How Collecting Every Pokémon Emerald Decoration Solved a 20 Year Old Mystery 

The mystery was how the Rooftop Sale/other timed events spawn, which hasn't been fully documented since Ruby and Sapphire released in 2002 :)

What gets me is how much better looking the Regi dolls are than the overworld sprites of the actual Pokémon. I feel like a toy being more on-model than the real ingame thing is some kind of paradox

I was always fascinated by the old guy who changed with every playthrough. I couldn't find anyone talking about him, thanks for explaining how he works

I love how the 20 year secret was broken ON 3RD TIER OF DIFFICULTY OUT OF 6

Man game freak must’ve thought children had way more friends than they actually do. Because I can firmly believe you’re the first person to actually do this. And for a child to do it they’d have to have a lot of willing friends. I had my brother and a neighbor kid to bother into these kinds of tasks in Pokémon, it was not as fruitful as a result.

It's amazing how much weird, random stuff they crammed into these games back in the day. You'd never find something so elaborate yet so pointless in a modern Pokemon game.

I must have been one lucky freak in my original Ruby playthrough. I must have gotten the Lilycove sales lady early, because I have no memory of it, yet I have the exclusives she sells. Breakable door and slide were always part of my secret base. What I do remember getting, however, is to Mirage Island. I got there, got the liechi berry and caught some Wynaut, because why not? I then planted the Liechi berry and went to do something else. ... And I could never come back to harvest it. I said I was lucky, not clever. :D

Time travel needs to be invented so that this guy can go back to 2004 and blow everyone's minds

Fun fact: if your team is shiny and you mix records, when your friend battles your team of shinies, they will lose their shininess and become regular colored Pokemon. Was pretty lame to find out for me and a shiny hunting friend

It's crazy to learn I got the clearance sale completely randomly, I remember getting those decorations

For all our Regiguy enthusiasts, 15:02 says "This card cost me 278, so be grateful"

I find it extremely validating to know that the rooftop department store was spawned by such an absurd mechanic. My friends all said "I don't know, it just spawned randomly for me," until one of them looked up the solution online and said "oh, it just spawns on Saturdays." I never got to the rooftop marketplace :(. Excellent research!

I remember if you record mixed, you could save your friend's secret base into your world, where you could battle them with the team they had at the time of the mixing. The best summer vacation of my life, like 20 years ago, my cousin from across the country visited and we spent a week together doing dumb kid stuff, hanging out, and just playing pokemon and other videogames side-by-side. We were like rivals, since our saved games were in the same places and we kept battling. It was so fun, but I haven't seen him since. Anyway, I was digging through my gameboy games a few years ago and came across my old copy of pokemon Sapphire. I booted it up and rode around until I found what I thought was my secret base. Apparently it wasnt, but instead had been my cousin's secret tree base. His npc with his name was there and everything. And talking to him threw me into a battle, which was a feature I completely forgot existed. I got goosebumps when it was his old party and everything. Like a snapshot in time from what I was little, as if only a few days had passed. Obviously I trashed his team. He couldnt beat me at the time, and definitely couldn't later. Also his base looked like garbage compared to mine which was filled with tons of stuff, including stuff I had got on the rooftop sale.

I really love these super niche Pokemon deep dives. Something about getting into the nitty gritty of Pokemon games is just really fascinating to me.

back in 2008, i used to search through all the possible forums just to find out how to fill those gaps in secret bases. not being able to understand english properly was a problem too, but the worst thing was that everyone just shared the myths they heard so you couldn't find any reliable information. you, sir toasty, just relieved my 11 year old self from a big headache. thank you and congratulations on completing your collection :D

"For the sake of narrative buildup..." I love this kind of unnecessarily honest, meta, and easy to miss commentary.

As someone who took the time to get all 7 gold frontier badges in emerald, I can appreciate the determination & patience it must’ve taken you to accomplish such a feat that most won’t even fully understand. Cheers to you mate.

As someone who put 1K+ hours into Emerald.... I love this. There were so many things I didn't do despite playing over and over and keeping the same save file for years. I love learning new things about one of my all time favorite games.

You know we're in for a hard one when the EASIEST group includes getting another copy of the game and an specific trainer ID just to get a free plushie.

I was OBSESSED with the secret bases when I was playing emerald, and minus those regis I most certainly did all the bullshit required to collect all the decorations. I remember the day I got that stupid plank, and that REALLY sealed in my obsession. Luckily I had a good group of friends who were also obsessively trading, battling and playing, I never truly realized just how difficult and time consuming collecting them all was.

