UPDATE: Looks like menus can delay timers the same way battles can! Anubis (@Sibuna_Switch on Twitter) confirmed this and some other stuff in BDSP, check this post here: x.com/Sibuna_Switch/status/1835417318265921664 I suspect it's the same in DPPt and that you can do the same timer trick that I show at the end of the video to experience minimal delay, but TLDR if you want to experience minimal delays for Honey/Berry trees the best thing to do is to leave your DS/Switch on and don't do anything at all lol.
@@sippingthepeachsoda Imagine you're boiling water for tea and the Muchlax is the finished drink. Everytime you get in to battle, it's like turning the stove off and keeps the water from boiling for a little longer.
When I was a kid, I went HARD trying to get a Munchlax. I had a roster of 8+ honey trees that I would slather every day, 3x per day (before school, after school, and right before bed). No Munchlax. I gave up after 3 months of failed attempts. Then 16-years-later, I dusted off my old copy of Diamond to play a nuzlocke...and got a damn Munchlax as my very first honey tree encounter...🙃
If I remember right only like 4 honey trees across the whole game can spawn munchlax (it's different for every person) and with only those 4 trees it's still only a 1% chance
TheMasterZelda here, had a great time assisting Etchy in the making of this video! Very glad we finally have an explanation for what happened in that great speedrun you did :) Looking forward to you running it again
@@silentstorm5757 doudou2714 is partially right here, i was expecting the delay to be caused by something Etchy did specifically in his run - here, encounters were the prime suspect. From there on, it was only a question of figuring what exactly it could be. By using trials and errors along with a memory viewer, i was able to find the internal timer for honey trees and from there, able to deduce everything else. Etchy then proceeded to more accurately test my findings and here we are, with the theory proved
The biggest crime with honey trees in my opinion is that they never added Teddiursa as a honey tree encounter when its many pokedex entries state how much it loves honey
I'm so glad to finally get a concrete answer as to why my trees weren't giving an encounter after 6 hours - doing a professor oak challenge in BDSP has been awful because of the trees not actively giving encounters when they should. I would set alarms for exactly 6 hours from the last slather and then go exp grind my Pokemon needing to evolve and it would cause offsets of hours of time. Eventually I just gave up on the timers and would wait 12 hours instead. When I woke up and when I'd go to bed. Thank you
Honestly even when this mechanic works as intended it’s still absolutely terrible. No idea why they thought that six hours was an appropriate amount of time to make us wait.
Because back when we were kids, time felt meaningless, but that's what made these kinds of things feel magical and rewarding. Nowadays, it seems like everything has to be instant gratification, and Pokémon has lost a majority of its charm catering to this mentality. Shiny Pokémon have suffered the same fate too, now being obtainable in a matter of minutes in Scarlet and Violet, and are treated like a standard collectable by the community instead of these extremely rare trophies. Back then it was the most insane thing just to SEE a shiny at all, now it's common for people to complain if they haven't seen one in under an hour. That feeling of discovery and exploration is almost completely gone now, and honestly the only Pokémon game that has ever felt that way since Black and White 2 was Legends Arceus.
This would be a total non issue if Muchlax's encounter rate wasn't so comically low. Even a 10-15 percent increase would've alleviated this drastically.
@@Forged4War206 I played Platinum a lot as a kid and used the honey trees once, then never again. It has nothing to do with the "magic" of older games, the risk of waiting +6 real-life hours is not worth the reward of maybe getting a rare pokemon(or nothing, which is what I got).
That 'saving 60 seconds on the honey tree timer' reminds me of doing farming runs in Runescape. Everything runs on a gigantic schedule in Runescape, including when plants grow. Sometimes you can plant your crops right at the perfect time where the next 'growth' tick is in a few seconds. So you plant some seeds, water them, and then BOOM, they instantly become saplings.
I don't think it would change that much for me, honestly, but this is still incredibly cool! The fact HGSS solved it, despite it being way less needed is so cool, honestly. Those games really were something else, uh?
I never knew about the Munchlax only being in certain trees based on your ID as a kid. I just would get it as my first encounter on the same tree for both of my playthroughs. Wonder what those odds are.
Imagine counting time by minutes instead of seconds or millis. Then imagine the bug being present for the core game mechanic. Then imagine copy and pasting that bug over
There's something comforting with knowing that a mystery I could have had as a kid would be enlightened years, maybe even decades after, even if the mystery itself isn't completely life changing. It's still nice to know that the small things that you wonder about is something someone else out there wondered about as well.
I think that the fact that this happens at all is crazy. How is anyone supposed to know that's what's been causing the delay this whole time? I always thought there was just a time frame where the tree gets a Pokemon and not that it was delayed this whole time.
100% know this happened to me when I was younger, I remember it clear as day. I went hunting around the internet and found people complaining, but never an answer...
I started up a cute charm file and always assumed I was just wrong about when I'd done it as to why it wasn't showing up when I expected, I can't believe there was an actual reason to it and my shiny hunting while I waited was the real cause! incredible work y'all've done!
I noticed this when I was replaying platinum for a living dex! I didn't think too much about it because I also thought it was some sort of lag affecting my game
GF do tend to not like using decimals, and I don't blame them - floating-point numbers are a mess. But they have plenty of techniques for getting around using them, like multiplying two numbers by something enormous before dividing them by each other. In this case, the DS could definitely have handled storing the time in seconds instead of minutes, I think they just overlooked it. If you're testing that the honey trees work, what are you going to do? Start the game running, slather a tree, put it down, come back in six hours. And yep, it works.
