Part 84: Side Note #05: Letters and Powers

Side Notes 05: Letters and Powers

Generation 2 introduced a very unique Pokemon in Unown. Just unique. Not useful, not powerful, just... unique. But the only move it can ever learn is also very unique and that's what we'll be focusing on in this Side Notes, though we might as well talk a little bit about the Unown themselves. So time for a bit of mathematics. Firstly, the Unown letter is determined in this gen by its DVs. More specifically, the middle two numbers of the Attack, Defense, Speed and Special DV (called nibbles in programming speak and corresponds to half a byte, or four bits). This combination is then divided by ten and then rounded down to only include the integers of 0-25, which corresponds to the letter it will be, with A=0, B=1 and so on. Pretty simple. And as mentioned, because of this quirk and the combination of DVs, only I and V Unown (so 9 and 21) can be Shiny.

Now let's go over Hidden Power. Firstly, the game takes the two least significant bits (furthest right) of the Attack and Defense DVs and then concatenating (joining the two strings together (man, I'm learning a lot of programming speak)) the two values in that order. This whole process can be represented in this formula:



So, with a representing the Attack DV and b representing the Defense DV, the calculated number is between 0 and 15 and corresponds to each type, aside from Normal. So we have, in order, Fighting, Flying, Poison, Ground, Rock, Bug, Ghost, Steel, Fire, Water, Grass, Electric, Psychic, Ice, Dragon and Dark. And there we go.

Next up, we have how much power the attack has, using this formula:



The variables v through y represent the most significant bit (furthest left) of each DV. If a variable is less than eight, this bit is 0, otherwise, it is 1. v depends on the Special DV, w depends on the Speed DV, x depends on the Defense DV and y depends on the Attack DV. In order to get max power in a type, your DVs must all be higher than 8. Since the Attack and Defense DVs determine the type, those are the only variables, so you can have the Speed and Special DVs at 15 without affecting the type. So, here's a fun table:



This represents the highest power you can achieve with a specific type, with Special and Speed DVs of 8-15. Unlike Gen 4 where Hidden Power will always be Special (making Unown's Attack stat completely useless), Hidden Power is special or physical depending on what type it ends up as, so keep that in mind. And also note that female Pokemon have an upper limit on their Attack DV depending on their species gender ratio, using this table:



Finally, before Platinum, the only one to determine the type of Hidden Power was to just test it against wild Pokemon (though RSE had Kecleon). There are very easy ways you can find this out despite this, though it will take a few minutes. The fastest way to determine is to use this graph:


(Thanks to Solumin for this real neat thing)

And that's everything to do with Hidden Power and the Unown. I knew about maybe 10% of this stuff when I started writing, so these are always a joy to research.