I really appreciate how Pikasprey is no longer satisfied with softlocking, instead coming up with escapable locks which require going through a Saw situation before escaping.
Well, this one’s easy, repeat the same steps, replace lvl 100 Weezing with lvl 2 Koffing (hatched from egg) who also only knows explosion (from move tutor).
There are a few ways to make this softlock even worse. First of all, you can obviously make the Weezing shiny. This just gives the shiny-lovers a bit of extra pain should they restart the file. Second, have the Weezing have both Explosion and Selfdestruct. One of the possible disobedience actions is the Pokemon using a move other than what you chose. With both exploding moves, even if Weezing's disobedience is to use a different move, it'd still explode anyway, which reduces the chance of a "successful" disobedience turn. You can also throw Memento on there, a move that makes the user faint while lowering the opponent's Attack and Special Attack by 2 stages each. That way, if that move gets chosen, you lose the battle and don't even get the satisfaction of knocking out the Weedle.
Does the "use a different move" line of disobedience really pick a different move or does it pick any random move including the one selected by the player? Because if the latter is true, Self Destruct would not make a difference, as the disobedient Pokémon already had the option to pick Explosion. It's fair to assume that it always picks a different move, but I can't find information on that while trying to make my calculations.
Also, the Memento idea is very funny, but it would increase the chances of escape significantly. Selecting Explosion and Self Destruct and then hitting yourself in confusion carries the effect of halving defense. If the player is selecting Memento, confusion damage would be a smaller factor in the escape
You missed the obvious one which is not to use a Poison-immune Pokemon. If you use something that's not immune to Poison, you also have to get lucky with all 35 Poison Stings not inflicting Poison on you (even if the last Poison Sting does before Weedle starts using Struggle, the Poisoned Pokemon will faint before Weedle faint from Struggle). Bonus points for using a Ground Pokemon so you can't get it Paralyzed by a wild Pikachu first. You could also make it a lower level so that it's less likely to survive confusion damage.
Softlock's kinda messed up when you think about it. A trainer is repeatedly telling the Weezing to kill itself, with the poor ball of fumes ignoring them
God I love these videos about video game children needing to perform rigorous tasks to escape living their entire lives around people who will do absolutely nothing to help them get back home 💯💯💯
@fulltimeslackerii8229 I think they mean in the video game world as in the character is a child stuck in a hell of grinding because none of the other people (npcs) will help them out
There's something so special about your specific type of videos. Every time you rock up with an obvious softlock, I think "oh, how unoriginal. An unwinnable battle." And then you point out a 1 in 686,251 chance you can progress through a ridiculous mechanic and I just can't help but admire how each and every way you pick softlocks is different and interesting.
One thing to note is that struggle in gen 3 only does 1/4 of damage dealt as recoil. So weedle would have to struggle whatever number it’s actual HP is because of how little dmg struggle would be doing
Actually, you don't even need to fight the Weedle. You can find a wild metapod that will start struggling in only 35 turns. Or a wild Pidgey that will start to struggle in 40 turns.
@@Jeremo-FD Sure, but that wouldn't get you out of the lock. The only way to progress is to beat the trainer without dying, because it's the only way you can get past and/or get money enough to buy a pokeball and get another pokemon (either to allow you to trade or just to use). Wild pokemon only give xp, and you can't level up because the weezing is level 100 (also making it so you can't learn another move).
@@JacklynBurnexactly! But I just thought of something helpful with a wild Pokémon. If you get paralyzed by a wild Pikachu you could skip 25% of turns entirely. I don't know how this works with the sleep from obedience issues tho...
I remember, back in 4t h grade, my friend's little brother got himself into a very annoying state in Pokemon Yellow at Pewter City and I was asked to "fix" it. He made the game needlessly difficult (and wouldn't let me start a new save and catch a Mankey or Nidoran on route 22) by repeatedly challenging Brock with only Pikachu, saving after he fainted until he ran out of money, and hadn't caught any other Pokemon and (I assume) inadvertently tossed his Pokeballs. So he was stuck with a ridiculous amount of grinding until Pikachu could KO Geodude and Onix with just Quick Attack or Slam. Pretty sure he couldn't read yet, as his player name was AAAAAAAA.
I wanted to find a probability to escape this softlock, so I've spent way too much effort looking into this. Here are the results of that effort. In the best case, we should have a Weezing with perfect HP and Defense EVs/IVs, 0 Attack EVs/IVs, and a Bold (+Def/-Atk) nature. To further sweeten the odds, we'll also assume the Weedle has 0-8 HP IVs. (Weedle's Attack IV and nature don't actually matter; the damage it deals is the same regardless.) In this case, Weezing has 334 HP, and Weedle has 26 HP. The damage values are as follows: - Weedle's Poison Sting deals 1 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 2 damage. On a critical hit, it deals 3 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 4 damage. - Weedle's Struggle deals 2 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 3 damage. On a critical hit, it deals 5 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 6 damage. Regardless, Weedle will always take 1 HP of recoil damage. - If Weezing hurts itself in confusion, it takes 26-31 damage (3/16 chance each of 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30, and 1/16 chance of 31). Here are the relevant probabilities when Weezing tries to attack: - It has a 37845/131072 (~28.9%) chance of going to sleep for 1-5 turns. - It has a 21547/65536 (~32.9%) chance of doing nothing. - It has a 37845/131072 (~28.9%) chance of hurting itself in confusion. - It has a 3/32 (~9.4%) chance of using Explosion successfully, immediately losing the battle. With these probabilities in mind, I ran 1,000,000 simulations of this battle in Python, and I won only 99 times, for a win rate of around 1 in 10,000. The average battle lasted ~17.576 turns, so if each turn takes ~10 seconds, then it takes, on average, ~20.3 days to escape this softlock.
What about the fact that Bug Catcher Sammy does not give enough money to buy a pokeball? To truly escape you would need to also defeat Brock or his Gym Trainer using the same method.
Always love seeing you break these games in their attempts to try to prevent the player from softlocking themselves. There is always something they overlook because once you have people playing the game they will break it in ways they never could imagine.
@@MrTrombonebandgeek Gen 1 was especially glitchy. I still think that beats even Scarlet and violet because multiple functions in the original Red and Green just did not work properly
@@crestofhonor2349 At least Scarlet and Violet's battle system functions entirely as intended. Gen 1's battle system is broken with glitches. I do not agree with those who hate-speaks Scarlet and Violet, and yet defend Gen 1 like it's some perfect masterpiece that has no flaws. When in truth, Gen 1 is so much more broken than any other mainline Pokemon game. Yes, even BDSP is less broken than Gen 1. This all is why I cannot stand Gen 1 and Charizard, Genwunners will defend them like they're perfect without flaws. When in truth, they are extremely flawed. Since I think Gen 4, Charizard's Typing combination is a terrible against Stealth Rocks, because it's the only stage hazard Move that takes the target Pokemon's typing into account for damage dealt to them via that stage hazard.
@@zigazav1 Not to mention that things like crits were tied directly to speed and other moves like focus energy doing the opposite of what they were supposed to do
This reminds me of a battle I recently had in Black2. I had the event lv100 Zekrom in my party and it almost lost to the first youngster on route 20. He used leer multiple times and Zekrom almost killed itself by disobedient confusion damage.
since (as you said) it takes less time to restart the game, you should've made Weezing shiny so the player has to decide whether to keep trying to get a lv.100 shiny or lose it. Top notch content as always
Its even worse bc weezing here has a brave nature, making her attack higher so confusion does more damage to herself. If she had a lonely nature itd be even worse
@@velvetbutterflythe turn wasted is what’s important not the self damage. If confusion damage is too high weezing could knock itself out which is just another factor in which you can lose
This is so close to being even more evil. There's a hidden Pokeball in Pewter City to pick up, you can catch something and escape. But if that wasn't there... Weedle kid only gives $108, so if the save was left with less than $92, beating the Weedle wouldn't have accomplished anything. You'd have had to do another perfect battle against the gym trainer or Brock to finally get more money, and they both have two Pokemon, so that's even more turns of no explosion required. Shame, really.