I'm shocked. I remember playing Emerald as a young teenager and loving secret bases. Not only I had all the special sale items without knowing it was a very random event and the contest glass statue but I also had lots of these Battle Points exclusive dolls. I didn't even remember it taking so long to get them. My dream was to get the Regi dolls ):

This was a great video! As one of the ~five people on the internet interested in gen 2 decoration collecting, I'm obligated to encourage you to attempt the GSC equivalent of this challenge. There's even less documentation to go off of and I don't believe there's a single account of someone actually completing the set!

I agree that the Point payouts in Emerald are hilariously bad, but here is one trick that will significantly speed up the process: Once you get to three Silver Symbols, you will be allowed to bet on your Battle Frontier performances in a house in the eastern region of the Frontier. So you just lose your streak in whatever facility they want to bet on first, then bet the maximum amount and beat the first set of trainers there. I managed to get to the Venusaur doll without much effort in about one or two days if I remember correctly.

I actually had a registeel doll in my old emerald. a friend from japan had visited me for a summer way back when (still comes to this day to hang out) gave me the doll through the trader, showing me how all that worked since I never messed with it before. then my cousin got ahold of my gameboy, and we all know how kids are with someone else's save file.

I miss these little secrets gen 3 hid. There's so many little things that let you feel more immersed into the world, without the game explicitly telling you anything about it. That kind of world-building is gone, and I miss it so badly.

The Battle Frontier dolls are super easy to get. Best method is just Pyramid with a Choice Band Slaking, Blissey, and something else of your choice like Suicune or some other physically bulky mon. You can get huge streaks which gives you 15 BP per completion, and sometimes you don't even need to fight

I vaguely remember having that breakaway door in my base as a kid, I never knew how rare that was

Stuff like this is so cool to me. I never even gave secret bases a second thought back in gen 3, but I’d love to see them return some day! Maybe in an actual house or something similar instead of cave squatting lol

You solved another little mystery of mine in this video: how that left-facing "decorating" sprite is used. I had seen it in the ROM visualizers/decomps but had skipped out on the hidden bases so never got why it was always/only facing left. Thank you!

wasnt expecting the 20 year old mystery to be something as mundane as "nobody knew how the spaghetti code worked so it was just ignored"😆

I cannot imagine how much that regi doll card must have cost... I applaud your dedication to these collection challenges, it's the same spirit that made me complete a gen 3 living dex back in the day! Borrowing games, cloning real event pokemon from friends, emulating a distribution cart and when all else failed, glitzer popping. Love your channel!

15:30 "this card cost me 278 so be grateful"

As a kid I accidentally got the sale and had no idea it was something special. I just checked and saw this new npc and bought him out since I was really into the secret base stuff. I’ve since restarted my game many many times since and stopped caring about secret bases. Watching this video just made me a bit sad since I threw out what would’ve been an awesome relic from my childhood😅

I’m tripping out because I haven’t played Pokémon since Emerald, and yet I remember that rooftop sale!!!! I had no idea how hard it is to get that event. I was very serious about decorating my secret base, so I imagine I likely purchased everything I could at the sale. I highly doubt I got any of the harder decorations though :p This gave me some incredible nostalgia. Pokémon Emerald, and FireRed are two of the games I hold so dearly in my heart. The amount of wonder and curiosity I had throughout these games are unlike anything else I have ever played. Thank you for making this.

I'm stunned that out of all the decorations, only 3 are tied to an event distribution.

If there are 35 dolls and there are 386 Pokemon in ADV, then the 35 dolls collected amounts to 9.06% of the Pokedex.

I love how all the heavy furniture is sold in a tree house with a rope ladder to carry it down.

To be honest, I kinda wish that something similar to secret bases gets added in one of the newer pokemon games. The concept for them is pretty neat, but it's hard to actually visit player bases in the two sets of games it was in without having to go out of your way to fetch somebody's base. I feel like it would be pretty cool if secret bases were added into something like Galar's wild area or pretty much anywhere in Paldea, with the bases of other players automatically taking open bases if you're connected to the internet.

Absolutely fantastic video! Gen III is my favorite generation, and a big part of it is that for me it has juuuust the right amount of fun little bonus features like this that are almost entirely ignored but are just waiting beneath the surface to be accessed. I think there's also something kind of sad and almost liminal about multiplayer features like Secret Bases that just aren't going to be used anymore as people aren't really playing these games on original hardware with each other in person. Videos like these help fulfill the promise and potential of these features, and I'll be sure to check out your other content!

Dude, you are insane for going for all these. Love to see the effort and information put into more obscure subjects like this. Awesome work

Gen 3 is my favourite generation because of how many wacky secrets the developers slipped in. No matter how old they get, there's always something new to discover.

Gen 3 is Pokemon perfection. I never bothered with decorations because I'm kind of a completionist and I hated the idea of having to dedicate more time to finding all the collectibles. But the decorations are so darn cute and cool so it can make for a fun/worthwhile adventure.

