BW Starter Manip

Overview

This Guide will teach you how to RNG manipulate for a shiny Starter Pokemon in Pokemon Black and White. To be able to RNG manipulate it, you need to have done both Profile Calibration and TID/SID RNG already. I will be using my German copy of Black 1 for this guide.

Hardware Requirements

• A BW1 game and a DS Console you have calibrated for Gen 5 RNG Manipulation and a savefile that you RNG manipulated a TID/SID pair on.

• a Windows 10/11 PC, MacOS Ventura/Sonoma/Sequoia, Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 or QT 6.8 or newer

In-Game requirements

• Be saved right in front of the Starter box in your character's home room.

Tools Used

• PokéFinder latest commit (Gen 5 is not fully implemented in latest official release yet)

Direct download links: Windows - Mac - Linux

• EonTimer 3.0.0-rc.6-calibration-fix-Windows

• EonTimer 3.0.0-rc.4-Other-OS

Video Example

• N/A

The Guide

Pick your target

If you have already prepared your target during TID/SID RNG to get a 5/6IV shiny Starter, you can skip this section and go right to the "The RNG Process" section.

Otherwise you'll want to start by opening up Pokefinder, going to the Gen 5 tab and once there opening the Static option.

In the Gen 5 Static windows top left make sure the profile of the game you wish to do this in is selected and right below the profile option switch to the searcher tab in which there's 3 different sections labeled "RNG Info", "Settings" and "Filters".

In the RNG Info section, leave the Initial IV Advances, Max IV Advances, Initial Advances and Lucky Power all at 0. The Max Advances and date range depend on whether you want the Starter to just be shiny or have a few perfect IVs too and whether you care about its met date. If you just care for a shiny, possibly with a specific Nature and Gender, searching through just 1 day (e.g. whatever your "today" is when reading this) with the Max Advances put to 0 will give you several possible targets to go for already.

If you want some perfect IVs as well, you'll have to increase the Max Advances, increase the date range and/or enable more Keypresses in your profile. I do NOT recommend trying to find a 4-6IV target seed this way, as it will either require you to search through several months to maybe even years or require you to do a lot of advances (or both) which are very slow since you can only use saving the game as a means to advance this early on in your adventure; if you want such high IVs + shiny, best to prepare for that already as explained in the TID/SID RNG guide.

Since I will just go for a shiny with a specific Gender and Nature right now, I put my Max Advances to 0 and the date range to just search through the current day as of writing this guide, which is the 21st of August 2025. If you also only care to get a shiny without any specific IVs, you can disable all but "None", "1" and "2" Keypresses in your profile for comfort.

Next in the Settings section, select the Starters Category with the Starter you wish to RNG and finally in the Filters section input your desired IVs, Gender, Nature and whether you want a shiny or not.

Now you can hit the Search button and once PokeFinder has found a result you're happy with you can cancel the search if it's not done already. If you get no results or none you're satisfied with you can either search through a different date range (e.g. the full current month), increase the Max Advances or select more possible Keypresses in your profile.

I will pick this marked Adamant Female Snivy seed here on the 21st of August 2025 at 10:17:17 because its target second in 17 is the most comfortable one for me to aim for out of the options I got since I'm playing on a DS Phat (same would apply on DS Lite and DSi; on 3DS going for something between like 40-55 target seconds would be most comfortable, though in the end it doesn't really matter what target second you aim for as this is just to make it a little bit quicker).

Since I searched for a seed with Max Advances of 0, I know I won't have to advance the RNG at all for this, but I will explain how to advance the RNG if you need to later on. There's also 2 Keypresses in the Y button and the Down direction on the D-pad that I'll have to press and hold during startup of the game.

The RNG Process

Open up EonTimer and there put the Target Second to your seeds seconds (17 in my case), go into the DS menu to change the date to the target date (here the 21st of August 2025) and get ready to change and confirm the target time (10:17 for me; should EonTimer say "Minutes Before Target: 1" and your target time is e.g. 12:30:05, you'd need to put it to 12:29 in your DS).