Like out of the frying pan into the fire, yes you might beat Sammy and just unlock pewter, but all you can do to help the situation after beating Sammy is battle pewters two trainers in the gym and they have two pokemon meaning you need more luck to beat one of them to have enough buy a poke ball. As asprey says, just start a new file, in 10 minutes you'll catch right up again
The funny thing here is that by making the Weezing level 100 you actually INCREASE the chance of getting out of this softlock. The pokemon's chance to disobey increases the higher level it is, and in this challenge a higher chance to disobey makes the battle easier A level 100 pokemon has around 91% chance to disobey a player with no badges. A level 17 Koffing (the lowest level to learn selfdestruct) has around 60%. So if you wanted to make the challenge even more impossible you'd make the pokemon lower level
You can level up a low level koffing against wild pokemon and maybe learn a move to get out of the softlock. Unless you level it to a point where it would take a long time before it learns its next move
Explosion ends the battle, not using explosion drags it out and makes everything more painful. Obeying you means it uses explosion immedietely, which ends the battle...I'm not sure how a lower chance of disobeying is better here. I guess disobeying gives the weedle a chance to struggle to death but that has to happen as many times as it has PP uses for ALL it's moves and then some. It's kind of a moot point, when considering you're just trying to make something painful to experience, not impossible to go through with.
I love watching these softlocking videos with my husband. Typically we don’t enjoy the same YT content but you are one of those creators that brings us together. ❤
Christian is the type of person that would break out of prison by punching the wall “Each time it punch this, it gets weaker so after a while I would be able to punch a hole in this wall”
If this were emerald it would be “relatively” easy to pass as that game always chooses the same rng seed upon opening up so you could just use a series of frame perfect inputs to win the battle. I believe in fr/lg you can use the static in the teachy tv to find out the rng seed and from there could rng manip through this fight, though there’s probably not good data out there on how the rng seeds determine Pokémon disobeying as it’s almost always used for shiny hunting. Still, I think this scenario should be very easily beatable with rng manipulation. Without it? Good fuckin luck
I would like to see a "tool assisted" speedrun (where you can go frame-by-frame and view RNG states) which attempts to get past this soft lock - given a specific initial state, what is the minimum number of frames required to hit all the correct RNG states to allow Weedle to KO itself with Struggle?
If it does advance every frame then it's 100% escapable consistently as long as you can slow down the frame rate enough to make accurate button presses. All you'd need is a framecounter and a lot of patience. Wouldn't even need to figure out seeds if you just test each frame manually and record the results. You seem to have a greater than 50% chance of the pokemon disobeying so it really might not take all that long. A few hours and you'd be free. Playing this on an emulator that has save states obviously makes it trivial. Just save state each time you don't explode or hit yourself in confusion. You'll be out in under 200 turns most likely which you can use speedup on.
@@AWanderingSwordsman this is what the "tool" in "tool assisted speedrun" is: an emulator which exposes the memory (so you can see RNG values at a frame) and the ability to step one frame forward.
I find it mildly amusing that even if you made it through this softlock, the money you get from the Bug Catcher isn't enough to buy a Poke Ball. There's a hidden one near the museum though, so you wouldn't be completely out of luck. Even so, if I had to rely on that, it would be significantly easier to just start a new game, as you said. This did take me back to my days of Red/Blue where I had a level 100 Snorlax traded to me from another game. It didn't listen often, but Body Slam was enough to sweep past so much of the game that it only needed to listen a few times to be effective. With Explosion as the only move on this Weezing, it could only be used to take out one opponent per battle (more if you used Revives I suppose).
@@inkii-y I believe another youtuber made a video on how to set it up but the basics are: In Pokémon BW you get a Pansage in the dream yard right before the first gym. After the first gym you get cut which you need to cut down a tree shortly afterwards. Tepig is the only Starter that can’t learn cut, and although pansage can, if you throw away all possible options for items, money, and release your pansage BEFORE teaching it cut, then there’s nothing you can do but restart. Seeing as you can’t cut the tree, you can’t get the encounter with Bianca, Team Rocket, and the Munna which is required to progress the story. And seeing as you can’t catch any other Pokémon that CAN learn cut (and you’re too early for trading and the dream world, seeing as you unlock that right AFTER saving Munna) you’ve doomed yet another child.
@@DJThatPlush oh thats intriguing! amd actually like completely possibly if you suck at playing pokemon (used up all your items, lost a bunch of pokemon battles, etr)
@@DJThatPlush I'm going to point out you put Team Rocket instead of Team Plasma. There's only one Rocket grunt in bw, and he's only there for fanservice rather than anything substantial.
@@darkiusmc979honestly who cares about the difference? They're the same villain archetypes with different skins. People will get what you mean regardless
A small optimization you could make to slightly boost your odds is to do a wild encounter before the battle until Weezing puts itself to sleep on the first turn. Then run, and save before the bug catcher. It wouldn't help much, but it's fun to imagine that with enough small tricks, you could wiggle your way out of something like this.
You know what I realized about halfway through this video? Even if you did win against the bug catcher, you would have to do that whole entire sequence a second time if you wanted to progress through the story and keep the Weezing, because Sammy only pays you $108 and you need at least $200 to buy a single Pokeball (unless there's a hidden ball somewhere that I'm forgetting). Truly diabolical.
Would love to see more late game softlocks. I find them more compelling since it takes longer to replay to that point, with more variety and variables that can make them more difficult to get into and more options to make them more difficult to escape
You could make it truly inescapable by RNG manipulating the origin game of the Weezing to have the same TID and SID as the target game, making the Weezing always obey you. And also make it shiny for the extra kick in the groin.
I love this videos because of how sadistic this situations can get and how they always go for that 0.000001 chance of escape after days even when it would be easy to simply make it impossible. Truly a masterpiece this is probably what hell looks like.
every time you come up with another one of these, my mind is blown even more. im sure youll run out of these at some point but ill be here watching every video!
I'm reminded of a comment I saw on the Graveler video, which was to do this softlock with a _shiny Pokémon._ Then, hand the game to someone and say that they can have the shiny and trade it to any game they like... ...if they can get it.
Hey Pikasprey! Ever considered using the void glitch from Diamond and Pearl for a softlock? I'd even thought of an idea in which the player is trapped with a Lvl. 19 Bidoof in the Battle Tower, fighting for a Rare Candy to evolve and learn a needed HM...Sound interesting?
I feel like these videos teach us to learn how to let go, since sometimes it is faster, and healthier, and more efficient to just give up on something and start anew.
