FR/LG Safari Zone Encounter Manip

Overview

This guide will cover Wild RNG manipulation in FireRed and LeafGreen inside the Safari Zone. The focus will be on acquiring Shiny Pokemon, without concern for competitive Natures or IVs.

This is Intermediate-Level because you cannot Save inside the Safari Zone. This means you must start from inside the Safari Gate, and use consistent movement techniques to minimize RNG interference.

Wild Grass tiles, Surfing tiles, NPCs and even Item Pokeballs on the map cause the RNG to advance more than it would when standing in one place waiting for the timer.

The Safari Zone also includes three exclusive Pokemon that cannot be caught anywhere else: Chansey, Tauros, and Kangaskhan. Unfortunately we can only RNG manipulate the appearance of these rare Shiny Pokemon, the capture itself still comes down to luck.

Be prepared to hit your target multiple times before actually securing the capture.

We will be going for Shiny Tauros in Safari Zone West, which is a rare spawn that requires the most specific walking route.

You must know your Secret ID to find viable targets, which would be done during the Shiny Starter RNG process. If you are on a completed save and DO NOT know your Secret ID, there are methods to deduce it using a previously caught Shiny, using glitches to read it from a Pokemon, or view it via extracting Save Data and using a tool like PkHex.

Recommended Setup

Hardware Requirements:

• Pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green (any language)

• GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS or DS Lite, Nintendo 3DS w/ open_agb_firm

• Windows / Mac OS / Ubuntu PC

In-game Requirements:

• Save in the entrance to the Safari Zone

• Pick up all Items on the ground in Safari Zone (they add extra RNG advances)

• At least one free space in your party

• Any Pokemon with the move Sweet Scent

• At least one Rare Candy (5+ is helpful, but not required)

Tools Used

• EonTimer 3.0.0-rc6

• G3 Calibration

• Fire Red Encounter Slots

• Leaf Green Encounter Slots

Video Examples

• N/A

The Guide

Finding a Shiny Target

To get started, open Lincoln's G3 Calibration here.

Select your Game, and then leave the Sound, L, A, and Held Button settings on the default values of Mono, L=A, A, and None. Make sure to select your System, as the boot-up times and frame-rates are slightly different based on the console, and the tool accounts for those.

Open the settings in-game, and change Sound and Button Mode to match these settings in the tool.

Make sure to SAVE after confirming these settings!

Leave the default Target Seed (hex) and Seed +\-.

Set Advance Range to 2500 to 5000. This means your maximum wait time will be ~2 minutes. The minimum is 2500 because we cannot save inside the Safari Zone, so extra travel time is necessary.

Set Encounter Method to Wild 1.

Set Encounter Type to Grass if the target is found in grass/cave. Surf if the target is in water.

Enter your Trainer ID and Secret ID.
Select Star/Square from the Shiny Filter. This will filter to all possible Shiny targets.

Square Shiny is only relevant if sending to Sword/Shield, but the option is there.

Set Nature Filter to Any. (OPTIONAL: Select a desired Nature)

Leave the IV Ranges as 0 ~ 31. (OPTIONAL: Increase minimum values for desirable stats)

Once these settings are correct, click Submit to search for all the potential Shiny Pokemon you could attempt to RNG.

NOTE: Your Browser might freeze momentarily while calculating, just wait. If anything pops up click "Wait" or "Continue".

When the search is complete, there should be a table of potential Shiny Seeds and Advances.

Since this is Wild RNG, we'll also need to identify the Encounter Slot of our target.

These range from 0 to 11 and are identified by the Slot column in the search results.

You can easily look these up using the Encounter Slot tables for each game.

• Fire Red Encounter Slots

• Leaf Green Encounter Slots

Assuming the target is the rare Safari Zone exclusive Pokemon, they all appear on Slots 9 or 11.

Chansey and Pinsir can both be acquired in the Entrance Area, which makes them significantly easier.

Tauros and Kangaskhan only appear in the West and North Areas which both require Surfing to access.
We'll be using Tauros in Safari Zone West as an example, which means Encounter Slot 9.

Keep this tab open, because we'll also need it to look up which Pokemon we actually hit during RNG attempts!

There might not be any Shiny results that match the Encounter Slot you're searching for, especially for the rare encounters on the route.

In this case, you can either increase the Seed +/- to 50 (which will increase maximum wait time on the Title Screen) OR alter the settings above to a different SOUND or BUTTON MODE, and Submit the search again. Remember to update those settings in-game as well!

Once you've chosen your desired target Shiny, change the Target Seed (hex) to match the Seed, and update the Advance Range to 500 advances above and below your target.

In our example, we found an Encounter Slot 9 Shiny on seed 3D93 and Advance 2762. Which means the Advance Range becomes 2262 to 2962.

Now we update EonTimer for this target as well.

Timer Setup

Open EonTimer 3.0.0-RC6, and switch over to the Custom Tab (C).

Click the (+) button at the bottom, and add two timer sections.

Make the Unit of the first timer ms, and the second timer Advances.

Enter the ms value from the Seed into the first Target box.

Enter the Advances value of the Shiny into the second Target box.

Then click the gear icon in the bottom left, and make sure your console setting is correct.

GBA, GameBoy Player and GBI use the "GBA" setting.

DS and 3DS (open_agb_firm) use the "NDS - Slot 2" setting.

The tools are now set up for...

The First Attempt

Because Tauros can only be found in Safari Zone West, we need to follow specific movement to reach the grass in that Zone with as few steps as possible. If you're targeting Pinsir or Chansey in Safari Zone Entrance, this is less of a concern because you can just run to the first available Grass tile.

