Catching in Gen 3/4 is surprisingly SIMPLE! 

You can get Pokémon items from Japan by using Buyee! Go to this link to obtain a 2,000 yen coupon: bit.ly/buyee-Lyramadeawebsite. You will receive the coupon after singing up. This video is bit more "math-y" than the previous ones, so I hope it is still clear and enjoyable! Looking back, I realize I did not give the Quick Ball the credit it deserved. For common Pokémon, it is pretty much a turn 1 catch. But at the same time, most Balls are very good against Pokémon with a high catch rate. Maybe I will revisit it in another video, who knows ;')

This brings back memories of the time I caught mewtwo in a nest ball because "weak pokemon" is ambiguous if it's "low level pokemon" or "low hp pokemon."

By the way, fun fact I discovered just now: while Poison does give 1.5x multiplier, in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire due to programming error, Bad Poison (the one from Toxic) doesn't have that multiplier as the code checks specifically for regular Poison status. This was fixed in Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen.

In future games, Timer Ball was boosted significantly so that it reaches ×4 catch rate as soon as turn 10, and becomes better than an Ultra Ball at turn 4! By the time you set up everything, it is probably gonna be better than the Ultra Ball already.

For people who don't have a Spore user, a Pokemon like Butterfree with Compound Eyes can also do the trick. Compound Eyes make Sleep Powder be 97% accurate, basically as good as Spore most of time.

I love your usage of the Pokémon animation sprite frames as reaction images, seeing them made me laugh a bit each time they showed up.

What's also really fun with dusk balls was how many things counted as "caves" in gen 4. Places you wouldn't expect to be caves were treated as caves for the 3.5x modifier, and it was glorious.

For those interested, the CaptureStrength formula at 4:29 looks complicated but is actually quite simple. The big numbers and nested operations come from the need to use only integer arithmetic and from (I would guess) the lack of a 4th-root function. Two nested square roots are the same as a 4th root (which I will write as 4rt). So if we remove the integer arithmetic restriction, the whole thing can be simplified to 65535 * 4rt(finalCR / 255). To get a probability from this, we can divide by 65535, so the final probability for each wobble is 4rt(finalCR / 255). My understanding is that this is the probability that the pokemon will not break out of the ball during that wobble. The probability of catching the pokemon is the probability that it doesn't break out during any of the 4 wobbles. So we can raise the probability to the 4th power to find the catch chance: 4rt(finalCR / 255)^4 = finalCR / 255. So, as Lyra said, in the absence of rounding errors, the final catch rate really is unchanged by this formula. The big numbers and weirdly rearranged divisions are only there to minimize rounding errors.

I mean adding to 255 and then caping out is probably better than it overflowing and makeing a hoothoot harder to catch than a mewtwo or hoho

The timer ball is slept on in Gen 3 for catching legendaries. It doesn’t take too long to out perform the ultra ball, and it has a lot of upside

Dude, i've a pc full of legendaries and shinies caught in duskballs from the gen 4 days, it was awesome.

Ever since the move Soak was added in Gen V, Net Balls have been my #1 ball (though Quick Balls remain a close 2nd)

Any chance you'll talk about catching mechanics in PLA in the future? Lots of wacky stuff in that game with stuns, berries, those rice ball things, back hits, new status effects, and of course my beloved gigaton balls.

Talking about modified catch rates, more recent games actually follow a convention where cover legendaries that you're "expected" to catch have a much higher catch rate than normal, but only in the game that they're starring in. This led to many catch rate changes - Dialga/Palkia/Reshiram/Zekrom were made far more difficult in ORAS compared to their starring games, while Rayquaza and Necrozma were made much easier than usual in ORAS and USUM, respectively

For the record quick balls are often good enough to catch most Pokémon that have decent catch rates on the first turn of battle. It won’t be catching legendaries but they are amazing when filling out the dex.

Back in my hey day of catching everything in the postgame, I had things down to a science. I would buy a bunch of dusk balls, quick balls, net balls, timer balls, and ultra balls for the ones that slipped through the cracks. I'd throw a quick ball on the first turn, especially against common Pokemon because I had a good chance of catching it without any effort. Then I would use a Smeargle who I taught spore, thunder wave, false swipe, and foresight (for Ghosts, sometimes I'd replace a move with mean look for roaming legendaries). In the later gens I had a tactician Smeargle who I EV trained in attack and gave a silk scarf to (or maybe it was something better, I forget) so that I could hopefully get it done to 1 HP in a turn or 2, then just spam spore (thunderwave if I got lazy or it was immune to spore). I had looked up all the catch rates so I knew which situations to use which balls. I'd mainly play at night so it was dusk balls all around, but on weekends sometimes I'd use the others and in legendary fights if they dragged on too long I'd go with timer balls. Thanks for the video, I would have found this really interesting back then (and still do now). Hopefully a lot of people are coming back to those middle generations of Pokemon since that's really when I think the series peaked.

