Is it really possible to softlock yourself in the middle of Gen 3's ocean? Soft Lock Picking Playlist: • Soft Lock Picking Twitch: / pikasprey Gameplay Channel: / @pikaspreyblue Twitter: / pikasprey
One way to make this worse: Vaporeon at Level 99. If you calculate out roughly how much XP each Vaporeon would earn before they KO'd themselves, you could set it so they'll level up before they finish struggling. This would not only add an extra bit of time with each "You gained 10 XP!" text box, but also the tiniest amount of HP you gain from leveling up would feel really spiteful.
Tut tut, no no no, Vaporeon is worst at level 69. At level 69, you would never escape because Vaporeon would be keeping you far too busy. This is because they're the most compatible Pokemon for humans. Not only are they in the field egg group, which is mostly comprised of mammals, Vaporeon are an average 3 foot 3 inches tall and 63.9 lbs. No other pokemon comes close to this level of compatibility and sheer power to make you never want to escape.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Pikasprey were to lock himself in a safe and let himself be thrown deep into the ocean, just to gracefully escape 2 weeks later and describe how he used some overly complicated berry strategy to survive.
“From inside the safe, the situation seems hopeless, but what if the ocean surrounding us was actually the key to our escape? If you collect the water leaking into the safe, you can sell the item for one cent through online marketplaces. Given enough time, you could raise the funds for your escape. How long would that take? 21.61 years.”
@@archivelibrarian6818 the comment references the popular meme “hey guys did you know that in terms of male human and female pokemon breeding”, google it to read the whole thing
I wonder if having the Vaporeons be a couple levels under 100 would lengthen the lock or not. Your stats still ensure that you shouldn't die to anything but struggle, but now you also have to sit through the exp gain after every battle
@@lurkerlp While you could, it's also important to remember this is Gen 3 before Struggle's recoil was based off of your maximum HP, instead the recoil is half of the damage you dealt. This is much faster than the occasional poison sting already. Since this is direct damage, Vaporeon is going to be better as it's 130 base HP (compared to Quagsire's base 95) is going to result in struggle taking much longer to kill you than reducing the damage of a move that's already doing much less damage to you than struggle is.
@@lurkerlp Oh god. I was thinking that it would end up being marginally slower, since the poison damage is low enough to not really change how long it takes you to die, but the HP going down would add up to seconds more. But if you resist poison, you'd have to deal with the "It's not very effective" text box every single time you get hit by a poison move...
I may have missed it, but you could use the black flute to reduce Pokémon encounter rate. I believe it doesn't stop you from having encounters, but takes longer to encounter a Pokémon, until the next map transition, which is never. A small addition, if I didn't miss it, apply a max repel right before you hand the game over.
I noticed that Wingull has Supersonic and wondered about the viability of trying to use confusion to knock yourself out. Against a wingull this is a bad idea, every wingull on the routes available will know water-gun making parafusion strats incredibly risky (and it's probably better to just run if you get that 1% wailord encounter since it's guaranteed to have 2 water moves). Something that did however stick out to me is that Tentacool under level 25 and all Pellipers do not know a water attack. Most notable is the Pelliper, as it knows both supersonic and wing attack, the strongest hitting non-water move that an opponent can have here. This means that if you save Acid Armor to spam out against Pellipers not only do you have a chance for confusion damage to further lower your HP, but if you get Lucky one of the 35 wing attacks might get a crit against you to also help speed up. Though it's probably just better to go for a normal attack and hope they protect as to waste an attack PP without ending a battle, but it's still a fun thought to consider.
you'd have to get knocked out before using up all 64 acid armors while on +6 defense after just 3 of them. I don't think this would be quick, but I do think it'd be quicker than 1h. Also the enemy could just run out of moves and struggle lol
@@tezcanaslan2877 Items don't really add all that much time. The assumptions are that the person is playing optimally, so each held item only adds the amount of time it takes to remove said item.
It's funny that the reason videos take so long to come out from Pikasprey is because they genuinely take that long to record lmao Also this goes without saying but great video as per usual
I always celebrate when these videos are released. I can't possibly imagine how long it takes to come up with the ideas, and spending 8 hours escaping your own softlock sounds like hell. thank you for pushing through to make this content :)
I think the other thing you slightly overlooked is that certain encounters at certain levels won't know any water moves, so it can be safe to use a bunch of PP or such against them.
You shouldve given 5 of the 6 Vaporeons Wish over dive so they could heal whatever chip damage the wild pokemon did, and also give the pokemon Cleanse Tags or Leftovers to reduce spawns and reverse the struggle damage when paralyzed respectively. Plus, both would make the pre-striggle grind way worse.
