Part 51: Pokeblocked

Side Notes 10: Pokeblocked

Before you can put your amazing Pokemon onto the front stage, you gotta feed them tasty treats to make them excel in the category you want to put them in. What does that involve? Blending berries together and making some great Pokeblocks with delicious science. Let's go over them.

First, you need to pick which berries you're going to use. All the berries have a flavour, ranging from +4 to -4, with rarer berries having higher numbers, as well as smoothness, which varies from 5-85, though only the e-Reader berries have those specific numbers. The Liechi Berry that we got last update, for instance, gives +4 to Spicy and Sweet, but has -4 Dry, -3 Sour and -1 Bitter, as well as 80 smoothness. These numbers matter when you're mixing them with other berries to create your Pokeblock and the more negatives you end up when blending, the lower the overall level of the Pokeblock. So we're clear, a Pokeblock's level will boost the stat of that block's flavour by that amount, though other flavours can be present in the block, and the smoothness of the berries results in the Pokeblock's Feel, which will cumulate towards 255, after which the Pokemon can no longer eat anymore Pokeblocks.

So when you throw your berry into the blender, depending on which one you used and how many people you're blending with will result in the AI using different berries. They usually match the main flavour you're going for and avoid duplicating berries, since if you have two of the same berry when blending, you get a low level black Pokeblock with a random flavour. All the various NPCs use pretty common, low flavour, low smoothness berries. But there's also the Blend Master, an NPC who appears occasionally in the postgame who uses rare berries and is near perfect in the blending minigame. Using berries with NPCs gives you a Pokeblock of around level 12, if you get the RPM to 100, but the Blend Master gets up to level 51 under the same circumstances, so it's a big difference. If you use the super rare berries he uses, then he'll use slightly less rare berries to compensate, giving you Pokeblocks up level 88.

How is all this level and feel stuff calculated? Well, I'm glad you asked. Let's have a simple example that totally isn't the Bulbapedia example so I don't have to calculate stuff. First, add the sum of all the berry flavours used, so if you blended a Bluk, Nanab and Wepear berry together, you'd result in -1 Spicy, -1 Dry, 0 Sweet, +1 Bitter and +1 Sour. Next, multiple each value by 10 and then subtract 1 for each flavour that is negative, so 2 from every number in this case. This results in -12 Spicy, -12 Dry, -2 Sweet, +8 Bitter and +8 Sour. Any new negatives that are created from the subtraction do not then count towards the subtraction. Finally, set all negative values to 0 and then multiply by ((MaxRPM/333)+1), rounded to two decimal places. So if the max RP was 110, then the value would be multiplied by 1.33, resulting in +11 Bitter and +11 Sour. Since the strongest flavour is 11, that's the Pokeblock's level.

Though that won't always be the amount the stat is boosted by, since abilities have a factor into this. They work the same way as the regular stat boosting works, so Pokemon that have an Attack boosting nature prefer Spicy food and any Red Pokeblocks eaten will have their amount boosted by 1.1, whereas the flavour that's disliked is boosted by 0.9, so if the Pokemon had a Lax nature, the Pokeblock would instead be +12 Sour and +10 Bitter. Only the specific flavours of that nature are boosted, regardless of if they're in the same Pokeblock, or in separate ones. Also, each nature gives the Pokemon a unique animation when you're feeding it the Pokeblock, it's the cute little details that make me love video games.

You can tell the various flavours and how strong they are by the colour of the Pokeblock. If there's one flavour in the Pokeblock and it's lower than 50 (so its level is lower than 50), then it's the colour matches the flavour colour. If there's two flavours under 50, then it's a mix of colours and the result is what's highest. If it's a tie, then the priority goes Purple > Indigo > Brown > LiteBlue > Olive, so you'll never see an equal flavour Olive Pokeblock. If any flavour is above 50, then the Pokeblock is Gold and if there are 3 or 4 flavours in a single Pokeblock, then it will be Grey or White, respectively. Feel is calculated from ((Smoothness1 + ... + Smoothness n)/n)-n, where n is the number of people who blended. The result is rounded down and cannot be higher than 99. For each 29 points of Feel added to a Pokemon, another star is added to its Condition view, up to a max of 9 extra stars.

And that's everything to do with making Pokeblocks. If you've got a large stash of berries, then great, enjoying blending them lots and lots to make Pokeblocks! It'd be best to wait until the postgame so you can get really high level ones, as well as new and interesting contestant Pokemon from other Kanto and Johto, but I preferred to do all this stuff now.