Question: Quick ball is useful against roaming pokemon if you left them at low hp and sleep, they run and you find them in a new fight? Or it doesnt count as the first turn anymore?

Catching in Gen 3: "I bet you thought this was always how it worked, huh? Well, it does now!"

I just wanted to say that your content totally rocks!! I started a Living Dex recently and your website has been a GINORMOUS HELP on my adventure!! I'm hoping to begin supporting your Patreon soon thanks to your great help!! Keep up the amazing work!

Thanks for making this! I always thought the dusk ball was amazing. And I remember the timer balls being handy. I caught Rayquaza with one.

This is an interesting mix of integer and real numbers mechanics, suggesting the formula for the catch rate was designed before the specs for GBA hardware were known to developers. As Pokemon by that time was firmly the platform-selling game and Game Freak was likely in the loop as quick as possible, this likely dates the integer-based formula as mid-2000-ish, maybe even before Crystal original release and the wobbles check as a later addition. Knowing the wobbles result beforehand and just displaying it as an animation is a valid shortcut, but likely someone thought "hey, we have a proper 32-bit cpu now with all the floating points in it, why the hell not?" Square roots must have been liberating as calculating distances in integer is a route full of hacky solutions that give a result that's as accurate as assuming pi equaling 3 for the ease of calculations. Enough error to have quirky edge cases, not enough for the vast majority of players to notice nothing. Weird-ish parentheses in the formula presented may be a tradeoff between wanting higher divided number to make integer division less errory and not wanting the multiplication result to overflow the likely 16-bit unsigned integer limit. The original was 8 bit ofc, but likely the formula was developed in anticipation of just 16-bit no FPU CPU, like 80286.

I sometimes forget this channel exists, but it's such a joy to see videos of yours pop up here and there :D

a new lyra video on my day off? what a treat!!

Quick Balls are amazing; even if the pokemon will be at max health and no status, the catch rate becomes so high that it still has a high chance to work or is outright guaranteed against most pokemon, especially after its Gen 5 buff to X5. In most encounters I just chuck a Quick Ball and it's done.

The Dusk ball truly is ridiculous. I used it ALL the time and still do when replaying those games. The funny thing is that, for whatever reason, I thought the ball worked on real time terms, growing stronger from the moment it got dark (I think 8:00 pm in Gen4?) until peaking at midnight. I don't know where I got that from, but that's what I thought. So, with my newfound powers of being a teenager (I bought Diamond with my first internship money too, good times) I used to stay up late specifically for legendary pokemon not in caves and rare hard to catch mons. Gen4 was also the first gen in which I actually completed a living dex, so I guess my dedication, even if misdirectedf, paid off. A shame that they busted Kurt's balls again though. HGSS made it so much easier to get apricorns and actually showed you the designs ingame, so it'd have been awesome to have some mons in matching balls. For that reason, they became an exceptional feature (to me) when they eventually brought them back in Alola (albeit in stupidly low quantity).

yes yes yes YES YES GEN 3 HOURS LETS GO (i love hoenn so much so im very stoked to see you dissect the games and explain in detail how all of it works) also finally got around to giving u money on patreon!

yr breakdowns are very interesting. learning about the actual math behind the games is v cool

I love the use of sprites to make a bit of humor.

9:07 Well, there's a funny thing about Quick Balls; see, Gen 4 has a few special Pokémon, like Cresselia, Mesprit, Entei and Raikou, that can be lowered to 1 HP and put to sleep, and still get that 4x catch rate with Quick Balls. Because these special Legendaries are roamers, and while any encounter of them is the start of a "new" battle, they retain any damage and status effects previously inflicted. So it's not impossible to get that 4x with the 2x sleep and the ?x damage bonuses.

In my first Sapphire playthrought, I used all my Ultra ball on a very low HP rayquaza (pretty sure he had like no attacks left or close to it), then had no more balls and used a timer ball (it was clearly over the 30th turn lol), and catch it directly... Actually I never really used the special balls before that, I thought that they would be bad so it was quite a funny surprise xD

Thank you for making these videos. I love learning about the topics in your content.

