pokémon cooking livestreams, and being a lovely friend.
• Namohysip and everyone playing Blacklight, which has been such a great time and continues to be.
• Everyone in Telecod, for the chats, streams, movies and more.
• My Patreon patrons, for the support.
• My parents, for being cool parents.
• Shadey, my husband, who I am just as in love with today as fourteen years ago.
• Birta, the softest cat.
• Everyone who played my Forum Revival TV Tropes Mafia Revival, which was a blast to watch (and opal for assisting with it).
• Everyone who played and commented on the full version of Sutoraiku High.
• Everyone who actually read my R/B/Y RNG mechanics article it's really cool you guys I promise

Fingers crossed for the year 2021. Love you all!

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