BW1 Roamer ID Preparations

Overview

This is a much more complex RNG to prepare for than the Starter but it may be worth it as this is the only way to get a shiny Tornadus or Thundurus in Gen 5. In the future this will be part of a proper full Roamer RNG guide but until that one's done, this will have to do.

There's 2 different ways you could prepare for it: the safe and the risky way.

The risky way works very similar to how preparation for the Starter works, however what makes it so risky here is that some Advances are completely unreachable when doing Roamer RNG specifically, and you can never know which Advances those are until you actually do the Roamer RNG. This is why I would recommend you do not use the risky way (though I will still explain it since it can work if you're fairly lucky and the safe way takes a lot more time to prepare than the risky way).

Click safe way or Risky way on the side bar to choose your method.(please use the safe way for your own sanity's sake).

Safe Way

Setup

To start the safe way, you'll want to open up Pokefinder, go to the Gen 5 tab and once there open 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 put the Initial Advances to 1715 if you're on Black 1 or to 420 if you're on White 1 (I use Black 1 for this example), put the Max Advances to 20 and input a date range you wish to search through (I personally would pick the full current month) whilst leaving the Initial IV Advances, Max IV Advances and Lucky Power all at 0.

Next in the Settings section, select the Roamers Category which will automatically select your versions Roamer and finally in the Filters section input your desired IVs, Hidden Power (which fully depends on IVs Hidden Power IV Combinations. | Smogon Forums) and Nature. Do not search for a Shiny but just leave that option at "any" as you're trying to find a not-shiny Advance that you can later turn shiny with a TID/SID combination.

The Initial Advances sit at those oddly specific seeming numbers because Route 7 can have different weather on it depending on the season and precise date (Clear weather which is just the absence of any of the three following weathers, Rain, Hail or Snow). When you exit the house on Route 7 to start the Roamer cutscene, whichever weather there is on your current target date will appear until Tornadus/Thundurus descends from the sky. Rain, Hail and Snow all advance the RNG forward fairly quickly at different speeds making you hit a far later Advance than if the weather was Clear.

Now you'd think why don't we just pick a target date with Clear weather then and for White 1 and Thundurus you'd be right as Clear is the optimal weather, however if you're going for Tornadus in Black 1 you actually want it to specifically Rain beforehand. This is because, for some unknown reason, the Rain Cutscene that Tornadus summons will sometimes extend way past its usual duration and make you hit an Advance several dozen to even 200-300 Advances later than expected. This phenomenon happens by far the least often when it already rained on the route just before Tornadus descends from the sky.

So for Tornadus you want a Rainy day, which on average Advances by around 1705 between you exiting the house and Tornadus generating, whilst for Thundurus you want a target date on a Clear day, which on average Advances by around 410 between you exiting the house and Thundurus generating. You should start searching at 1715/420 with 20 Max Advances (the Max Advances start counting from the Initial Advances making the range it searches 1715-1735/420-440) instead of 1705/410 to have at least 10 Advances to confirm the seed you're on using Chatot/saving and then be able to find the Nature you want by stopping on an Advance not too far away (20 at most in this case). Which days of what seasons it Rains, Snows and Hails on on Route 7 you can see in this table (for some reason only Winter months have variation):

Seasons cycle through three times per year. So January is Spring, February Summer, March Autumn, April Winter and then in May it goes back to Spring etc. (Data from the Bulbapedias Rain and Hail articles Rain - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia, Hail (weather condition) - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia).

Since Summer has the by far most Clear days and Spring and Autumn have the by far most Rainy days, I recommend to search through any 1 full Spring or Autumn month of your choice for Tornadus or any 1 full Summer month of your choice for Thundurus.
With all the fields now filled out, press search.

If you get no results you can either search through another month, increase Max Advances (will make each attempt take longer later and since you'll most likely have to do this several times, I'd not recommend it) or enable more Keypresses in your profile (I recommend to have at least none, 1, 2 and 3 Keypresses enabled and maybe even 4 and 5 too. But no more than 5 unless you have more than 10 fingers lol; you may need to search through several months before finding a suitable target seed when looking for 6 specific IVs as it's pretty rare. With only 5 specific IVs and up to 5 Keypresses, a single month should likely produce several results though).

With a few results found to make it much easier to hit the desired nature later, there's several more things to account for. Start by looking for a cluster of 2 or more different Advances that all happen on the same seed.