I loved the secret bases 😭💕 i would love to see something similar brought back

I admire the dedication as I could never do this myself. I don't have the patience to battle for hours and hours just to get some dolls but this is amazing.

This was my dream to get all the decorations and have the best secret base! I never knew how difficult it really was as a kid until now! I feel satisfied knowing someone has them all though!

I had no idea how painstaking these games made outfitting your base, damn.

It’s sad how many of the special events in second and third generation games are rendered useless because of something as trivial as a clock powered by a battery that cannot be accessed without action that would void a warranty on literally any other device. One might think that after gen 2 introduced the Morning/Day/Night time and day of the week mechanics that determine when certain Pokemon appear (as well as some other events) Nintendo would have figured that other games would need a clock, and decide to build one into the GameBoy Advance line of systems and future proof usability of the physical games. I’m glad they got around to it in the DS and 3DS lineups, but too little too late.

Wow I didn't know the Department Store sale was so rare! I remember event triggering for me shortly after beating the Elite 4 and thought nothing of it and just bought all the items from the sale thinking it was just a normal postgame occurrence What a great video! Emerald is one of my favorite games and glad to see new things are still being uncovered about the game

This was an interesting video. Thanks for showing off the expensive e-Reader Card. Props to your friends in your discord group for discovering how the Postgame TV Events worked.

This and the Ribbon videos are your best ones yet and they’re so fun to watch. I’d watch more like this in a heartbeat

It doesn’t surprise me that the TV events have BS low probability tied to them like a lot of things in Pokemon lol. Great work to you and the discord person for discovering it though, as well as the grinding for the Battle Frontier dolls

When I was a kid, my friend told me you needed the solid boards to cover the gaps inside the abandoned ship to assess new rooms in it. Crazy the I used to believe that.

Gen 3 is my favorite generation and I had absolutely no idea about half this stuff

Man. And I thought I was hot shit for earning the Glass Ornament, and Silver and Gold Shields!

absolutely wonderful video, i love that someone is taking the time to deep dive these classic games

One thing that really sucks is how a lot of the cool features like bases and the battle tower are basically unusable without crazy high luck or a LOT of work/grinding.

I never thought something in Pokemon could be more tedious than getting every single ribbon, but here we are.

Man this is incredible. Your ability to explore the limits of areas not often explored in depth in this generation has been incredible to watch. Keep up the great work I look forward to more in the future if you have the sanity for them 😂.

You tread these waters 15 years after I did. I cannot describe to you how cathartic it is to know that someone else, somewhere, has felt the same madness. I depended on luck for the events, though. Had no idea about the battle encounter trigger. I should have known better than to attribute anything in a cartridge-era Pokémon game to "just RNG".

God this brings back memories, I remember finally getting the clearance sale event as a kid and getting so excited. Great video as usual!

I feel like this should be a speed run category for emerald

I’m so glad someone finally made a video about all the secret base decorations. I been curious about this for years!

I find it extremely hard to believe that it took until recently to find out how the tv events trigger, considering the fact that the reverse engineered source code has been made publicly available on github over 2 years ago.

I'm happy to say I've 100% everything in my copy of emerald and then did like 80% of the stuff in a Japanese copy with the events. Including the decorations I've probably got 1,500 hours in emerald alone . Man I had no life as a kid

Man I sure do love getting notifications for videos that don't exist yet. It's always so fun.

Nice video! I've always liked finding secret bases but wished they were bigger cause I wanted to decorate more. Knowing now that there're a ton more decorations make me wonder why they didn't make those places bigger. I'm happy to see what all of the items are though and it was interesting to see how they could be obtained. You put so much work into getting them all and it's amazing. Thanks for making a video about it!

Its beyond comforting to know that someone out there really has completed a full collectathon in pokemon :)

The amount of dedication to do this for everyone to see at the end must have felt so worth it in the end!

Wow, I didnt even know there were other events than the Lilycove Department Story Rooftop sale. That's the only one I've ever gotten. Also I didn't know these old guys were a thing, but it does explain why I had the Bard on my very first playthrough, loved him, but never found him again on other playthroughs!

This was SO great. Thank you for making this, I feel like there’s hardly anything new for me to see in these games at this point but this was definitely new.

wow, i’m just blown away by how much you have to do to get every single item. i learned so much watching this. super nostalgic. making bases was one of my favorite things about this gen

Great vid and adventure. Secret bases are some of my favorite things to come out of pokemon and it's cool to see the hoops you have to go through to get everything. Also I will never forgive ORAS for having the regice doll be the only available regi doll in-game. Admittedly, it looks like it was an accident given the method it was distributed and that the other two are gettable with hacks, but my regirock-dedicated base being topped off with a regice doll hurt lol.