What a great video!! Now I want a Gen 3 living dex video. It's my favorite Gen, so I'd love to see it. Great work, I'm amazed by your time and effort put into this

Ok, but you didn't adress how rhythmically tapping the L and R buttons increases the catch rates in the Gen III games. My friend at the playground told me about that trick, so I've got it on pretty good authority that it works.

You make awesome videos, always love learning more about pokemon mechanics

I just LOVE these mechanics video! You found a niche, my friend. Hope your channel grow big!

I love your videos! They’re informative and well put together. I’m always excited for a new upload!

I love these videos, I would love to see the rest of the Gens as well that'd be cool asf

dusk ball is especially good in pokemon moon and ultra moon if you're a day player, as time is offset by 12 hours, so when its broad daylight outside in real life, in game its midnight. there's also the altar of the sunne/moone in the postgame of both sun and moon, which let you change the current time by 12 hours no matter what, so you can always be at a time when dusk ball is most effective.

I am going for astrophysics and that root on root action had me rolling.

I love those explanation videos, keep up the good work!

I've been searching for info on catching in gen 3 since i saw ur last videos on gens 1 & 2 :D

Great video as always Lyra!

Finally someone that understand that the Dusk Ball being so great

Oh man, this video for some reason really takes me back to TheJwittz's older Pokémon videos (fact/top 10 era). It's a nice information video, and it isn't overly complicated but has personality. Not to mention calling out Kurt for not being able to design his balls right has stuck in my head after all these years haha I don't mean that you don't have your own identity - you've got your own angle for going at things, and tend to go deeper into the exact specifics in how things work. But Jwittz was a big part of Pokémon youtube a solid 10 years ago and I thought it was cool to see something a bit like it in the 20's :)

10:30 I laughed when you said let's take a look at Kurt's balls

Just watched this little series, and I was glad to see it go from THE patron to all of the patrons.

I really love your breakdown videos of pokemon programming! Keep it up

Neat analysis video! Thanks for uploading!

I think it's interesting that casual fans think Level has a direct impact on catch chance, when it doesn't. Though in gen 3+, it does have a tertiary effect due to the HP calculation getting marginally better at higher levels. Assuming catch rate and ball mod of 1 for simplicity, the catch rate is: (3*Max-2*Cur)/(3*Max). At 1 hp, it evaluates to 29/30 with 20 maximum, and 299/300 with 200. Consequently, higher max HP Pokemon, such as higher levels, are _easier_ to catch by a marginal amount.

very much worth the wait, great vid!

Kurt's Pokeballs are designed about as well as Gen 1 Pokemon. They don't crash and burn, which is extremely admirable, but... The alternative isn't very good either if you happen to know what's going on!

Great video I would love to know more about how damage is calculated or likeliness of other aspects of pokemon, etc. keep up the great worl

Great video friendo! It's cool seeing the math involved in the older games.

"Let's take a look at Kurt's balls" I would have worded that differently, but ok

Was about to try and catch Lugia in SoulSilver while I was watching this. Caught it with my first Heavy Ball. Thanks for the info!!!

Big fan of these deep dives into the mechanics and code of the games. Especially gen 3.

I really like these nerdy catch em all videos for the older gens. Thanks for the content lyra.

Very interesting! I enjoyed watching.

I love these videos, I get excited when I see them

It's so cool to hear how this all works!

Thank you for affirming my quick ball turn 1 then dusk ball everything strategy

yesss- i love these videos sooo much- so eccitged for the rest of them!

I like all your videos, just keep doing what you're doing

Great video bud 👍🏻👍🏻

I just got the national dex in Brilliant Diamond to unlock shaymin and this video pops up... perfect.

At 4:08 the double roor espression can be simplified to ~1.57% of the 4th root of catch rate Since this caclulation is done 4 times the capture strenght over 4 rolls, is final catch rate/~16517612

I really like your videos, the perspective on Pokémon you give is really interesting. I have some constructive criticism: when using colour for the catch rate algorithm, you should use bold text or mark it (background colour). It was nearly invisible and not to distinguish between purple maxHP and blue currentHP. Keep up the good work :)

I finished a Gen 2 living dex a couple weeks ago and just now find out you have a website ;_; At least the prep work and tracking was somewhat fun for me lol

just a random question and i am sure it's been asked but are you doing these for every generation? but enjoying the series so far keep up the good work

This formula makes more sense if you cancel the max hp in the fraction and put the other variables off on the side. Then you get (1 - 2/3 (current hp/max hp))(CR)(ball)(status), and surely that makes more sense? The first number is a number which goes from 1/3 when it's full HP to 1 when it's just about dead. So basically it's a linear function of the percentage of HP that the target has remaining. Everything else is modifiers which boost that number in certain circumstances.

