Player evolves pokemon with the aid of two wrenches

by John Bardinelli { May 30th 2007 at 1:45PM }

The most time-consuming part of any Pokemon game is capturing and strengthening your horde of creatures. To make things worse, some pokemon will only evolve after they've attained a certain level of happiness. An intrepid (lazy, impatient, resourceful, etc.) gamer named Joshua didn't want to wait, so he came up with a plan.

For every 256 steps you take with a pokemon in your party, it gains one happiness point. To reach the maximum level of 250 you would have to take 64,000 steps and waste roughly half your life running in circles. Instead of whittling his afternoons away, Joshua found a few locations in the game with a moving floor that allowed him to take 13 steps every six seconds. That adds up to 7,800 steps in an hour and would allow maximum pokemon happiness in about eight hours. Two wrenches and a good night's sleep later, Joshua was the happy owner of several fully-evolved pokemon.

Tags: ds, hacks, lazy, nintendo, pokemon

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

JodyAnthony @ May 30th 2007 1:50PM

way to mcgyver that shit.

Vince @ May 30th 2007 1:55PM

I thought everybody knew about this already.

GCNH87 @ May 30th 2007 1:57PM

lmao, that's great XD

Matt B @ May 30th 2007 1:57PM

Sounds like a blast.

slagar @ May 30th 2007 2:00PM

there are easier and faster ways. berries. there are berries which will increase a Pokemon's happiness.

Grog @ May 30th 2007 2:01PM

My friend and I broke one of his SNES controllers doing a similar exploit on the rafting section of Final Fantasy III/VI when we were kids.

Rare Hare @ May 30th 2007 2:02PM

"there are easier and faster ways. berries. there are berries which will increase a Pokemon's happiness."

easier than doing leaving your DS sitting around and doing absolutely nothing?

question though.. why TWO wrenches? couldn't he just hold down the one direction and leave it?

vladtheimpaler @ May 30th 2007 2:03PM

Why don't you just go to the town with the breeding place, (I forget the name) which has a wide open road north and south that stretches a couple of game screens. Then just ride your bike up and down while you watch TV or something. Only need one hand and eventually get used to holding up for a couple of seconds and then down for a couple of seconds.

It's like the developers put that road in there just for that purpose. The breeding town in ruby red/sapphire blue had a similar road that ran east to west.

sheppy @ May 30th 2007 2:09PM

Quite frankly... happiness evolutions annoy me. I don't care if my pokemon are happy. I want them pissed. I want them fighting mad. If my Bidoof is driven to a blood frenzy so badly that, when your Abra faints, he rips out it's throat and proceeds to build a dam from the slaughtered pokemon from his exploits... then I did my job properly as a Poke trainer. But if I gotta be all cuddles and berries and shit with my Ghastly, then how fearsome could this Pussymon be?

Great exploit... btw. I remember using the chain spin on Circle Of The Moon against Medusa Heads to similar, though longer, effect.

NintendoFanbot @ May 30th 2007 2:14PM

Or you could challenge them in battles that earn them lot of experience and keep their health up with potions and such. Like a good trainer. :P

ALH @ May 30th 2007 2:18PM

i fed mine a load of poffins and entered it in contests, took like 3 hours and one levels worth of battling, not that tricky tbh, and way less tedious. this is a useful trick for hatching eggs though.

Jonathan Tran @ May 30th 2007 2:20PM

In Super Paper Mario, there is a literal experience treadmill you must use at one point to literally treadmill-grind your way out of jail.

I found a couple heavy books, set my wiimote up just right, and played Counter Strike Source while Princess Peach ran a marathon. Next thing y'know, I was out of jail.

Great success!

Author X @ May 30th 2007 2:24PM

Wow, yeah... it's so much easier to just play the game like you're supposed to. Which is to say, there are tons of ways to raise happiness, especially items that 'permanantely' raise or lower stats (specifically, one of the hidden values that affects each stat, but it's a long explanation), all of which also raise happiness. There's also massages you can gave someone give to one pokemon a day, an item that makes the pokemon holding it gain happiness twice as fast, and even a pokeball the does the same for the pokemon in it.

Fuzz @ May 30th 2007 2:34PM

Jonathan Tran-

You realize you only had to do that long enough to get 10000 rubies, right? Then you could pay the dude to tell you the secret of the top floor? I hope you didn't run for 1 000 000 rubies worth. Thats just crazy.

Game Artist @ May 30th 2007 2:41PM

Heh. Reminds me of battletech:cresent hawk's revenge. They had a stock market in that game that would change with each step. So you put some money in the safe stock and wedged the run key down in a corner. Instant billionaire.

Jonathan Tran @ May 30th 2007 2:41PM

@ fuzz

I didn't realize it at the time, but I only did an hour's worth before I realized what I had to do.

Still, 10k took a while. I just thought it was funny that there was a literal treadmill.

If you want to hear crazy, fuzz, think about this: before I found the hamster wheel I was trying to find a way to automate the treadmill/box hitting grind! At 1 rupee per second!!!

