Part 16: Bless my soul, Herc was on a roll

You know, it's a little disheartening when instead of becoming a cooler beetle your Digimon becomes a dead body.

It's more disheartening when it happens three times.


It's even more disheartening when You get the right guy the goddamn second it meets the conditions.


Or so I thought! Then the 2nd failure happened. Then the third failure.


It was a good plan to just quit, I thought. I didn't know what I did wrong, it was frustrating.


I guess it is kind of funny, a guy flailing helplessly at a game he's had for over a decade because the strategy guide is incompetent.


It stopped being funny really quick.


It was at about this time that our own MechaBread and I started collaborating. It involved a lot of strange actions but the end result was simple.

Because of his findings, I'm working back from Ringo's birth and going forward.


We were going to pick out from the game's coding itself what HerculesKabuterimon's conditions are.

...Even though he's never played Digimon World and I've no ability figure this shit out.


The procedure was kind of strange. First I sent him a save of Ringo right about to pass on or digivolve. Using that, he found a wealth of data locations. With another save getting to Kuwagamon (what the above was going towards with all the care mistakes) he could find HerculesKabuterimon in the data by finding the hex in each Digimon's digivolution options that matched.


From there, he could just give me numbers and I could interpret them.


Here are his notes.


One thing he found was 0 care mistakes (which he originally interpreted as 0 lives lost). I have no idea if care mistakes carry through digivolution, and how Frigimon's scenario affects that. So, for the sake of simplicity, I didn't try it this time. We'll have another baby that can do it.


Everything goes as planned, but I can't help but be nervous as I get closer to the time period for Ultimate digivolution.


You can actually get techs from training brains. Kind of good because a bonus condition for HerculesKabuterimon is 0 battles.

That was the faltering point last time, I think, Ringo originally killed time by... fighting a lot.


Of course, with the bucket of chips I had and the improved training and the restaurant's meager boosts, I got what might be the stat conditions in days.

Thing is, in my own testing I found that weight, care mistakes, and a bonus are enough to digivolve.

It happens that MechaBread found the weight is 55.

55 weight, 0 care mistakes, a bonus of zero battles, likely the stats too?









And that's how I got my very own HerculesKabuterimon.

He's big and he's murderous and he can sho-

...He doesn't have any good techs yet because of that whole "zero battles" thing. Shoot.


Well, Ringo is 17 kinds of badass now so the Kabuterimon who teaches Bug in Beetle Land should teach it!





Tied with Buster Dive for the 4th most powerful tech, and it sometimes hits twice thanks to how the bugs work.


Also the bugs explode. That's a Vermillimon by the way. There's a good reason.


The reason being so Ringo can learn how to shoot lasers.


He's a giant laser spewing beetle that flings smaller beetles that explode.


And he's going to be my bestest buddy and he's going to fight robots and cyborg-dragons and it'll be awesome.