Part 37: Side Note 03: Honey, I'm the worst mechanic!

Side Notes 03: Honey, I'm the worst mechanic!

So I've done a lot of bitching about this, but since I've washed my hands of Honey Trees, it's time to delve in why they're so awful. There's 21 trees around Sinnoh which, if you slather Honey on, will have a Pokemon appear 6 hours later, well, most of the time. There's a 10% chance the tree won't spawn anything and what is spawned is determined when you slather the tree, so if you don't like the Pokemon you get after 6 hours, then try again and wait another 6 hours! You can at least reset and change the specifics of the Pokemon, like gender, nature, IVs, etc.

But, out of all of the trees, 4 of them are Munchlax trees. Which one of them is it? There's no real way to determine it, it's decided at the start of the game and based on Trainer ID and Secret ID. For those ones, rarer Pokemon have a higher chance of appearing and there's only a 9% chance of nothing being spawned, with the 1% being the Munchlax. And that's about it, so let's look into the specific numbers.

Firstly, to determine which of the trees will be Munchlax ones, the Trainer ID and Secret ID are split into single bytes, as they're two byte values to begin with, with tree 1 determined by the lower byte of the Secret ID, tree 2 by the higher byte of the Secret ID and then trees 3 and 4 doing the same, but with the Trainer ID. These values are divided by 21, with the remainder used as the final value. All the numbers are checked against each other so they're not equal and increased by 1 if they are. If this results in one being 21, it'll become 0 instead. The final number determines which of the trees can spawn Munchlax. It's just that easy.

Now that each tree is determined, what Pokemon will you get from each one? When you use Honey, firstly, the game rolls which group it'll use, Group A or Group B. Munchlax trees have a 70% chance of using Group B, a 20% chance of using Group A, 1% chance of using Munchlax, or a 9% chance of no encounter. It's swapped for no Munchlax trees, 70% for Group A, 20% chance for Group B and a 10% chance for no encounter. From there, it rolls which Pokemon will appear at a specific encounter chance, from this table:



So if you want to get Heracross, the rarest regular Honey tree Pokemon, it's got a 70% chance of appearing on a Munchlax tree AND THEN another 5% it'll get picked, between Burmy, Cherubi, Combee, Aipom, or Aipom. It's pretty ridiculous the rates involved for other Pokemon that aren't even Munchlax! But that's the easiest way to tell if you've gone a Munchlax tree, since Heracross is a 20% chance and then another 5% chance on a non-Munchlax tree. So with both of those chances, what are the proper encounter rates for these Pokemon?

On a non-Munchlax tree, there's a 32% chance of finding Combee, a 22% chance of Burmy, 14% for Wurmple, 11% for Cherubi, 10% for Aipom and 1% for Heracross. And then 10% for no encounter. And you've got to wait 6 hours to roll this chance. It's ridiculous.

For Munchlax trees, there's a 32% chance of Burmy, 22% chance of Combee, 16% for Cherubi, 12% for Aipom, 4% for Wurmple, 4% for Heracross and then 1% for Munchlax.

Oh yeah, how much the tree shakes before you encounter the Pokemon usually determines what Group the Pokemon is from, 0 shakes is a 72% chance of no encounter, 1 shake is a 59% chance of Group A, 2 shakes is a 75% chance of Group B and 3 shakes is a 93% chance of it being Munchlax, lucky you. After the battle, if you slather Honey on the tree again AND it was the most recent tree slathered, then there's a 90% chance of the same Group being used again. And that's everything about Honey trees, what a waste of fucking time.