Man, that would have been horrible.

Grant @ May 30th 2007 3:02PM

"blah blah blah would have been easier that this!!!"

Really? doing nothing but attaching two wrenches, which probably took 10 minutes at most, is harder than doing whatever for an hour?

once the wrenches are attached, you leave for 8 hours. come back, it's done. How are there easier ways?

i'm just waiting for the techno-trolls that will say that disembling and rewiring the controller would have been easier to achieve.

Almack64 @ May 30th 2007 3:03PM

@16

I know what you mean when I realized that the game really wanted me to gather rubies, (At first I thought I had to figure out a way to blackmail her with her boyfriend's telephone or something) i bout had a fit. Then I came to myself and realized there is no way they would really make me do this. It was pretty funny though since you still had to "work" pretty hard just to get the 10K.

Troa @ May 30th 2007 3:20PM

Not saying there are easier ways, but most pokemon that evolve by happiness only need ~37k steps to evolve or ~18k if they have the soothe bell equipped. This way is lazier than running the bike route near the day-care (I think it only took me about an hour to rack up 18k going back and forth, can't remember), but you shouldn't have to leave it for 8 hours to evolve a pokemon. Still, good work on finding a set it and forget it spot in the game.

Fuzz @ May 30th 2007 3:25PM

Jonathan Tran-

LOL

I would have liked to have been sitting in the room quietly watching as you tried to do that. :P

Harukio @ May 30th 2007 3:38PM

With Super Paper Mario and the treadmeal, I just went and made myself a sandwich with one hand (hurray for bluetooth's wonderful range)

Rare Hare @ May 30th 2007 3:43PM

"Quite frankly... happiness evolutions annoy me. I don't care if my pokemon are happy. I want them pissed. I want them fighting mad. If my Bidoof is driven to a blood frenzy so badly that, when your Abra faints, he rips out it's throat and proceeds to build a dam from the slaughtered pokemon from his exploits... then I did my job properly as a Poke trainer. But if I gotta be all cuddles and berries and shit with my Ghastly, then how fearsome could this Pussymon be?"

LMFAO. I can't remember the last time I laughed that hard at something I read on the internet. sheppy wins.

Mr Khan @ May 30th 2007 3:59PM

@ sheppy

I agree with your disdain for "happiness" evolution, but it usually happens that the strong pokemon (with the exception of Golbat --> Crobat) don't evolve with happiness anyway

This sounds a lot like a trick i would do on Phantasy Star Online Ep III (the card game), while waiting for a tournament to start i didn't want to have to move my character every couple of minutes to avoid a line-timeout

I just rigged the controller with a rubber band

Velops @ May 30th 2007 4:17PM

The main problem with this trick is that you can't play with your DS while doing this. You could leave it on overnight while you are asleep, but you would have to leave the charger plugged in so that the battery doesn't run out.

As for the happiness point system, most pokemon automatically start out with about 70 happiness points. That only leaves 180 points to go. If you know all the ways to increase happiness, it shouldn't take you more that 20 minutes at most.

praesil @ May 30th 2007 4:19PM

Two wrenches - one for the run button, one for direction.

oswa @ May 30th 2007 5:06PM

use toothpicks instead...

ShortFuse @ May 30th 2007 5:11PM

I've done that for Smash to unlock Mewtwo but without holding down buttons. Had two controllers plugged in, Final Destination, no items. Left it on over night. 10 hours later. Mewtwo. Same goes for 5000KOs. I set the computer against each other.

I know i've done it somewhere else, but I don't remember

munjey @ May 30th 2007 6:02PM

My brother did something similar to this with the original Pokémon Blue game and his LEGO Mindstorms. I was probably in 6th grade, he was in 8th. He made a wheel that was offset a little bit that spun around and repeatedly hit the A button to gain coins at the slot machines. He had to make a bit of an encasing so that the Gameboy Color didn't move around from it.

Unfortunately, the LEGO Mindstorms set only ran off of AA batteries, so he wouldn't let me use it much, but it was enough to get a Porygon for 9999 coins.

I did the mudslide trick with Ruby/Sapphire for egg hatching, but alas, they didn't have any in Fire Red/Leaf Green.

ChronoReverse @ May 30th 2007 6:10PM

There's an NPC in Veilstone that gives your Pokemon a massage once a day for lots of happiness. Fighting a battle (use VS Seeker for lots of easy battles) gives lots of happiness. Berries and vitamins gives lots of happiness.

Frankly, there are much quicker ways.

Reapz @ May 30th 2007 6:15PM

Wow, this reminds of trying to achieve Perfect: 1 ranking in Perfect Dark on the N64. You had to get a multitude of other things to gain rank, but one of them was I think walking 20km or 200km or something in Multiplayer. It was an insane amount.

So I sticky-taped the controller and some of the buttons to straife around in a circle and left it on for days at a time and even then it still took ages to reach the amount.

This brings back memories.