@@manjackson2772 It would make sense in gen 1 and 2 since the trees operate on a 24 hour cycle, and 24 hours is 86400 seconds. In those early gameboy games, you would want to reduce the save game size as much as possible, and by avoiding numbers above 65535 you could save 2 bytes per tree. From SNES and GBA onward you would very rarely need to resort to such measures.
@@manjackson2772 They probably also thought "eh it's good enough, nobody will sit there with a stopwatch to check on the honey trees after exactly six hours"
BDSP are, in fact, he most faithful remakes of any game ever made. All the bugs from 20 years ago somehow persisted, This may also make them the laziest remakes of all time...
I always forgot all about the honey trees whenever I played,and never known about this stuff until years later how dreadful these honey trees are,honestly,I'm glad I forgot about them XD but I feel feel bad for shiny hunters that wanted this fucking munchlax though
background timers being paused under certain circumstances can be found in other games (such as: baten kaitos 100% speedruns, where the evolution of cards have real time timers that get paused on menuing and in battle and requires the speedrunner to optimize these as much as possible), but it is insanely enlightening that this is the same thing happening and that it took this long to uncover. i feel like most of the issue is in the opaqueness of this timer quirk, and the fact that officially printed guide books didn't even have this information. as annoying as this research result is, it's always awesome to know that we can still very much learn from these old games by picking them apart. what's annoying is the fact that the best thing to do is... nothing at all. i sure do enjoy not playing video games! :T
it always warms my heart that we are learning things about these old gems many years after they were released. the science and experimentation is pure gold. thanks for the content
i encountered this bug in BDSP because i continued the story while i waited for the honey trees to spawn pokemon. it being hours off of when it was supposed to made me no longer want to even try to get the honey tree pokemon in game so i just transferred them from home after.
It's really interesting that it keeps track of minutes instead of seconds. Timestamps usually work by keeping track of the number of seconds that have passed, but because it was on DS, maybe they thought it would save on memory or CPU or something?
I could never get those stupid honey trees to work. I half expected this video to be a proclamation that they never worked for anyone and it was a sham mechanic all along lol
Dear void, core memory unlock moment. Munchlax, as a teen I encountered one the very first time I used honey, and assumed it was common, knocking it out on the expectation I'd find another. I tried 3 more times and basically erased the mechanic from my mind after that.
It's not a bug it's at worse an oversight but it's working as they intended. A bug is when a feature isn't working as it should or not as advertised to the player. It would be a bug if the tree was supposed to shine and give an encounter but was only shining for example. It's just a dev implementation that didn't account how much delay you could have if you were to do a lot of battle during the 6 hours delay.
I found a munchlax at the honey tree directly north of oreburgh completely randomly when I was 6. I will never forget it. I’ve never found a full odds shiny but I’ve found a munchlax
The burmy I got from a honey tree was male and shiny. The luck on that was never replicated for me again in any pokemon game. The Shiny Mothim had to be on the team, even though it sucks.
A bug? That wasted everyone's time? Introduced in Gen 4? Due to the advent of honey trees? You're clearly talking about Burmy's three forms, and gender-divergent evolution paths.
I got recommended your two most recent videos and I decided to checked out your channel and subscribe since I enjoyed them a lot. Turns out you did a sort of fresh start with your channel and you've just come back. Good luck with your new videos, can't wait to see them!
I always wondered what the hell was going on, and just assumed the game didn't work right in some obscure way. It's nice to know the answer finally, and I'll most certainly keep this information in mind. Good research!
Imagine creating a game mechanic that involves leaving the game on and not playing it for 6 hours. Incredible. Hated the honey trees when I was a kid playing diamond
Didn't expect this glitch to actually be a thing, was waiting for the plot twist at the end that this actually wasn't a bug but here we are. Super interesting
That is so strange, they can stop you from cheating by changing the time because they so accurately keep track of the offset, but then instead of updating the timer to match the offset away from the starting time, it updates using a completely different less accurate timer? I feel like that must have be programmed by an intern, lol.
So basically this frustrating bug could have been easily avoided by just having it round up instead of down? It would still be inaccurate, but it'd be significantly less likely that anyone notices, considering they probably wouldn't check the tree until they knew it was done. And even if they did notice, they'd assume it was a feature rather than a bug, because it encourages you to spend time battling instead of just standing and waiting. Or y'know, they could've just counted by seconds instead of minutes, but maybe there was a hardware limitation for that? (Which is not an excuse for BDSP. But I'm starting to think BDSP probably just copied chunks of the source code of gen 4 directly instead of re-creating it, which could maybe explain some of the other new errors and glitches that are identical to the original.)
@@Reymax164 but in the worst way cuz why couldn’t they just copy platinum? I never got to experience the distortion world but sure let’s add this bug 😒
I started a Diamond playthrough recently and just so happened to get a Munchlax casually on the tree west of Eterna. I planned on getting it eventually, but I was just trying to cover my bases to try to fill the Pokedex as I went lol I got so lucky!
I remember GameFreak back then in 2007 promoting this mon like none in the trailers on TV (aside from Lucario and starters) as if it was gonna be in your party before the first gym 😂😂
This is such a dumb system Gamefreaks have created. All it needed to do is set the final time and check the timer. I hate Gamefreaks making Pokémon punish players.
Here I was, hopping I would get the answer as to why I haven't found a Munchlax in the trees for literally 17 years... Turns out I don't even suffer from this bug...
When I played this game for the first time in 2007 I talked to every honey tree in the entire game every day for weeks and I never encountered a Munchlax.
That do be some crazy bug with the- well, considering these games just looked to be a decrease to the Emerald release, its no wonder its riddled with bugs. What else could even be possible.... BDSP....no surprise there