Next up you'll want to have a look at each of those 2+ Advances Characteristics.

They must be different for you to later be able to tell exactly what Advance you hit. If you get the same Characteristic on two or more different Advances, those Advances no longer count towards the 2+ required different ones (so if there's 4 Advances on the same seed where the first one is 'Mischievous', the second 'Alert to sounds', the third 'Capable of taking hits' and the fourth 'Alert to sounds' again, that seed would only count as having 2 different Advances, as the first and third ones are indistinguishable from each other for us later).

From a few test searches it seems that getting more than 2 properly different ones (with different and not repeated Characteristics) is fairly rare (or extremely rare if you're looking for a 6IV target instead of a 5IV like I did in this example), so if you can only find ones with 2 in a row you can either just take it and hope you can hit either of the two, or what I would rather recommend search through a few different months to try and find one with 3 (or more; but 3 is good already) as that will make hitting one of the desired Nature Advances likely a fair lot faster. This is also why going for less than 5/6 perfect IVs is more difficult here; will give you less different Characteristics.

After that make sure the seed is on a date with the recommended weather (which mine is as the 4th of July is a Rainy Autumn day).

To finish up the target seed selection, you also need to check the specific time of the seed. This is because after you RNG the Roamer, it'll start wandering through the region, and where exactly it goes depends on your current time of day and the season (Roaming Pokémon, Time - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia).

Since after the 8th gym you do not yet have access to Routes 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15, you will want to make sure that either your target seed is not in the early morning hours or that you remember to beat Ghetsis first and explore some of the east of Unova before starting the actual ingame testing phase of this preparation (the late evening is fine as you can just go back and forth between routes until it is on Routes 9 or 10 and not 11). For my Black Version Tornadus RNG I will choose the shown 5IV, 25 Attack seed on the 4th of July 2025, at 21:53:36 with the Keypresses R + L + B + Left that has 3 different Timid Nature Advances on 1772, 1773 and 1777 all with different Characteristics.

With a proper target seed selected, save its info somewhere (e.g. in the form of a screenshot of the searcher window) and then we can finally get into how to actually execute this safe way. Here you will want to basically speedrun the game (not literally; just be fast to not waste your own time) without doing any RNG at all (again to not waste time) until you can summon the Roamer after the 8th gym. Once you try to go to Route 10 after beating the Opelucid Gym, the worker inside the Gate will stop you and tell you about a storm. This means that Tornadus/Thundurus is now available for encountering on Route 7. Don't go there just yet though, as there's a few more things to do before starting. Having at least 1 but preferably 2 Chatot and a Master Ball will make this a fair lot easier and faster but are not absolutely required.

You can get Chatot either via trading locally from another Gen 5 game you or a friend may have, from trading online via fan hosted servers (Poké Classic Network) or by putting some into your Entree Forest using the program "Entralinked" mentioned at the beginning of this guide (technically only legal in BW1 as the Dream World could not spawn Chatot for connected BW2 games originally).

Another thing to watch out for is in regards to the ingame season. The Game only updates your current season whenever you leave a building or cave, or when crossing between two outdoor maps at a transition that involves a loading zone (such as by moving between the various sections of Castelia City). The game also remembers what your season was when you last saved. This can become an issue since the process of doing Roamer RNG involves exiting the house on Route 7 on a certain Advance after which a cutscene will take over immediately and since you are exiting a building, the game will update the current season up to 3 times (depending on both the season you saved in and the season of your target date) during which the two randomly moving NPCs on the Route can already advance the RNG adding more inconsistency to an already inconsistent RNG.

So to minimize the NPC issue, you need to change your current season to your target season (if it isn't the same already) by e.g. putting your console date to your target date, loading the game, going into some building or cave, leaving it and then watching as the season gets updated.

After that you can finally go into the house on Route 7 (make sure to bring your Chatot with you if you have any and optimally leave 1 empty space in your party) and once inside save the game.

Now back to PokeFinder, open the Gen 5 Static option and select your game's profile if it isn't already. Paste your target seed into the Generators Seed field (if you have not closed PokeFinder since you found your target seed, you'll need to switch to the Generator in the top left), put the Max Advances to 30, select the Roamers Category and press the Generate button.