Also make sure to pick up any Item PokeBalls on the ground in the Safari Zone before starting, as they cause extra RNG advances while running around.

The following Movement Route is 77 Steps in total. You can use a Repel before saving in the Safari Zone Entrance, and taking 24 steps to avoid the Wild Encounters on the 4 Surfing Tiles. If done correctly the Repel should expire on the steps right before the final Grass tile.

You will need a Lead Pokemon of at least level 41 to avoid all encounters on these tiles, as the Surf spawns go up to Level 40. It should be noted that this extra text box from the Repel expiring will add time, so if your Shiny Target is very close to the minimum of 2500 you may not be able to make it to Sweet Scent in time.

Open your in-game settings and double check that they match the SOUND and BUTTON MODE settings for the target Seed at the top of G3 Calibration.

Save your game, and then Power Off the system.

The startup sequence is slightly different depending on the console being used.

Reference the following Boot method for your system of choice.

The general flow of each attempt is as follows:

1. Boot the game and click Start on EonTimer at the same time.

2. Wait for the ENTIRE Introduction to play, DO NOT PRESS ANY BUTTONS or SKIP. Your first timer should be long enough to make it to the Title Screen.

3. When the timer is close to completion, you will hear the 1st of 6 beeps.

4. ON THE 6TH BEEP, PRESS and HOLD the A Button.

5. Once the File Load screen appears, you can release all buttons and press A to load your save.

6. Mash B to skip past any "Previously on..." screens.

7. Hold Up and proceed to Enter the Safari Zone

8. Move to the Grass containing your target as fast as possible.

9. Press START once you reach the target Grass tile, and open POKEMON

10. Hover over SWEET SCENT in your Pokemon's Field Move list.

11. When the second timer is close to completion, you will hear the 1st of 6 beeps.

12. ON THE 6TH BEEP PRESS A to use SWEET SCENT.

13. Attempt to Capture the Pokemon (Sometimes you just won't be able to)

Initial Calibration

After catching, open the Pokemon's summary and look at the Nature and Stats.

Open the G3 Calibration tool, set Shiny back to Any, select your caught Species, select the Nature and then enter Stats into the IV Calculator in the following order: LEVEL HP ATK DEF SPA SPD SPE

Then click Calculate IVs.

This should automatically populate the Stat ranges with the best guess possible given the inputted data.

Clicking Submit will search for all the potential Pokemon this could be.

Safari Zone Pokemon are a high enough level that you should get a clear result or no result. In the unlikely event there are multiple results, use a Rare Candy to gain a level and refine the IV calculations.

If the first search yields no results, this is expected sometimes. Wild Pokemon in FireRed and LeafGreen can be generated using different Encounter Methods.

This setting can be changed in the Encounter Method dropdown in the tool. Every time we search for which Pokemon we hit, it's important to check Wild 1, Wild 2, and Wild 4.

If you get multiple results on the same Seed, with the same PID but different Advances, then you'll need to compare the Pokemon and Level to the Encounter Slot Table to figure out exactly which Advance was hit.

Our Level 25 Exeggcute lines up with Wild 1, Encounter Slot 2 for Safari Zone West. So we can confidently say the first attempt hit Seed 8651 and Advance 2935.

If you get NO results on ANY METHOD, then increase Advance Range to 1000 advances above and below target, and increase Seed +/- to 50. Increase levels with Rare Candy as necessary. If this still yields no results, there was an error in the attempt and you must check all your settings and try again. Double check in-game settings match the settings in the g3 calibration tool, and that the timers match your target seed/advance.

Now that Exeggcute has been confirmed, we can enter the millisecond and Advance values from the result that matches our Encounter Slot into EonTimer and then click Update.

The values in Calibration should update accordingly, and you can now turn off your game and begin a second attempt.

Attempts & Adjustment

Repeat the same steps of:

1. Performing the startup sequence with EonTimer

2. Capturing the Pokemon

3. Entering Stats, Checking Methods, and Leveling Up as needed to reach a single search result

4. Inputting the Seed ms, and Advance into EonTimer and clicking Update

Make sure to use Encounter Slots to your advantage, like in this example.

I still had three results left in the search, but Level 26 Doduo could only be Encounter Slot 0. Therefore, I must have hit the seed F474 and Advance 2761.

This was my second attempt, and I was -17ms on Seed, and -1 on Advances.

Once your calibration is within the range of +/- 50ms for the Seed, and +/- 3 for Advances you can confidently narrow the search range in G3 Calibration to speed up attempts.

Lower Seed +/- to 10 and Advance Range to 20 advances below and above your target.

With this smaller search range, you should be able to get a single result after only inputting the stats of the Pokemon. If you still get two or more results, use Rare Candy and Encounter Slots to narrow it down again.

At this point, you must repeat attempts until you successfully hit your Target Seed and Advance.

This requires two frame perfect inputs, so it can be difficult.

Only Update the calibration of EonTimer, if you notice you are consistently hitting early or late over multiple attempts. The optimal Calibration will have you landing sometimes early, sometimes late.

Now it's a matter of overcoming human error to succeed.

Eventually, you will hit your Shiny! Good luck capturing!

Next Steps...

After you've dealt with the inconsistencies of the Safari Zone, why not tackle some of the other more, shall we say, frustrating Manips. Fishing & Roamer both have aspects that are entirely out of control, and therefore require a bit more patience than your average manip!

What a coincidence, they're the next two courses in Intermediate!