TL;DR: You'll need an average of around 1.76 million battles to win. Looking at the disobedience formula on Bulbapedia, there seems to be 3 rolls done regarding disobedience: Does the Pokemon successfully obey, then does the Pokemon use a random other move, then what action the Pokemon actually does. Looking at the disassembly code, it looks like that succeeding the check for using a wrong move when there's actually no other usable move makes the Pokemon do nothing instead. Knowing that, these are the rounded odds of each outcome: 9%: Explosion 29%: Falling Asleep 29%: Hitting Self 33%: Do nothing Falling asleep puts you to sleep for 2 to 5 turns, each outcome having equal weight. Since you wake up on the last turn, that's an average of 2.5 turns lost each time you fall asleep. So in average, you get to play ~7 turns out of 10. Since Weedle needs to go through all 75 PP + ~27 Struggles, that's ~71 turns you need to survive. For Explosion alone, that's ~0.115% chance to happen. Then you have to not deal too much damage on yourself. With 35 Poison Stings + ~27 Struggles, Weedle will be dealing ~62 damage, leaving you with 272 HP. In the video, Weezing dealt 49 damage, so you can't have more than 5 self hits. Using binomial distribution, we calculate that the odds of not hitting self on the assumption that you never use Explosion are 4.93887752541E-7, or 0.0000494%. Multiplying the two odds together, we reach 0.0000000567%, or 1 out of ~1.76 million. Soooooo yeah. The math might not be 100% accurate due to sleep changing how many turns you need to survive, but you can expect to need at least 1 million battles to finally win against this bug catcher.
I would love to see the odds of escaping the softlock calculated. Since it has multiple moving parts (confusion and sleep that last an unknown number of turns and can kill Weezing) I think you'd have to use simulation or a markov chain. Also, since confusion killing you ends the battle, you can make the softlock harder by ensuring Weezing has max Attack and min HP/Defense, right?
I'm not sure why he used Weezing, because using a Poison-type or Steel-type is the most generous thing you can do. Something that can be Poisoned would be far unlikelier to escape (even though it's already astronomically unlikely) because you have to avoid being Poisoned by all 35 Poison Stings, or you will die before Weedle dies from Struggle recoil. So along with your Pikachu comment, the obvious best option is to use a Ground type, so that it can't be Paralyzed by Pikachu and it can be Poisoned.
@@DJFracusAnd ground makes that whenever you are hit by poison sting, the "not very effective" text appears, making it as long as against poison on that regard
@@DJFracus My best guess is because he's already shown off a softlock/ not-quite-softlock using Graveler, and I believe it also had its method revolve around explosion/self-destruct. As-is, this situation is already pretty close to that one, so I imagine Pikasprey is trying to keep it a bit novel by switching up the pokemon, even if the repeat would be the more sadistic choice. Might be why he chose to not make the Weezing shiny, as I recall he's also done "early lock but you have a shiny so you have to choose between it and restarting", because as he mentions in this video, there's not a whole lot of reason to actually try to get out of the situation, as much as just restart the game.
“Wheezing kept exploding within the first few minutes” he just like me fr. But the high level traded mons falling asleep or hitting themselves is such a good mechanic. Never knew the extent
Holy shit how do you manage to impress me so much every single time, every time I think I can see coming what the trap entails, you blow my mind with sth I never even considered. So consistently having me humourously yell out as I slowly realize how horrific and sadistic this situation is "What is wrong with you?!?!?" I love this series
To make this worse, I would trade over a level 51 weezing instead. Since it's a lower level, it will be less likely to survive the hits and the only move it learns after 51 is memento which is effectively just as bad as explosion
nah this is more suffering if u think about it. over 70 turns of weezing not able to use the move. u could probally find a couple of shinies at this point lol
You could make fancier version if this using a level 51 Weezing that's only one fight away from leveling up, with it's only move as Explosion that has 0pp left.
Poor little Weezing keeps hearing that voice, telling him to kill himself. All he has to do is ignore that voice. Keep holding on little Weezing. You can do it.
Not to mention even if you did get past Sammy you’re still out of luck. He only gives 108 Pokémon currency after the battle so you’d still need to win against another trainer to get enough money to buy a pokeball.
This one is especially good because for some reason, I remember one of the options a Pokemon can do when they disobey is to use Struggle instead (Looking it up on the wiki, it seems that was never a thing? Maybe I had it mixed up with it taking Confusion damage). So I thought your escape method would be to hope Weezing uses that one specific kind of disobedience enough times to defeat it without using Explosion. It was so, so much worse than I could have ever anticipated.
A few ideas to make the odds of winning against weedle lower: - Lower weezing level: since disobedience chance is influenced by the traded mon level, the higher the level, the most likely it is to disobey you. (about 90% chance for a level 100, no badges) by lowering weezing's level, you make her more likely to use explosion succesfully, making you lose the battle that much more likely. The level should not be too low however, in order for weedle's struggle to make 1HP of recoil damage still (if you ever reach that point). The level should be 58 or higher. If the player by some miracle was able to level up, it would be able to learn memento, increasing their odds of winning the battle (unlike explosion, memento does not halves your defense when you hit yourself in confusion). - Do not use a poison/steel type: by making the level traded pokemon able to be poisonned, You give a max 9 turns deadline for the battle, making it unwinnable if you ever get that status. It would also prevent the mon from falling asleep, although at this point the battle would be doomed anyway. - Increase Atk and lower HP/Def stat. disobedience may create a "hit itself in confusion" trigger, which would use the traded mon offense and defense stats. Explosion will also halve the traded mon's defense, since you become your own target. -use a ground type pokemon. Players might be tempted to battle against the Pikachus roaming in the forest, seeking for their mon to be paralyzed, increasing the odds of not using explosion. by using a ground type, you ensure this case to be impossible. As a bonus, it allows the pokemon to be poisonned against Weedle as well.
I’m surprised you didn’t go with a shiny Weezing just to twist the knife further. Make the player contemplate whether they actually should go through with resetting. Also, why Weezing specifically if it’s going to be traded in anyway? Wouldn’t Electrode or Golem work as well too?
I'm a bit surprised you didn't put Leftovers on the Weezing. The sell price is only 100, so while the victim could take them off once they notice the problem, they couldn't turn around and sell that for enough to buy a ball. It'd add a minor annoyance, at least.
"Would you like to play a (Pokémon) game?" NO! NO! NO! NO!! I'll go play something else, like Mortal Kombat or something! Just- ANYTHING but Pokémon! No more softlocks!! I'll never get the Explosions out of my head...
Woohoo finally another soft lockpicking video. I remember spending every available hour watching the blue channel for almost 3 months following the ditto challenge video. I love your content pikasprey
Yesterday we got Smallant's escape room video, and someone comments that Pikasprey would be an evil architect of escape rooms. Today we get this. Coincidence????? OK yes it probably is a coincidence, but I'd love to see various Poketubers try to escape something you constructed.