Testing Process

Open up EonTimer and put the Target Second to that of your target seed (in my case it's 36 as my target time is 21:53:36; your calibration value you should already have found during profile calibration).

Then go to the menu of your DS to change the date to that of your target seed and get ready to change the time to the proper one as well (if EonTimer says you need to set the time to 1 minute before target, put it 1 minute earlier than usual so if your target time was 12:30:05 and EonTimer says "Minutes Before Target: 1", 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 R, L and B buttons and the Left direction on the D-pad).

The moment you see this star, you can continue to get into the game. Just before you can get in, the C-Gear popup will appear and you must deactivate it upon entering the game as it would otherwise screw with the RNG.

Once ingame, open your party and listen to 10 Chatot cries in a row comparing what you hear to what each Advance in PokeFinder shows.

Note: How does using Chatter or saving to advance the RNG work?

The way the Chatter works is that you first have to use Chatter as a field move and can then record a custom sound onto it; Chatot learns Chatter at level 21. With such a custom Chatter recorded, whenever you view the summary of a Chatot, the game picks a value between 0-99 at random (which is why it Advances the RNG forward by 1 each time) and depending on how high of a number it rolls, the Chatter will sound anywhere from very deep (lower value) to very high (higher value).

In my case the first Advance on my seed, Advance 49 (likely a different number for you), is pretty high with a value of 84 and the Advance number 50 after has an even higher Chatter with a value of 98 (the letters H, MH, M, ML and L stand for High, Medium High, Medium, Medium Low and Low). Generally we humans can not differentiate between closeby values like my Advances 51 and 52 which have values of 61 and 56. Instead you should try to focus on whether a Chatter sounds more high or more low and then try to orient yourself mostly on pretty low (0-20) and pretty high (80-99) Chatters.

In my example the Chatters between Advances 49-58 have values of 84, 98, 61, 56, 29, 37, 81, 5, 66, and 0 so I know that the first Chatter will sound pretty high, the second one even higher, third, and fourth lower than the two before but still a bit high, fifth and sixth both a bit lower than before again, the seventh pretty high, the eighth very low, the ninth a fair bit higher again and the tenth extremely low. The following GIF shows me flipping back and forth between 2 Chatot 4 times to advance the RNG by 5 (+41 for opening the summary initially and +4 for each flip). If you only have 1 Chatot you can just flip back and forth between it and another party member but ofc that'll halve the advancement speed since only viewing Chatot's summary will advance the RNG.

If you do not have Chatot, you can also use saving the game to advance the RNG (though it is significantly slower). 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 84 in the Chatot column, the save needle would start in a left ← facing position when saving the game (see GIF).

If your DS does not seem to pick up any sound you can either use a different DS to record a Chatter if you have another one or use save needles to confirm your seed; even if no sound plays the Chatter will still advance the RNG but it wouldn't be very helpful to us as we have no way of knowing how high or low of a pitch each Chatter was. The Chatter sound gets deleted whenever you deposit the last Chatot that was still in your party into your boxes.

Here's what the first 10 Chatot of my target seed sounded like (will sound different depending on what you recorded. This is just an example; with the Route 7 music in the Background since you can't turn it off):

If the Chatters (/save needles) do not seem to line up at all, simply try again beginning with changing the time back to the target value and starting EonTimer. If on a second attempt it also does not seem to match, 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. If you find nothing wrong, try a third time and if it still doesn't match, do 1 profile calibration run with this target date, time and Keypresses (only works with up to 3 Keypresses. If you have more just leave as many out as needed until there's only 3 left) to check whether you're at least just getting Timer0'd (aka the game is only giving you your usually rarer Timer0) or whether something else is wrong. If you get a valid result that looks like your usual calibration (possibly with the Timer0 being slightly different by 1 hex value), you're just getting Timer0'd and have the choice between either continuing to try as you will get it eventually or trying out another target seed hoping that one will be more merciful with the Timer0 (I would probably do ~5 more attempts and if you still couldn't hit it I'd recommend trying another seed 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).

After having done these 10 Advances and being sure you're on the right seed, you can continue advancing towards your target if need be. Take any of the 2-5 Advances with your desired nature (in my case I'll pick the 1773 one as having some desired Advances above at 1777 and below at 1772 would make it a bit more likely to hit one of them) and subtract 1705 from it if you're on Black 1 or 410 if you're on White 1. In my case this gets me to Advance 1773-1705=68 so that's the Advance I'll want to stop on on this first attempt. I do the remaining Chatot until I hear the Chatter of Advance 68 (following along each Advance's Chatter pitch one by one to not lose track) and then exit the house. Right after exiting the house, the cutscene will begin.