DS DSi 3DS

At the moment that you confirm the time change on your DS console, press the Start button in EonTimer. Now go back to the home menu, get ready to start the game as soon as the 6th and final beep of EonTimer sounds and make sure to press and hold any buttons your target seed may require (start pressing the buttons right after you started the game and you can let go once the star appears on the top screen; I will need to press and hold the Y button and the Down direction on the D-pad).

Now continue getting into the game and once you can move your character, you have to do the advances if your target requires any. If you did not search with Max Advances of 0, check out the following note.

Note: Advancing the RNG for the Starter.

Let's say we searched for a target seed using 10 Max Advances because we wanted it to have a perfect speed IV of 31.

In that case we'd copy the seed, switch to the Generator tab, paste the seed into the Seed field and press the Generate button. Now we find our target Advance (will be the one saying Star or Square in the Shiny column; if you searched with Max Advances higher than 11, you may need to scroll a bit to find your shiny Advance. The Searcher tab tells you what Advance the shiny is on) and Check out how many Advances it's away from the seed's initial Advance.

In my case the target is at Advance 49 whilst the very first shown Advance is at 47 meaning I'll have to do 49-47=2 Advances. We can advance the RNG by saving the game. Each save advances by 1 so I'd save the game 2 times and then take the Starter. If you for some reason wanted to make things harder for yourself and get a very high IV Starter this way without preparing for it during TID/SID RNG, you may need to aim for a very high Advance. In that case to not lose track of what Advance you're on, you can make use of the Chatot column and each saves save needle starting position the same way it worked during Profile Calibration. Here is a table of what Chatter value corresponds to which save needle starting position:

The edge cases between 2 save needle starting positions can always be either one of the two adjacent ones; probably due to some rounding the game does (e.g. 12 and 13 can be either a ↑ or a ↗).

In my case, since the very first Advance shown has a value of 53 in the Chatot column, the save needle would start in a bottom ↓ facing position when saving the game. You can follow along with each Advance and then have to make sure you stop 1 Advance before your target and then take the Starter.

In my case that'd be Advance 48 which has a Chatot pitch of 25 leading to either a top right ↗ or right → facing arrow .

If you did however search with Max Advances of 0, you can just take your Starter immediately. If all went well, you will have the shiny Starter of your dreams now in which case you can skip to the "Next Steps..." section.

Troubleshooting

If your Starter did not shine, double check all date and time settings match your target, make sure you accounted for any minutes before target if EonTimer tells you you need them and check if all the buttons you may need to press and hold are working properly. Then simply try again 4-5 times by going back to the console menu, changing date and time and using EonTimer to get into the game at the target second. Should it still not have shined after 4-5 attempts, load into the game on your target date/time but instead of taking the Starter or doing Advances towards it, do 1 Profile Calibration attempt as explained in the Save Needle Calibration section of the Profile Calibration Guide.

If the result of the Profile Calibration attempt matches your target second (or is very closeby; it being 1 too high or low is fairly common on 3DS models specifically) but has a slightly different Timer0, you seem to be getting Timer0'd aka the game only gives you your other Timer0. In that case you can choose between either trying out a different target seed for your Starter, as some date/time/Keypress combinations may have your usually less common Timer0 be much more common, making this RNG take much longer than normal, OR changing the Timer0 Min and Max in your profile to both be this other Timer0 and searching for a new target seed using that.

Should you however get no results at all, join im a blisy ._.'s RNG manip assistance Discord server and ask for help in the bw_b2w2 channel providing an explanation of the issue and full window screenshots of your PokéFinder Static and Calibration windows and EonTimer.

I got my Shiny Snivy after only 2 attempts!

Next Steps...

And with the Starter successfully RNGd, get through the battles with Cheren and Bianca and then save the game. And that's it; if you'd like to learn how to RNG some shiny Legendaries and other statics in this game, check out this guide [GUIDE COMING SOON™].

Thank you for reading and have fun RNGing!