Ok, let's do the math. Gen III mechanics give this lvl100 weezing about a 90% chance to disobey with no badges. If it does disobey, it would have a tiny (~2%) chance to use a different move, but that's not possible here. If that check fails, it has a slightly more than 1 in 3 chance of missing 1-5 turns (so 2-6 counting that turn), an also roughly 1 in 3 chance to hurt itself, and the last slightly less than 1 in 3 it just won't attack. That means that each turn: - Roughly 10% chance to lose - Roughly 30% chance of +2-6 turns of progress - Roughly 30% chance of +1 turn of progress - Roughly 30% chance of dealing self-damage. Seven of these events will knock weezing out based on the damage in the video. We need approximately 90 turns of progress - 70 for Weedle to exhaust its pp, and 20 more for it to struggle itself down. So, how bad is this? ---- We'll start with just avoiding Explosion. Passing a check with a 10% chance of failure 90 times is roughly 1 in 13,000. Even at 10 seconds per reset (much less than the actual average), that's more than a full day of time by itself. If you're on one of those 1 in 13k runs, you now need 90 turns of progress from sleep and ignores before 7 self-hits. On average, sleep nets you +4 turns and an ignore +1, so +2.5 on non-self-damage turns on average. And you have a 2/3 chance to make progress. That means you need (90/2.5) = 38 successes at a 2/3 chance before 7 failures. The exact values here are a bit tricky but a rough estimate based on average success progress is about 0.3%, or 1 in 300 or so. The sleep turns also reduce that 1 in 13k to a more reasonable (9/10)^38 = 1 in 55 to avoid Explosion. Times our 1 in 300 to win without it, we get 1 in about 15,000. At realistic fight lengths - which are dominated by long failed attempts on the order of a minute or two - that's around a week or two of time. ----- Oddly, because disobedience gets more likely at higher levels, as does the sleep turn, this would be much, much worse at lower levels. Weezing's last non-self-knockout move is Destiny Bond at 51. A level 51 Weezing would have a nearly 1 in 4 chance to successfully explode, and if it doesn't, it has about a 1 in 7 chance of sleep or hitting itself and a 5 in 7 to do nothing, for a 6/7 chance of an average of about +1.1 turns of progress. That means we need about 95 non-Explosion turns, at a 3/4 chance. That's about 1 in 700 *billion* - even if we leave out the need to dodge self-injury afterward, you'd never ever ever ever win this way. In fact, your odds are SO bad that on your 51 weezing, you should go fight wilds to level up. Even though you have only a 1 in a couple hundred million chance to beat a Metapod, you can do that thousands of times in the time it'd take you to win at 51, which will let you level up and rapidly increase your odds.
I'm so glad another one of these videos has graced my homepage. Out of curiosity, I would like to know just how late in the series you can softlock yourself, and for added difficulty, try to make it a softlock we haven't seen before. I know it's all but impossible to softlock yourself in Scarlet and Violet, but I wanna know what the latest games are that you can softlock yourself in. Something like Black2/White2 seems like it may be the limit, or just maybe X/Y.
I spent way too long calculating this (with a very long markov chain). With the worst weezing you have a ~1/150,000 chance of survival. The best possible weezing has a ~1/150 chance. This varies because hitting yourself is a 40 base power physical attack against yourself, so HP, attack and defence really matter. In the best case scenario for all damages (26-hp weedle never crits or high rolls, weezing min-rolls every time it hurts itself in confusion), a maximum defence and hp minimum attack weezing has a 98.998% chance of exploding, a 0.249% chance of hitting itself to death with weedle's help and a 0.753% chance of survival after the weedle struggles itself to death on turn 101.
Notes: - the battle will last between 101-103 turns (weedle uses 35 poison sting, 40 string shots and 26-28 struggles (depending on hp IV)) - weedle will deal 35+26 = 61 minimum damage (more for max damage rolls and crits) - With maximum attack and minimum hp and defence, weezing will survive 3-4 confusion hits after weedle chip. (240 hp, 40-48 damage from confusion) -the chance of no explosion and
I simulated this battle one billion times and here are the results: Weezing won the battle 3894 times, that's 0.0003894% or on average a win after 256805 fights. Each fight took an average of 14.59 turns, so in order to win this fight you need about 3.7 million turns. With approximately 9 seconds per turn, this totals to an average of 9250 hours or over one year if you are "playing" non-stop. Not entirely impossible but pretty close to it...
I really appreciate how Pikasprey is no longer satisfied with softlocking, instead coming up with escapable locks which require going through a Saw situation before escaping.
Well, this one’s easy, repeat the same steps, replace lvl 100 Weezing with lvl 2 Koffing (hatched from egg) who also only knows explosion (from move tutor).
Pikasprey: You can leave when you solve this puzzle. And oh, you can’t restart the game from the beginning. You need to solve it
Pikasprey I think:
“I want to play a game.”
In Mario Maker, we call it an antisoftlock
Pseudo softlocks
I love how this series has gone from "a softlock plausible enough that Nintendo directly addressed it" to "I put this ten year old kid in a saw trap."
lol
There are a few ways to make this softlock even worse.
First of all, you can obviously make the Weezing shiny. This just gives the shiny-lovers a bit of extra pain should they restart the file.
Second, have the Weezing have both Explosion and Selfdestruct. One of the possible disobedience actions is the Pokemon using a move other than what you chose. With both exploding moves, even if Weezing's disobedience is to use a different move, it'd still explode anyway, which reduces the chance of a "successful" disobedience turn. You can also throw Memento on there, a move that makes the user faint while lowering the opponent's Attack and Special Attack by 2 stages each. That way, if that move gets chosen, you lose the battle and don't even get the satisfaction of knocking out the Weedle.
That's some mustache twisting monocle adjusting evil right there! These would make good twitch streams just going till it can do it.
Does the "use a different move" line of disobedience really pick a different move or does it pick any random move including the one selected by the player? Because if the latter is true, Self Destruct would not make a difference, as the disobedient Pokémon already had the option to pick Explosion.
It's fair to assume that it always picks a different move, but I can't find information on that while trying to make my calculations.
Also, the Memento idea is very funny, but it would increase the chances of escape significantly. Selecting Explosion and Self Destruct and then hitting yourself in confusion carries the effect of halving defense. If the player is selecting Memento, confusion damage would be a smaller factor in the escape
You missed the obvious one which is not to use a Poison-immune Pokemon.
If you use something that's not immune to Poison, you also have to get lucky with all 35 Poison Stings not inflicting Poison on you (even if the last Poison Sting does before Weedle starts using Struggle, the Poisoned Pokemon will faint before Weedle faint from Struggle).
Bonus points for using a Ground Pokemon so you can't get it Paralyzed by a wild Pikachu first.
You could also make it a lower level so that it's less likely to survive confusion damage.
r/foundsatan. that is a deliciously evil idea.
Softlock's kinda messed up when you think about it.
A trainer is repeatedly telling the Weezing to kill itself, with the poor ball of fumes ignoring them
Destruct yourself NOW
LowTierTrainer moment
@@BlazingKhioneus YOU SHOULD USE SELF DESTRUCT NOW‼️
@@Amirrorofmirrorsfoul
And then it eventually gives into the voices
God I love these videos about video game children needing to perform rigorous tasks to escape living their entire lives around people who will do absolutely nothing to help them get back home 💯💯💯
It's the funniest premise for a series and that's why I love it so much
what does this even mean?
@fulltimeslackerii8229 I think they mean in the video game world as in the character is a child stuck in a hell of grinding because none of the other people (npcs) will help them out
Undertale be like
just like real life school
There's something so special about your specific type of videos. Every time you rock up with an obvious softlock, I think "oh, how unoriginal. An unwinnable battle." And then you point out a 1 in 686,251 chance you can progress through a ridiculous mechanic and I just can't help but admire how each and every way you pick softlocks is different and interesting.
"Hey, wait up! What's the hurry? Why the rush?" the bug catcher asked *calmly*
One thing to note is that struggle in gen 3 only does 1/4 of damage dealt as recoil. So weedle would have to struggle whatever number it’s actual HP is because of how little dmg struggle would be doing
That alone adds an extra 20 turns Weezing needs to not explode
Actually, you don't even need to fight the Weedle. You can find a wild metapod that will start struggling in only 35 turns. Or a wild Pidgey that will start to struggle in 40 turns.
@@Jeremo-FD Sure, but that wouldn't get you out of the lock. The only way to progress is to beat the trainer without dying, because it's the only way you can get past and/or get money enough to buy a pokeball and get another pokemon (either to allow you to trade or just to use). Wild pokemon only give xp, and you can't level up because the weezing is level 100 (also making it so you can't learn another move).