20 seconds spent removing the items before doing any battling hardly makes a difference when it takes nearly 8 hours at minimum to escape; also Wish has *way* less PP than any of the moves Pikasprey gave to the 6 Vaporeon, you only actually get healed by it half the time since you can spam it and, unless you're dumb enough to leave Wish as your last move to drain PP from, said healing is minuscule compared to how much Water absorb screws you over in the long run.
Good to see another upload from ya, always look forward to them. You could probably extend the time slightly by giving every Vaporeon a -Atk+def nature and max def EV/IVs and 0 atk EV/IVs, since confusion damage is treated as a physical attack against yourself(hence why swagger's a thing). This would minimize the amount of extra self damage you could get off of everything knowing supersonic. Another option I think would be a different pokemon that has an ability that reduces or prevents encounters.
It would be better (in terms of making the softlock worse to escape) to have one Vaporeon with Surf and Dive for the mandatory field moves but give the rest Haze and Tail Whip for the additional PP they have over Surf and Dive.
I think that'll make the escape a lot faster, though. Considering Haze and Tail Whip don't do damage, even if they have more PP, you can just spam those throughout just a few encounters. Meanwhile, Surf and Dive will probably one/two shot every wild Pokémon, forcing you to go through several more encounters and in turn making things take a whole lot longer
As another commenter suggested, something like Bite would be an improvement but non-damaging moves are not a good option for this. Forcing the lockpicker to KO stuff and find a new encounter is MUCH slower than merely having to use a few extra non-damaging moves within the same battle.
You could shorten the time to escape by teaching the Vaporeon Waterfall after the player is trapped. There’s no part in which you specifically avoided receiving the HM from Wallace (if its even possible to) and you can’t remove it from your bag so you could replace Tackle and save yourself a few hundred encounters. Not much but its something, once again great video. Love seeing ways to trap yourself in ridiculous obscure ways
Since the Kyogre/Groudon events only start occurring after beating the league we have to assume he has waterfall. On a similar note, Vaporeon can also learn rock smash. Replacing both non hm moves would reduce the total PP from a total of 160 to 70, but still you have to account for the fact that you can probably cast all PP for acid armor in a single encounter. Does it take more to kill 15 pokemon with an attacking move or to use acid armor 64 times?
cant you just swap pokemon constantly and not use the pp moves at all? This way you don't use pp and your turn ends while each pokemon is getting hurt, until one is left shortening the amount of PP needed to use up to just one vaporeon?
@@acters124 You'd have to entirely rely on wild pokémon damaging you then, which is not at all a reliable method because they can always use a Water move and heal you instead.
@@EtopiaCA No joke, I was watching Mewtwo Strikes Back at one point and my mum walked in and saw him and immediately commented on how big his butt is 😂
Fun to see a softlock with my favorite Pokemon. However, imagine the pain and suffering someone would endure of the Pokemon was even tankier, like Snorlax or Shuckle, AND had healing moves, like Recover or Softboiled.
I feel like vaporeon works better than other tanky Pokemon because of the extra annoyance of water absorb. Recovery moves will be exhausted before the main damage source that is struggle but water absorb is a problem during the struggle arc as well
I love the part of these videos when he reveals how many grueling hours of fighting random low level Pokémon it takes to escape and it’s just one day of what I do for fun as a full odds shiny hunter lol
I did some calculations not to figure out how long it's likely to take (too many variables), but the absolute minimum amount of time it would take assuming optimal conditions across the board. In this case, that means a random encounter with a level 30+ wild Pokémon every step, the paralysis never stopping Vaporeon from attacking, all uses of Supersonic by the enemy missing, no attacing moves used ever being critical hits, and no Water-type moves used by the enemy (except to top off Vaporeon's HP the same turn it uses up its last PP because I like predictable numbers and Vaporeon's max HP is a predictable number). I used the video timer to find out about how long it takes to start a battle under the above optimal condition, as well as how long it takes for a turn to play out when Vaporeon uses Acid Armor, Tackle, or Struggle. I extrapolated how long it would take for Surf and Dive to play out from there based on what I remember of the animations of those moves. Again keep in mind that this is the absolute minimum, regardless of realism, so I assumed that every turn the enemy got they would use a non-water attacking move. What I found was that even in the absolute best case scenario, miracle of miracles as laid out above and trusting the system enough to never stop to save, it would take more than 5 hours, almost 15 minutes more, to escape.