Once Tornadus/Thundurus descends from the sky, start spamming A, as you spamming it is the by far easiest way to make sure your timing on when you close the 2 textboxes that will appear shortly is consistent and consistency is key. The first textbox is just the Pokemons scream and the second textbox has 2 parts to it saying something about the storm. Once that second textbox is gone and Tornadus/Thundurus has flown away, you can stop spamming the A button. The Storm will last a few seconds longer and after it stops you can go and hunt down Tornadus/Thundurus (remember that where it appears depends on your current time of day and to a lesser extent season). The in my opinion best way to get it is to just go to the gate adjacent to a Route Tornadus/Thundurus can be on at your current time of day and then just go back and forth between the Route and Gate until the Storm appears (since it's around 22:00 ingame for me, it can appear on Routes 9, 10 and 11 and I will be in the gate at Route 9).

Once the Storm is on the Route, run around in the grass until you encounter Tornadus/Thundurus (having a repel active with a Pokemon that's very close in level but not higher than Tornadus/Thundurus which are at level 40 at the front of your party will make this faster). Now catch it (with e.g. a Master Ball) and have a look at its Nature and Characteristic.

Excuse the german but in my case I got a Bold Nature (Kühn in german) and its Characteristic is "Alert to sounds" (Achtet auf Geräusche in german).

That is ofc not what I wanted but that's ok and to be expected due to the inconsistency of this RNG. We want to repeat this as often as necessary until we hit the nature that we want our Tornadus/Thundurus to have later on (with a not repeated Characteristic). Trying to stop on the exact same Advance multiple times is completely useless as that'll always yield the exact same Advance you hit assuming you spammed A consistently throughout the cutscene textboxes. Instead you'll want to try the +/-10 surrounding Advances in any order of your liking. Since I started at 68, I'll try stopping on 69 next, then 67, 70, 66 etc. always going 1 more Advance up and then 1 more Advance down until I get my desired Timid Nature.

What else you hit instead of your desired Nature also doesn't matter so if it's not the correct one you can just immediately go back to the console's date and time settings to try again; do make sure to write down which Advances you tried already though to not waste time trying the same ones several times on accident. It'll probably take around 5-15 attempts but it can be more or less depending on your luck and if you have incredibly awful luck, all 2-5 of the Advances with your desired nature may be impossible to hit. After having tried the +/-10 Advances if you did not get your desired nature yet, try another 5 in both directions. If you still didn't get it, it's probably best to try another target seed (in the same season).

I got one of my seeds Timid Advances after 11 attempts which is about average luck. I stopped on Advance 63 that attempt and got the one on 1772. I know that's the one because it was the only one that's nearby with a Timid Nature and Often dozes off as the Characteristics.

IMPORTANT: For English language games, the names of 2 of the Characteristics were changed in Gen 6. Currently PokeFinder only uses the Gen 6+ names for these, even for older generations. Other languages may have a similar issue but I am not aware of any table that tracks every language's Characteristics change so if you're RNGing on a non-English game, you may have to figure this out by yourself using a Pokemon wiki site of your language for example.

With my desired Nature now hit and me knowing which Advance exactly that is, I'll try stopping on the same Advance 2 more times to make sure it's consistent. And with that the preparation for getting a perfect IV shiny Roamer the safe way is done. If you haven't already, save the target seed info somewhere (e.g. in the form of a screenshot of the searcher window) and then copy the PID of the Advance that you hit (you can e.g. just click on the PID of your hit Advance in the generated results and use ctrl+c to copy it; FBF114D0 in my case since I hit Advance 1772).

Risky Way

Setup

To start the risky way, you'll want to open up Pokefinder, go to the Gen 5 tab and once there open 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 put the Initial Advances to 1715 if you're on Black 1 or to 420 if you're on White 1 (I use Black 1 for this example), put the Max Advances to 10 and input a date range you wish to search through (I personally would pick the full current month) whilst leaving the Initial IV Advances, Max IV Advances and Lucky Power all at 0. Next in the Settings section, select the Roamers Category which will automatically select your versions Roamer and finally in the Filters section input your desired IVs, Hidden Power (which fully depends on IVs Hidden Power IV Combinations. | Smogon Forums) and Nature. Do not search for a Shiny but just leave that option at "any" as you're trying to find a not-shiny Advance that you can later turn shiny with a TID/SID combination.