@@JacklynBurnexactly! But I just thought of something helpful with a wild Pokémon. If you get paralyzed by a wild Pikachu you could skip 25% of turns entirely. I don't know how this works with the sleep from obedience issues tho...
@@Jeremo-FDbut you’re still stuck after you defeat it, and you don’t get any money. What then?
Sammy: What’s the rush?
Pikasprey: And I took that personally
Something about this soft lock in particular feels especially brutal and insulting, lol. Excellent work as usual.
Well yeah, it’s a 10 year old screaming that a pile of tumors should kill itself, over and over and over again.
I remember, back in 4t h grade, my friend's little brother got himself into a very annoying state in Pokemon Yellow at Pewter City and I was asked to "fix" it. He made the game needlessly difficult (and wouldn't let me start a new save and catch a Mankey or Nidoran on route 22) by repeatedly challenging Brock with only Pikachu, saving after he fainted until he ran out of money, and hadn't caught any other Pokemon and (I assume) inadvertently tossed his Pokeballs. So he was stuck with a ridiculous amount of grinding until Pikachu could KO Geodude and Onix with just Quick Attack or Slam. Pretty sure he couldn't read yet, as his player name was AAAAAAAA.
This is hilarious lmao
young pikasprey
@@LSqrepikasprey lore
I wouldve just started a new save and said that I didn't.
bro's first core memory.
I wanted to find a probability to escape this softlock, so I've spent way too much effort looking into this. Here are the results of that effort.
In the best case, we should have a Weezing with perfect HP and Defense EVs/IVs, 0 Attack EVs/IVs, and a Bold (+Def/-Atk) nature. To further sweeten the odds, we'll also assume the Weedle has 0-8 HP IVs. (Weedle's Attack IV and nature don't actually matter; the damage it deals is the same regardless.) In this case, Weezing has 334 HP, and Weedle has 26 HP.
The damage values are as follows:
- Weedle's Poison Sting deals 1 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 2 damage. On a critical hit, it deals 3 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 4 damage.
- Weedle's Struggle deals 2 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 3 damage. On a critical hit, it deals 5 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 6 damage. Regardless, Weedle will always take 1 HP of recoil damage.
- If Weezing hurts itself in confusion, it takes 26-31 damage (3/16 chance each of 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30, and 1/16 chance of 31).
Here are the relevant probabilities when Weezing tries to attack:
- It has a 37845/131072 (~28.9%) chance of going to sleep for 1-5 turns.
- It has a 21547/65536 (~32.9%) chance of doing nothing.
- It has a 37845/131072 (~28.9%) chance of hurting itself in confusion.
- It has a 3/32 (~9.4%) chance of using Explosion successfully, immediately losing the battle.
With these probabilities in mind, I ran 1,000,000 simulations of this battle in Python, and I won only 99 times, for a win rate of around 1 in 10,000.
The average battle lasted ~17.576 turns, so if each turn takes ~10 seconds, then it takes, on average, ~20.3 days to escape this softlock.
Thank you for providing the answers to my internal questions. =D
Now do it with this specific Weezing (Brave nature, stats shown at 3:26)
You can do that in python?
That's awesome, he should pin this comment
What about the fact that Bug Catcher Sammy does not give enough money to buy a pokeball? To truly escape you would need to also defeat Brock or his Gym Trainer using the same method.
@@milsharkie Apparently there is a hidden Poké Ball that you can collect in Pewter City, according to some other comments.
Always love seeing you break these games in their attempts to try to prevent the player from softlocking themselves. There is always something they overlook because once you have people playing the game they will break it in ways they never could imagine.
To be fair, a lot of the first few gens were fairly jank and ran on duct tape, and that’s why you see a lot of his vids be from that era of pokemon
@@MrTrombonebandgeek Gen 1 was especially glitchy. I still think that beats even Scarlet and violet because multiple functions in the original Red and Green just did not work properly
@@crestofhonor2349 At least Scarlet and Violet's battle system functions entirely as intended. Gen 1's battle system is broken with glitches. I do not agree with those who hate-speaks Scarlet and Violet, and yet defend Gen 1 like it's some perfect masterpiece that has no flaws. When in truth, Gen 1 is so much more broken than any other mainline Pokemon game. Yes, even BDSP is less broken than Gen 1. This all is why I cannot stand Gen 1 and Charizard, Genwunners will defend them like they're perfect without flaws. When in truth, they are extremely flawed. Since I think Gen 4, Charizard's Typing combination is a terrible against Stealth Rocks, because it's the only stage hazard Move that takes the target Pokemon's typing into account for damage dealt to them via that stage hazard.
@@zigazav1 Not to mention that things like crits were tied directly to speed and other moves like focus energy doing the opposite of what they were supposed to do
This reminds me of a battle I recently had in Black2.
I had the event lv100 Zekrom in my party and it almost lost to the first youngster on route 20.
He used leer multiple times and Zekrom almost killed itself by disobedient confusion damage.
since (as you said) it takes less time to restart the game, you should've made Weezing shiny so the player has to decide whether to keep trying to get a lv.100 shiny or lose it. Top notch content as always
Give it pokerus, too. (Actually nvm since fan run servers exist lol)
Make it shiny so that the player is forced to watch a pointless sparkle animation before every battle lol
Its even worse bc weezing here has a brave nature, making her attack higher so confusion does more damage to herself. If she had a lonely nature itd be even worse
Why would Lonely be worse?
@@velvetbutterflylowers Attack, buffs Defense.
@furiouscorgi6614 buffs attack lowers defense, does even more confusion damage
@@furiouscorgi6614 that would make it better since you'd be more likely to survive the battle even if you hit yourself a few times
@@velvetbutterflythe turn wasted is what’s important not the self damage. If confusion damage is too high weezing could knock itself out which is just another factor in which you can lose
Just what I needed after a long day. Another video about how to play Pokémon incorrectly.
Wut happened?
this is how DSP plays every game
This is so close to being even more evil. There's a hidden Pokeball in Pewter City to pick up, you can catch something and escape.
But if that wasn't there... Weedle kid only gives $108, so if the save was left with less than $92, beating the Weedle wouldn't have accomplished anything. You'd have had to do another perfect battle against the gym trainer or Brock to finally get more money, and they both have two Pokemon, so that's even more turns of no explosion required.
Shame, really.
Like out of the frying pan into the fire, yes you might beat Sammy and just unlock pewter, but all you can do to help the situation after beating Sammy is battle pewters two trainers in the gym and they have two pokemon meaning you need more luck to beat one of them to have enough buy a poke ball. As asprey says, just start a new file, in 10 minutes you'll catch right up again
After you beat that trainer you can find more items to sell without fighting.
This is what I was wondering; what are the steps after winning this fight?
The funny thing here is that by making the Weezing level 100 you actually INCREASE the chance of getting out of this softlock. The pokemon's chance to disobey increases the higher level it is, and in this challenge a higher chance to disobey makes the battle easier
A level 100 pokemon has around 91% chance to disobey a player with no badges. A level 17 Koffing (the lowest level to learn selfdestruct) has around 60%. So if you wanted to make the challenge even more impossible you'd make the pokemon lower level
You can level up a low level koffing against wild pokemon and maybe learn a move to get out of the softlock. Unless you level it to a point where it would take a long time before it learns its next move
@@ICryOverSpiltMilk ...how would you level it up? it _only knows self-destruct_
Explosion ends the battle, not using explosion drags it out and makes everything more painful. Obeying you means it uses explosion immedietely, which ends the battle...I'm not sure how a lower chance of disobeying is better here. I guess disobeying gives the weedle a chance to struggle to death but that has to happen as many times as it has PP uses for ALL it's moves and then some. It's kind of a moot point, when considering you're just trying to make something painful to experience, not impossible to go through with.