It's been nearly 20 years and I still learn about things these games have that I didn't know existed

This was amazing. Thanks for going through all of this lol your collection is well deserved 🤘

It always surprises me how fucking detailed emerald is. I know that recent games have just as many things now, but emerald will forever be my favourite pokemon because at the time this type of detail was unheard of. People really take advantage of it now adays.

another absolute banger coming straight from the toastiest of toes, keep at it king (salute)

Thank you so much for doing this and showing it to the world cause ain’t no way in hell I’m ever doing that, gen 3 May be my favorite but that is a pain in the ass I’m not willing to go trough,also you deserve the subs you have and just gained a new one

Absolutely beautiful! Thanks for all the work you do to bring this info to us!!

This is absolutely the kind of thing I want to do someday in some of my GBA and DS Pokémon games, they’re so full of mystique and I love it

Huh. About a year or two ago I did all of this on real cartridges, because I'm also an insane completionist. I remember seeing The Kraken's messages a bit earlier, and it's cool that we finally solved that! Luckily I got my Lilycove sale during the main story of the game with no extra effort. The trophies and Frontier dolls were definitely insane to get. I did the trophies completely in Emerald. I was already also going for the full Gold symbols, so getting the BP for the decorations wasn't quite as grueling as you described (although it still took months, lol) because I had two different goals in mind and I was getting two birds with one stone. I wish I had known about the Link Multi stuff though. I got the Regis from a save file I had from an emulator, so I didn't end up buying the E-cards like you did. Respect to the commitment, I'm insanely jealous. Great video! I enjoyed watching

Amazing video! I never knew how to pass those holes in some Secret Bases and all that rabbit hole of decorations in Gen 3. Thank you for that! :D

I'd totally forgotten about secret bases until this video. Maaaan Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald was a wild time. Well done; this was oddly satisfying to watch.

There's actually an easier way to spawn the clearance sale in Emerald, using your method of getting the higher odds in R/S. Events like the clearance sale, mass outbreaks, Energy Guru sale, etc., can be transferred to other games by mixing records. In fact, in my experience, you can mix records the day before they happen, or a day or two after, and the game(s) that they didn't happen in will still detect them and make them happen a day or two later. I had a clearance sale happen in Emerald, then attempted to mix records with my Ruby when Ruby had a Surskit outbreak, the outbreaks of which I knew could be transferred. But to my surprise, Ruby got the clearance sale some time later...and I didn't win many battles, so it's not like I spawned it by coincidence. My memory is a little hazy, but yeah, you can Mix records to transfer events. A lot easier than using the Trader over and over again.

You should do a video where you collect every obtainable item in a game! It took quite a while but I was able to do this in ORAS (I even reset Pokemon X to get both gen 6 fossils). I included event only items as well.

Hats off to you, this is the first video in a very long time that I actually learned about a mechanic in the hoenn games I didn't already know

This video was really interesting! Loved the music and the commentary and visuals. Just got yourself a new sub😁

While I agree that this was way too difficult, I do miss these kinds of side quest sort of treasure hunts that the old games used to have. Completing them gives you an immense sense of satisfaction, and the journey is always fun. It’s a shame they don’t do this anymore.

Great video! I always wanted to have multiple of the glass ornament decoration in my secret base, but just assumed it wasn't possible. Thanks to this video I now know its something I can actually work toward getting one day!

I remember having the platform, slide, breakable door and wooden floor decorations in my ruby game. I definitely didn't know how they were gotten but it's cool to see that these were pretty rare!

So I finally figured out why the pokeblock master never left in my save file, the battery died as the event spawned

Title had me confused but after fully watching the video everything made sense. Congrats for figuring out the mystery, collecting all the decorations and thank you for sharing your incredible journey

I appreciate your effort in collecting everything in these games ! Such training for those effort points !

The trader mechanic is probably the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Thanks for the content, dude!

it seems only god knows when we'll eventually know every weird obscure thing about old pokemon games

Amazing video!! It is so hard getting the gold symbols i remember having enough for one the large dolls! Love learning more about Emerald, subscribed!

Your level of dedication and time doing this has definitely got you a new fan and subscriber!

Would you ever consider doing similar thing in ORAS? the collection there is larger, but as you well know, much easier to collect. There are still a few interesting one to obtain in those games as wellso would be cool to see it all in one video

That was impressive, Emerald was pretty much my childhood but no way I knew any of this stuff

This is SO COOL, I CAN'T 😭 Thanks for the video. I don't remember many adjectives in English, but I liked your video a lot!!

I wish I knew about this video sooner because I was trying to look up information on how the Blend master and those tv events spawned but all of the info out there was sooooo vague. Thanks for finding this out.