The Initial Advances sit at those oddly specific seeming numbers because Route 7 can have different weather on it depending on the season and precise date (Clear weather which is just the absence of any of the three following weathers, Rain, Hail or Snow). When you exit the house on Route 7 to start the Roamer cutscene, whichever weather there is on your current target date will appear until Tornadus/Thundurus descends from the sky. Rain, Hail and Snow all advance the RNG forward fairly quickly at different speeds making you hit a far later Advance than if the weather was Clear. Now you'd think why don't we just pick a target date with Clear weather then and for White 1 and Thundurus you'd be right as Clear is the optimal weather, however if you're going for Tornadus in Black 1 you actually want it to specifically Rain beforehand. This is because, for some unknown reason, the Rain Cutscene that Tornadus summons will sometimes extend way past its usual duration and make you hit an Advance several dozen to even 200-300 Advances later than expected. This phenomenon happens by far the least often when it already rained on the route just before Tornadus descends from the sky.

So for Tornadus you want a Rainy day, which on average Advances by around 1705 between you exiting the house and Tornadus generating, whilst for Thundurus you want a target date on a Clear day, which on average Advances by around 410 between you exiting the house and Thundurus generating. You should start searching at 1715/420 with 10 Max Advances (the Max Advances start counting from the Initial Advances making the range it searches 1715-1725/420-430) instead of 1705/410 to have at least 10 Advances to confirm the seed you're on using Chatot/saving and then be able to find the Nature you want by stopping on an Advance not too far away (10 at most in this case). Which days of what seasons it Rains, Snows and Hails on on Route 7 you can see in this table (for some reason only Winter months have variation):

Seasons cycle through three times per year. So January is Spring, February Summer, March Autumn, April Winter and then in May it goes back to Spring etc. (Data from the Bulbapedias Rain and Hail articles Rain - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia, Hail (weather condition) - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia).

Since Summer has the by far most Clear days and Spring and Autumn have the by far most Rainy days, I recommend to search through any 1 full Spring or Autumn month of your choice for Tornadus or any 1 full Summer month of your choice for Thundurus.
With all the fields now filled out, press search. If you get no results you can either search through another month, increase Max Advances (will make each attempt take longer later and since you'll most likely have to do this several times, I'd not recommend it) or enable more Keypresses in your profile (I recommend to have at least none, 1, 2 and 3 Keypresses enabled and maybe even 4 and 5 too. But no more than 5 unless you have more than 10 fingers lol; you may need to search through several months before finding a suitable target seed when looking for 6 specific IVs as it's pretty rare. With only 5 specific IVs and up to 5 Keypresses, a single month should likely produce several results though).

With a few results found, there's one more thing to pay attention to and that is the specific time of your target seed. This is because after you RNG the Roamer, it'll start wandering through the region, and where exactly it goes depends on your current time of day and the season (Roaming Pokémon, Time - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia).

And since after the 8th gym you do not yet have access to Routes 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15, you will want to make sure that either your target seed is not in the early morning hours or that you later remember to beat Ghetsis first and explore some of the east of Unova before starting the Roamer RNG later (the late evening is fine as you can just go back and forth between routes until it is on Routes 9 or 10 and not 11). For my Black Version Tornadus RNG I will choose the shown 5IV, 25 Attack seed on the 4th of July 2025, which is a Rainy day, at 21:53:36 with the Keypresses R + L + B + Left that has a Timid Nature on Advance 1772.

And with that the preparation for getting a perfect IV shiny Roamer the risky way is done. This guide will not explain how to do the actual Roamer RNG later as that is a subject for its own guide. If you haven't already, save the target seed info somewhere (e.g. in the form of a screenshot of the searcher window) and then copy the PID of the target (you can e.g. just click on the PID of your hit Advance in the generated results and use ctrl+c to copy it; FBF114D0 in my case).

Next Steps...

You can now return to the TID/SID RNG guide [[LINK]{.underline}] and RNG for an ID pair that makes the PID of the Roamer you found shiny.