@@ICryOverSpiltMilk
How would you level it up? The fight against a wild Pokemon would be the same as against the Trainer
But then the koffing would have less hp. Weedle could probably kill it with its poison stings, no need to struggle
The Weezing is too proud of itself to obey a command to make itself be KO'd.
I love watching these softlocking videos with my husband. Typically we don’t enjoy the same YT content but you are one of those creators that brings us together. ❤
Christian is the type of person that would break out of prison by punching the wall
“Each time it punch this, it gets weaker so after a while I would be able to punch a hole in this wall”
Technically not INaccurate!
Depending on how RNG is implemented in these games, this might be literally impossible without taking action to manipulate the RNG mid battle.
If this were emerald it would be “relatively” easy to pass as that game always chooses the same rng seed upon opening up so you could just use a series of frame perfect inputs to win the battle. I believe in fr/lg you can use the static in the teachy tv to find out the rng seed and from there could rng manip through this fight, though there’s probably not good data out there on how the rng seeds determine Pokémon disobeying as it’s almost always used for shiny hunting. Still, I think this scenario should be very easily beatable with rng manipulation. Without it? Good fuckin luck
I would like to see a "tool assisted" speedrun (where you can go frame-by-frame and view RNG states) which attempts to get past this soft lock - given a specific initial state, what is the minimum number of frames required to hit all the correct RNG states to allow Weedle to KO itself with Struggle?
In most Pokémon games, the RNG advances once every frame from boot.
If it does advance every frame then it's 100% escapable consistently as long as you can slow down the frame rate enough to make accurate button presses. All you'd need is a framecounter and a lot of patience. Wouldn't even need to figure out seeds if you just test each frame manually and record the results. You seem to have a greater than 50% chance of the pokemon disobeying so it really might not take all that long. A few hours and you'd be free.
Playing this on an emulator that has save states obviously makes it trivial. Just save state each time you don't explode or hit yourself in confusion. You'll be out in under 200 turns most likely which you can use speedup on.
@@AWanderingSwordsman this is what the "tool" in "tool assisted speedrun" is: an emulator which exposes the memory (so you can see RNG values at a frame) and the ability to step one frame forward.
I find it mildly amusing that even if you made it through this softlock, the money you get from the Bug Catcher isn't enough to buy a Poke Ball. There's a hidden one near the museum though, so you wouldn't be completely out of luck. Even so, if I had to rely on that, it would be significantly easier to just start a new game, as you said. This did take me back to my days of Red/Blue where I had a level 100 Snorlax traded to me from another game. It didn't listen often, but Body Slam was enough to sweep past so much of the game that it only needed to listen a few times to be effective. With Explosion as the only move on this Weezing, it could only be used to take out one opponent per battle (more if you used Revives I suppose).
Always love seeing what fresh new hell you’ve cooked up for this series.
Would love to see you tackle the BW Tepig softlock in one of these episodes!
whats that one?
@@inkii-y I believe another youtuber made a video on how to set it up but the basics are:
In Pokémon BW you get a Pansage in the dream yard right before the first gym. After the first gym you get cut which you need to cut down a tree shortly afterwards. Tepig is the only Starter that can’t learn cut, and although pansage can, if you throw away all possible options for items, money, and release your pansage BEFORE teaching it cut, then there’s nothing you can do but restart.
Seeing as you can’t cut the tree, you can’t get the encounter with Bianca, Team Rocket, and the Munna which is required to progress the story. And seeing as you can’t catch any other Pokémon that CAN learn cut (and you’re too early for trading and the dream world, seeing as you unlock that right AFTER saving Munna) you’ve doomed yet another child.
@@DJThatPlush oh thats intriguing! amd actually like completely possibly if you suck at playing pokemon (used up all your items, lost a bunch of pokemon battles, etr)
@@DJThatPlush I'm going to point out you put Team Rocket instead of Team Plasma.
There's only one Rocket grunt in bw, and he's only there for fanservice rather than anything substantial.
@@darkiusmc979honestly who cares about the difference? They're the same villain archetypes with different skins. People will get what you mean regardless
the only time you'd want your Pokemon to disobey
A small optimization you could make to slightly boost your odds is to do a wild encounter before the battle until Weezing puts itself to sleep on the first turn. Then run, and save before the bug catcher.
It wouldn't help much, but it's fun to imagine that with enough small tricks, you could wiggle your way out of something like this.
This softlock in a nutshell: How long can weezing ignore his trainer telling him to unalive himself before caving to peer pressure?
You know what I realized about halfway through this video? Even if you did win against the bug catcher, you would have to do that whole entire sequence a second time if you wanted to progress through the story and keep the Weezing, because Sammy only pays you $108 and you need at least $200 to buy a single Pokeball (unless there's a hidden ball somewhere that I'm forgetting).
Truly diabolical.
there is a pokeball in pewter city
Would love to see more late game softlocks. I find them more compelling since it takes longer to replay to that point, with more variety and variables that can make them more difficult to get into and more options to make them more difficult to escape
New Soft Lock Picking, Better viewing then live TV for sure.
Weezing *reaches level 100*: ‘I’m ready to solo the Pokémon League and go down in history!’
Pikasprey: ‘Well yes, but actually no.’
Any time I see a Soft Lock Picking video I will immediately stop whatever I am doing and watch it with no exceptions
I hope you're not a surgeon!
@@renakunisaki ha def not
I legit just finished watching the rest of this series last night and was hoping for more! I freaking love it!
"Pokemon is known for being incredibly easy" ok tell my 7-year-old self when I'm up against SS Anne Gary
Hell yeah! New Pikasprey softlockpicking! Love your content bro!
Amen to that:3
Me too!
I'm unlucky enough. For the longest time, I actually thought it was just garunteed to not listen if you don't have enough badges.
i don't know what about finding so many ways to softlock games is so fascinating to me but i am glad you're still finding ways to do it
Pikasprey Yellow is basically John Kramer from the Saw movies but for Pokémon games
So you just trapped yourself and a poor innocent child with a time bomb huh, Pikasprigsaw strikes again!
I guess the Weezing must be the poor innocent child, huh? /j
Out of all your softlocks, i think this is the most straightforward one. Big fan
Love this series so much! So hyped to see this on my feed after what feels like forever! Thanks for the awesome content!
I sure hope there's more not found locks out there. These videos are gold
You could make it truly inescapable by RNG manipulating the origin game of the Weezing to have the same TID and SID as the target game, making the Weezing always obey you. And also make it shiny for the extra kick in the groin.
Or just trade a level 5 Pokemon that gets self destruct by tutor in FRLG
I love this videos because of how sadistic this situations can get and how they always go for that 0.000001 chance of escape after days even when it would be easy to simply make it impossible. Truly a masterpiece this is probably what hell looks like.
every time you come up with another one of these, my mind is blown even more. im sure youll run out of these at some point but ill be here watching every video!
I'm reminded of a comment I saw on the Graveler video, which was to do this softlock with a _shiny Pokémon._ Then, hand the game to someone and say that they can have the shiny and trade it to any game they like...
...if they can get it.
“Pokémon is known for being incredibly easy.” Don’t let people who haven’t played since emerald when they were a kid hear you say that.
I didn't know there were a potion in the vision line of the bug catcher, Mr. Yellow taught me something
Hey Pikasprey! Ever considered using the void glitch from Diamond and Pearl for a softlock?