I cannot believe the level of perseverance that you have in this series. It is insane that you would sit there that entire time just to figure out these setups that would never happen in any capacity. All the respect in the world.
The upside of getting out is seeing what the previous owner stored. The dick move is to release everything and waste all your money + items. A nice person may leave something amazing though
Could've taken longer. Have one Vaporeon learn Dive and Surf because it's necessary but have the five others know higher PP moves that do less or no damage. Something like Tail Whip as an example which IIRC would have 64 PP. Not only does it take longer for the obvious reason but it extends battles via Water Absorb. Opposing pokemon will end up using water moves to heal you. That in of itself doesn't necessarily matter since you won't be taking any damage that matters until you use struggle *but* it will cause an animation and text block for every time HP is gained. Tail Whip over Surf is an extra 38 PP you need to burn. That times five Vaporeon is 190. Multiply that by fifty percent 285. Between the added paralyzed turns and the enemy pokemon using a water attack 25%-50% of the time you should end up with at least a hundred additional instances of being healed and the text block informing you about Water Absorb popping up. That's not an enormous amount of time but that even a floor of one hundred times should add two minutes to the total runtime. This is just ballpark, I'm sure you could number crunch this. Edit: Also more PP means you'll be hit with confusion more often from Supersonic. It's pretty much impossible to take a swing at how long that could add to the run because it has three variables creating such a wide range - Supersonic has 55% accuracy, confusion lasts 2-5 turns, and confusion effects the Pokemon 50% of the time.
"Tail Whip over Surf is an extra 38 PP you need to burn. That times five" why do you multiply it by 5 here? the next times 5 i get since there's 5 vaporeon, but i can't see what makes you use 5 times more pp here
The player would still have the Surf and Dive HMs and could replace these moves. Then surf and dive wouldn't be pp maxed so it's strictly worse. Or well, better for the unfortunate soul who has to do this I suppose.
Funny thing is, having worked on a romhack before of Emerald, it generally just treats dive spots as sort of "doors" that you activate with dive and take you to another "room" that being whatever section of map you're going to. So it makes me highly curious how that weird dive spots works to teleport you. My guess is it's likely a leftover bit of code where they were going to make that map area somewhat larger that got left in by accident.
This could be made even longer by replacing Dive and Surf on the other 5 Vaporeons with Tackle and Bite since they have higher PP which would force you to knock out more wild Pokémon and have to sit through the battle victory screen more.
I know he probably hacked for the Vaporeons and he can probably hack to activate the glitch but did you forget how the glitch is done? I dunno what happens if you surf without surf but the best option is probably have only 1 learn surf and dive. Or just surf and using wall walk hacks.
Eevee learns growl at level 16 and baton pass at level 36 in gen 3, both of which have 40 base PP (max 64, like acid armor), which would be even worse than that, especially since you'd be forced to switch out every time you use baton pass edit: I overlooked the battle victory screen part, that's a good point although the vaporeons in the video already have tackle, so maybe replacing surf and dive on the other 5 with bite and baton pass would be ideal
Interestingly, it might be possible to have a Vaporeon faint much faster. If you encounter a level 30+ Tentacool, it will know wrap. If you switch in an untouched Vaporeon until it runs out of uses of Bubblebeam, if the Tentacool still has any uses of wrap left you can then have it take out a bunch of that Vaporeon's health with wrap. Hopefully fainting it, but possibly not. On repeating this process with the next high level Tentacool, once it wastes all its Bubblebeams against a full health Vaporeon, you would switch in the low-health Vaporeon to have it get taken out. While doing this whole grind it might be useful to keep one of the Vaporeon as a dedicated full HP Vaporeon to switch to when facing Wingull, Wailord, or any level 24+ Tentacool, since those are the enemies with water moves. Knowing that, and considering how long it would take to breed up even one Max IV Shiny Vaporeon for myself, I would probably try to break the softlock rather than reset.
Wouldn't it be faster to get KO'd than to faint to struggle though? In gen 3 Tentacool only learns a water move at level 25, so wouldn't it be faster to look for a low level Tentacool and let it chip you down?
It is possible to make it even worse by having all vaporeons learn baton pass, only one vaporeon with surf and one with dive, and the other ones with growl. Those moves have a lot more pp than surf and dive, and baton pass forces you to choose a switch and switch, taking even more time.