Would be nice to see some graphs that show how the catch rate changes based on the amount of HP remaining. While reducing to 1 HP does give the highest probability, it isn’t necessarily the most time-efficient strategy since it may require additional turns.

amazing vid 👍

10:00 "there is one final type of ball we need to talk about"

Repeat balls, timer balls, and fast balls can have utility for shiny hunters and dex completionists. Timer balls are great for legendary catching since catches can run long enough for the 4x rate to kick in, fast balls are great on HGSS’s roamers as they all have 100+ base speed, and repeat balls are just a nice upgrade to ultra balls if your dex is complete or mostly filled.

I think for the purpose of completing the dex quick balls are the best. They've saved me so much time and it only costs 1 turn if it fails I imagine money and party HP aren't a concern for people who have moved on to the goal of filling the dex. Quick balls are basically master balls for pre-evolved mons with a high catch rate.

This was a very fun video

Fun fact: In gen 4 Dusk Balls don't work in caves while surfing. Not sure about at night.

“It does not matter if the HP is green, yellow or red, there is no threshold” That one sentence is probably going to have the most impact on me in the future, I had always wondered but never confirmed it so I would always try to chip a pokemon into that next colour just incase that was what was needed.

I use Dive Ball for everything that doesn't belong in it. Maths can't tell me otherwise.

Amazingg contenttt !!

glad that the apricorn balls will and always will be the weirdest things on earth! if you're going to try to fill out the gens 3+4 living dex and onward, may i recommend a breloom? it's like parasect, with both false swipe and spore, but with a higher base stat total (higher atk, equal sp. atk, and higher speed), one less 4x weakness, and, in gen 4, if you're willing to get a toxic orb, it can heal indefinitely with poison heal, which goes a long way in longer battles!

Man, that title brings back memories. At least Pokemon catch formulas don't need exploits on the level of Super Mario Maker glitches. Surprisingly simple, truly.

Love ur videos!!!!

This is super-interesting, thank you=)

0:54 Gotta say, that formular was arranged to look a lot more complicated that it actually is, technically only being multiplications, not even needing the brackets...

Love this series

There is a MEME about the other professors yelling at Lannete due to her logical thinking about the storage system looool

I used the Timer Ball on Colosseum to catch the beasts, I was prepared for battles of attrition (was nearly 20 years ago so can't remember my strategy) but they worked nicely

“So, let’s take a look at Kurt’s balls” is a WILD sentence

Loved the video

it was easy to understand and enjoyable

For the formula around the 4:00 minute mark a more clear way to write it is to replace the two squareroots with a single quadratic root ∜, this way everyone can see the formula can be solved by dividing what is beneath the ∜, solving that quadratic root and then dividing again for the answer. Plus it looks more professional, in academic papers you probably won't see 2 square roots on top of each other.

I had to figure this stuff out on my own by consulting a few different websites but I did just complete a living dex up thru Gen 5. The Dusk and quick balls were my best friends, with probably a third of my living dex being caught in quick balls. But lemme tell you, catching Kyogre in Heartgold was a real test. Turns out that putting it at very low HP (incredibly difficult to do when it knows Aqua Ring), putting it to sleep, and using a CHAD heavy ball gives you a 1 in 4 chance of catching it. So yeah. Heavy ball is totally busted on the Weather Trio.

If I remember correctly, the Heavy Ball’s negative catch rate modifier actually makes it 100% impossible to catch Beldum with them, to the point that if you saw a Beldum inside one, it was definitely hacked.

10:30 “Let’s take a look at Kurt’s balls”

If I were to include Kurt (or a Kurt stand-in) in another pokemon game, I'd have all the unique balls he can make work at the same catch rate as great balls, but if conditions are met, boost friendship of the pokemon in question. This still relegates them to being 90% for vanity's sake, since friendship boosts are not really that difficult to achieve, but it would spare the frustration of these "specialized" pokeballs not working as advertised.

Finally there's someone that takes a proper elaborate look at Kurt's heavy balls

love your videos

Smeargle is a Pokemon catching machine. False Swipe, Spore, and maybe Mean Look for the roaming Legendaries. I read a comment that mentioned how Soak will let you use False Swipe on a Ghost type, so throw that in the last slot!

Not gonna lie I always assumed the wobbles were a lie, I had no idea they were ever anything other than flavour