I'd even thought of an idea in which the player is trapped with a Lvl. 19 Bidoof in the Battle Tower, fighting for a Rare Candy to evolve and learn a needed HM...Sound interesting?
Really nice transition between the trade canter and the Forest
7:48 Just make the Weezing shiny to make it actually somewhat worth trying to get past the Bug Catcher. As easy as that.
I feel like these videos teach us to learn how to let go, since sometimes it is faster, and healthier, and more efficient to just give up on something and start anew.
*Sobs* That poor Charmander, you monster...
Other than that, great video! A very evil set up to give to someone~
Dude, I love these! Don’t stop making them please.
TL;DR: You'll need an average of around 1.76 million battles to win.
Looking at the disobedience formula on Bulbapedia, there seems to be 3 rolls done regarding disobedience: Does the Pokemon successfully obey, then does the Pokemon use a random other move, then what action the Pokemon actually does. Looking at the disassembly code, it looks like that succeeding the check for using a wrong move when there's actually no other usable move makes the Pokemon do nothing instead. Knowing that, these are the rounded odds of each outcome:
9%: Explosion
29%: Falling Asleep
29%: Hitting Self
33%: Do nothing
Falling asleep puts you to sleep for 2 to 5 turns, each outcome having equal weight. Since you wake up on the last turn, that's an average of 2.5 turns lost each time you fall asleep. So in average, you get to play ~7 turns out of 10. Since Weedle needs to go through all 75 PP + ~27 Struggles, that's ~71 turns you need to survive. For Explosion alone, that's ~0.115% chance to happen.
Then you have to not deal too much damage on yourself. With 35 Poison Stings + ~27 Struggles, Weedle will be dealing ~62 damage, leaving you with 272 HP. In the video, Weezing dealt 49 damage, so you can't have more than 5 self hits. Using binomial distribution, we calculate that the odds of not hitting self on the assumption that you never use Explosion are 4.93887752541E-7, or 0.0000494%. Multiplying the two odds together, we reach 0.0000000567%, or 1 out of ~1.76 million.
Soooooo yeah. The math might not be 100% accurate due to sleep changing how many turns you need to survive, but you can expect to need at least 1 million battles to finally win against this bug catcher.
Just yesterday I was thinking how awesome it would be to get another softlock video from you. Thanks!
I would love to see the odds of escaping the softlock calculated. Since it has multiple moving parts (confusion and sleep that last an unknown number of turns and can kill Weezing) I think you'd have to use simulation or a markov chain. Also, since confusion killing you ends the battle, you can make the softlock harder by ensuring Weezing has max Attack and min HP/Defense, right?
It would take way less time to shiny hunt for a Koffing in gen 9 than to actually finish this challenge
I love that in this one trading with others is blocked off too.
Couldnt you encounter a pikachu, have it use thundershock until it paralyses? That could technically help escape odds.
Maybe, but Weezing falling asleep is a really good thing and it cannot do that while paralyzed. It is really hard to know if it helps or hinders.
I'm not sure why he used Weezing, because using a Poison-type or Steel-type is the most generous thing you can do.
Something that can be Poisoned would be far unlikelier to escape (even though it's already astronomically unlikely) because you have to avoid being Poisoned by all 35 Poison Stings, or you will die before Weedle dies from Struggle recoil.
So along with your Pikachu comment, the obvious best option is to use a Ground type, so that it can't be Paralyzed by Pikachu and it can be Poisoned.
@@DJFracusAnd ground makes that whenever you are hit by poison sting, the "not very effective" text appears, making it as long as against poison on that regard
@@DJFracus My best guess is because he's already shown off a softlock/ not-quite-softlock using Graveler, and I believe it also had its method revolve around explosion/self-destruct. As-is, this situation is already pretty close to that one, so I imagine Pikasprey is trying to keep it a bit novel by switching up the pokemon, even if the repeat would be the more sadistic choice. Might be why he chose to not make the Weezing shiny, as I recall he's also done "early lock but you have a shiny so you have to choose between it and restarting", because as he mentions in this video, there's not a whole lot of reason to actually try to get out of the situation, as much as just restart the game.
Falling asleep via disobedience overrides the other statuses. So being paralyzed doesn't help that much.
I love this series, I've been watching for years now
I never knew that this game was this broken
“Wheezing kept exploding within the first few minutes” he just like me fr. But the high level traded mons falling asleep or hitting themselves is such a good mechanic. Never knew the extent
Love that this series returns
I love your videos, man. They're so comforting. I love the megaman, castlevania and gem collecting series as well.
I was having a bad day and Pikasprey releases a video, my day is saved
Holy shit how do you manage to impress me so much every single time, every time I think I can see coming what the trap entails, you blow my mind with sth I never even considered. So consistently having me humourously yell out as I slowly realize how horrific and sadistic this situation is "What is wrong with you?!?!?" I love this series
To make this worse, I would trade over a level 51 weezing instead. Since it's a lower level, it will be less likely to survive the hits and the only move it learns after 51 is memento which is effectively just as bad as explosion
Yeah I was thinking that too. Giving it 2 fail states with the chance of being ko'd makes things much worse
nah this is more suffering if u think about it. over 70 turns of weezing not able to use the move. u could probally find a couple of shinies at this point lol
You could make fancier version if this using a level 51 Weezing that's only one fight away from leveling up, with it's only move as Explosion that has 0pp left.
Poor little Weezing keeps hearing that voice, telling him to kill himself. All he has to do is ignore that voice. Keep holding on little Weezing. You can do it.
Not to mention even if you did get past Sammy you’re still out of luck. He only gives 108 Pokémon currency after the battle so you’d still need to win against another trainer to get enough money to buy a pokeball.
there are items to pick up in pewter city iirc
@@mello-byYeah, there is a pokeball you can pick up in Pewter City
@@mello-byI was basing my assumption off of Gen 1 where there really aren’t any hidden items. There’s literally a poke ball hidden in FR/LG.
This one is especially good because for some reason, I remember one of the options a Pokemon can do when they disobey is to use Struggle instead (Looking it up on the wiki, it seems that was never a thing? Maybe I had it mixed up with it taking Confusion damage). So I thought your escape method would be to hope Weezing uses that one specific kind of disobedience enough times to defeat it without using Explosion. It was so, so much worse than I could have ever anticipated.
Please keep making more soft lock picking
A few ideas to make the odds of winning against weedle lower:
- Lower weezing level: since disobedience chance is influenced by the traded mon level,
the higher the level, the most likely it is to disobey you. (about 90% chance for a level 100, no badges)
by lowering weezing's level, you make her more likely to use explosion succesfully, making you lose the battle that much more likely.
The level should not be too low however, in order for weedle's struggle to make 1HP of recoil damage still (if you ever reach that point).
The level should be 58 or higher. If the player by some miracle was able to level up, it would be able to learn memento,
increasing their odds of winning the battle (unlike explosion, memento does not halves your defense when you hit yourself in confusion).
- Do not use a poison/steel type: by making the level traded pokemon able to be poisonned,
You give a max 9 turns deadline for the battle, making it unwinnable if you ever get that status.
It would also prevent the mon from falling asleep, although at this point the battle would be doomed anyway.
- Increase Atk and lower HP/Def stat.
disobedience may create a "hit itself in confusion" trigger, which would use the traded mon offense and defense stats.
Explosion will also halve the traded mon's defense, since you become your own target.
-use a ground type pokemon.
Players might be tempted to battle against the Pikachus roaming in the forest, seeking for their mon to be paralyzed, increasing the odds of not using explosion.
by using a ground type, you ensure this case to be impossible. As a bonus, it allows the pokemon to be poisonned against Weedle as well.
