#fancyson

Didn't notice until now, but yeah it seems fancyson's blog is gone.

Edit: Yup, Fancyson has been termed.

WARNING: special interest activated. long ass ramble about an incredibly niche application of pokemon spaghetti code that nobody else cares about deploying in t minus 5 seconds. press j to abort

well here's the fun thing! gen 8 has eternatus, which isn't actually obtainable in its eternamax form but does have the code there for all its stats so you can fight it in the story, and sports a bst of 1125 [for comparison the highest statted actually obtainable pokemon, mega rayquaza, has a 780 bst, and without counting form changes it's arceus at 720]. even if you have eternatus in your party dynamaxing it doesn't do anything interesting, but as a consequence eternamax eternatus is a separate pokemon within the game's code, making it technically possible to hack in as a pokemon

enter smogon's two hacked formats, balanced hackmons and pure hackmons. balanced hackmons is probably better known, it's where things like sturdy shedinja and flash fire ferrothorn run around, but the key word there is balanced. moves, abilities, and pokemon that are so brokenly powerful they make things uncompetitive are banned, and standard rules like sleep and evasion clause are still in effect. naturally, eternamax is banned banned banned from balanced hackmons for being stupidly overpowered. however, it's allowed in pure hackmons, which is essentially anything goes but for sadomasochists. aside from endless battle sets [like the infamous funbro] you can literally do whatever the fuck you want so long as it is possible within the constraints of the game's code to hack in. naturally, this includes having an eternamax eternatus or three [not hyperbole] on your team

so the thing is that pokemon code is fucking bad. have i mentioned that yet. putting aside the obvious messes like everything that moves and most things that don't in the gameboy entries or scarlet and violet blatantly not being finished at launch, the battle system is full of bizarre oversights and overflow errors and needlessly complex accident-prone methods for doing incredibly simple things. one of these problems is that because of how natures are calculated [which i won't get into it's too much math] every non-hp stat only goes up to 654, overflowing to 0 at 655. normally this doesn't matter because you need at least a base stat of 249 to get this far, which no pokemon has in any stat other than hp, which isn't affected by nature and thus can't have this issue. but the thing is that pokemon can have a base stat that high, it goes up to 255 as seen with blissey's hp, there just isn't any pokemon with a non-hp stat that high. [if you're curious, the highest non-hp stat is on the mighty shuckle, with 230 in both defences; still not enough to overflow.] except eternamax eternatus, which beats out shuckle with 250 defence and special defence, which is just enough to trigger the overflow at level 100 with a boosting nature and max ivs and evs, making what should be a stat of 658 a very embarrassing 3 instead. and if you carefully stat your eternatus to have 655 in either defence, it will have a final stat of exactly zero

here's where we hit another error! isn't pokemon great! so pokemon's damage calculation doesn't really know what to do when you tell it to divide by zero, fair enough. instead of crashing itself trying to perform an impossible calculation, the game just kinda gives up and replaces the value with a zero and calls it a day. alright, nice, the game didn't crash, but because you did that at the defence step of the damage calculation, you just deleted the opposing pokemon's corresponding attack stat and its move's base power, whoopsy daisy! this makes it pretty much impossible to deal any more than 2 hp of damage to a pokemon with 0 defences. fortunately, it's only possible to overflow to 0 on one stat per pokemon, but still, you're effectively invincible on one side of the attacking spectrum. combined with eternamax's blissey-level hp stat, immunity to toxic, and monstrous other defence stat, this makes it practically invincible

centralising does not even begin to describe eternamax in pure hackmons. this thing makes gen 1 mewtwo look like quagsire. as the viability rankings put it, the only pokemon that are even remotely usable in ph are eternamax, pokemon that support eternamax, pokemon that can do something to at least one version of eternamax, and pokemon that counter the ones that can do something to eternamax. the only listed sample team is 50% eternamax. it's not literally unkillable, no pokemon is, but the only somewhat consistent way around it is to either do an incredible job setting up to hit its non-invincible side without getting knocked out in the process or to resort to frustrating, otherwise uncompetitive strats like perish trapping, ohko moves, or hazard phasing. either way, you're probably in for a mind-numbingly long, stally, boring, and uncompetitive game. eternamax is so overwhelming that gen 8 pure hackmons has been left mostly abandoned out of frustration and will probably stay that way unless eternamax is somehow banned or made possible to deal with