Thanks as always for making these I alway really enjoy watching them and learning these truly evil setups. Also my condolences for the unfortunate comment section on a video like this
I wonder if theres a similar scenario in other game where an absorb ability can be used in an area with only that attack type, making it physically impossible to faint. If there is, I think it'd be a really interesting soft lock, although I guess they'd also all have to be 100% accurate moves.
8hrs isn't very bad when your reward is 6 shiny Vaporeon u can likely rename, and u can take a break at any time when u knock out a Vaporeon or get it to half health
Do all the Vaporeon have to have surf and dive? or could those two moves be replaced with other moves to make it even longer? My reccommendation for the best moves to replace it with would be Dig (TM) and Baton Pass (learn as Eevee before evolving) as dig would take twice as long as other moves due to it being a 2-turn move, and baton pass forcing you to switch with another vaporeon while keeping the acid armor buffs
Dig wouldn't work. While it would take longer to attack a Tentacool because of the super effective text, you could just waste all the PP against a single Wingull and not spend time searching for 15 more. Also, the Vaporeon all need to have Surf and Dive because you can't not have those HMs in your bag, so if any of them didn't have those moves, a smart player could teach them and save on PP. Baton Pass or Quick Attack might be better than Acid Armor though.
One minor change I’d make to this set up is using a single max repel before handing the cartridge off to someone else. Even if it only adds a minute to the overall time, it’s an extra step of torture before the player realizes how bad the situation they’re in is.
There should be a Pokèmon Softlockpicking Contest where if anybody manages to crack any of the Soft Locks contributed by the community, they would win an actual cash prize, because I do not think anyone would not do this to their worst enemies under normal circumstances. Still, I love how Pikasprey is still able to lay out the Softlock, and being able to crack it open even after all these years, even unveiling secrets from a game thats more than a decade old! Cheers, man!
I'm curious why you chose to go with Vaporeon instead of Lapras, whose higher defense stat would reduce chip damage from most non-water moves, potentially (though likely minimally) making the softlock last longer
Naming all of them AAAAAAAAAA might technically be there to increase time, but we all know the true reason is to represent the player's inner monologue screaming while doing this
Oh gosh, I was _just_ about going on Route 129 to catch my Kyogre with my fully HP EV-trained 6-Shiny Vaporeon team (I’m a Vaporeon fan), all with Water Absorb to reduce the risk of getting knocked down by Kyogre, while mashing A without looking, to speedup the text prompt when encountering the legendary. Once again, RU-vid algorythm saved my life. Thank you for this video!
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure getting 6 shinies typically takes longer than 8 hours, especially in gen 3, so a good handful of people would see this save and be like "I can do that"
Heard a guy say that using the black flute would make encounters 50% less likely on the route. Not sure if that would save after turning off. Nice video man
iirc there is a permanently available dive spot in the route leading to pacifidlog, so the kyogre event isn't required for this setup. It's also possible to use this to use the bicycle on water, but afaik you need Dive to exit the ocean if you're not currently surfing. I don't remember if Waterfall also works, this "feature" never turned out to be useful in any speedrun, so my friends and I never really explored it much further.
Surf and Dive are only required on ONE Vaporeon to set the trap. You can replace the moves for the other 5 by worse moves like Roar and Growl for even more PPs and time to waste
I was low-key expecting a ridiculous time to complete this softlock, like 10 months or so, because Water Absorb is literally the worst ability for this predicament.
My hypothesis is that the likelyhood of water-moves would essentially rule out death by enemy attacks as a realistic option. But I suppose if there are different encounters in the area, there may be one which is less likely to use a water move than the other. Reguardless, even with the best luck imaginable, you would need at best 220 attacks to land before you die. By that time, most of your moves would likely be depleted anyways. I ended up with the following estimation for hp depletion by struggle... I saw a rough avrage of 50pp per move slot, making up a total of 200 moves. 3/4 moves lead to a one-turn knockout. The avrage time to encounter a new pokemon, open the menu and perform one turn is probably around 20s from my experience. With that as a basis I did some simple math... 20s * 200 moves = 4000s (1h 15m) And if we multiply that by 6 pokemon to white out. We end up at 7h 30m. (If we assum maximum efficiency on time spent and avrage luck)
Glitched ocean ehh? ...might i suggest next softlock to experiment with the harbor mail tile corruption glitch? To summarize in ruby and sapphire _only_ there's a tile and item corruption glitch tied to the harbor mail, specifically by using thief on a pokemon to steal the mail in your party. This can cause some ridiculous items combinations when bold enough, however this also takes tiles _away_ from slateport and replaces them with new ones that you can walk on. They reset whenever you restart the game _and you can already see where I'm going_