I’m surprised you didn’t go with a shiny Weezing just to twist the knife further. Make the player contemplate whether they actually should go through with resetting.
Also, why Weezing specifically if it’s going to be traded in anyway? Wouldn’t Electrode or Golem work as well too?
Electrode and Graveler can be poisoned, which drastically lowers the number of turns you need to stall
Maybe because it's a Poison type. It's immune to being poisoned by Poison Sting.
wouldn't that cause you to die faster, making the entire process take longer @@MsFmaFangirl
That makes sense@@DoubtedDecidueye
I just wanna say that with the recent uptick in pokemon escape rooms I'd love to see you throw one together.
I'm a bit surprised you didn't put Leftovers on the Weezing. The sell price is only 100, so while the victim could take them off once they notice the problem, they couldn't turn around and sell that for enough to buy a ball. It'd add a minor annoyance, at least.
you need to keep the weezing alive in this case, so the leftovers would help - compared to other softlocks where you need to faint.
@@jro.90 At the same time, leftovers triggering constantly would cause such a large extra time drain that it would probably be worth it.
Hello Pikasprey! I feel welcomed by this intro! I hope to see some niche mechanic I’ve heard only a dozen times used to mess up a play through!
finally got to one of these early, I think 99.9% of you won’t see this comment though, which is sad
I saw it :)
@@savathunsgoblin sick
"it's way faster to just erase everything and start over"
so make the weezing shiny so they won't do that :)
"Would you like to play a (Pokémon) game?" NO! NO! NO! NO!! I'll go play something else, like Mortal Kombat or something! Just- ANYTHING but Pokémon! No more softlocks!! I'll never get the Explosions out of my head...
Woohoo finally another soft lockpicking video. I remember spending every available hour watching the blue channel for almost 3 months following the ditto challenge video. I love your content pikasprey
Yesterday we got Smallant's escape room video, and someone comments that Pikasprey would be an evil architect of escape rooms. Today we get this.
Coincidence?????
OK yes it probably is a coincidence, but I'd love to see various Poketubers try to escape something you constructed.
If the Weezing is shiny and has perfect IVs and EVs, people have to decide whether or not to give up the Weezing by restarting.
Bro anytime you upload I lose my mind! These are some of my favorite videos on the internet! You're a LEGEND+
Nicely done. This is one of the most evil softlocks you've implemented yet, in my opinion.
Ok, let's do the math.
Gen III mechanics give this lvl100 weezing about a 90% chance to disobey with no badges. If it does disobey, it would have a tiny (~2%) chance to use a different move, but that's not possible here.
If that check fails, it has a slightly more than 1 in 3 chance of missing 1-5 turns (so 2-6 counting that turn), an also roughly 1 in 3 chance to hurt itself, and the last slightly less than 1 in 3 it just won't attack.
That means that each turn:
- Roughly 10% chance to lose
- Roughly 30% chance of +2-6 turns of progress
- Roughly 30% chance of +1 turn of progress
- Roughly 30% chance of dealing self-damage. Seven of these events will knock weezing out based on the damage in the video.
We need approximately 90 turns of progress - 70 for Weedle to exhaust its pp, and 20 more for it to struggle itself down.
So, how bad is this?
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We'll start with just avoiding Explosion. Passing a check with a 10% chance of failure 90 times is roughly 1 in 13,000. Even at 10 seconds per reset (much less than the actual average), that's more than a full day of time by itself.
If you're on one of those 1 in 13k runs, you now need 90 turns of progress from sleep and ignores before 7 self-hits. On average, sleep nets you +4 turns and an ignore +1, so +2.5 on non-self-damage turns on average. And you have a 2/3 chance to make progress. That means you need (90/2.5) = 38 successes at a 2/3 chance before 7 failures.
The exact values here are a bit tricky but a rough estimate based on average success progress is about 0.3%, or 1 in 300 or so.
The sleep turns also reduce that 1 in 13k to a more reasonable (9/10)^38 = 1 in 55 to avoid Explosion. Times our 1 in 300 to win without it, we get 1 in about 15,000. At realistic fight lengths - which are dominated by long failed attempts on the order of a minute or two - that's around a week or two of time.
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Oddly, because disobedience gets more likely at higher levels, as does the sleep turn, this would be much, much worse at lower levels.
Weezing's last non-self-knockout move is Destiny Bond at 51. A level 51 Weezing would have a nearly 1 in 4 chance to successfully explode, and if it doesn't, it has about a 1 in 7 chance of sleep or hitting itself and a 5 in 7 to do nothing, for a 6/7 chance of an average of about +1.1 turns of progress.
That means we need about 95 non-Explosion turns, at a 3/4 chance. That's about 1 in 700 *billion* - even if we leave out the need to dodge self-injury afterward, you'd never ever ever ever win this way.
In fact, your odds are SO bad that on your 51 weezing, you should go fight wilds to level up. Even though you have only a 1 in a couple hundred million chance to beat a Metapod, you can do that thousands of times in the time it'd take you to win at 51, which will let you level up and rapidly increase your odds.
I'm so glad another one of these videos has graced my homepage.
Out of curiosity, I would like to know just how late in the series you can softlock yourself, and for added difficulty, try to make it a softlock we haven't seen before. I know it's all but impossible to softlock yourself in Scarlet and Violet, but I wanna know what the latest games are that you can softlock yourself in. Something like Black2/White2 seems like it may be the limit, or just maybe X/Y.
One must imagine Weezing happy.
I spent way too long calculating this (with a very long markov chain). With the worst weezing you have a ~1/150,000 chance of survival. The best possible weezing has a ~1/150 chance. This varies because hitting yourself is a 40 base power physical attack against yourself, so HP, attack and defence really matter.
In the best case scenario for all damages (26-hp weedle never crits or high rolls, weezing min-rolls every time it hurts itself in confusion), a maximum defence and hp minimum attack weezing has a 98.998% chance of exploding, a 0.249% chance of hitting itself to death with weedle's help and a 0.753% chance of survival after the weedle struggles itself to death on turn 101.
Notes:
- the battle will last between 101-103 turns (weedle uses 35 poison sting, 40 string shots and 26-28 struggles (depending on hp IV))
- weedle will deal 35+26 = 61 minimum damage (more for max damage rolls and crits)
- With maximum attack and minimum hp and defence, weezing will survive 3-4 confusion hits after weedle chip. (240 hp, 40-48 damage from confusion)
-the chance of no explosion and
Please never stop making these. I love the idea of making a game totally unplayable just for shits and giggles
Wow I was just thinking about these types of videos and one just happnes to show up out of no where.
Imagine the Weezing being shiny. Suddenly it is worth it to do the Soft Lock Picking
Lesson learned:
- why fight for a *chance* of success when you can just *end it all?*
Due to the same restrictions to limit which Pokémon can get in to a save file this early, Pokémon Box RS can't be used.
I don't normally care for pokemon but these softlock picking videos are so entertaining I lovr binge watching them
I simulated this battle one billion times and here are the results:
Weezing won the battle 3894 times, that's 0.0003894% or on average a win after 256805 fights.
Each fight took an average of 14.59 turns, so in order to win this fight you need about 3.7 million turns. With approximately 9 seconds per turn, this totals to an average of 9250 hours or over one year if you are "playing" non-stop. Not entirely impossible but pretty close to it...
Thanks for another great video!
I’m always surprised you having reached a million subscribers yet. Such great work and great content.
The trees always reminded me of if there was a sudowudo that got really really jacked and had a shroomish sit on its head.