Emerald hack: Pokémon Mu Magma - Play Emerald as a Magma Grunt!

[jicem]

Pokémon Mu Magma (pronounced Mew Magma) is a rom hack of Pokémon Emerald that lets you play as a male or female Team Magma Grunt, with custom sprites, story changes, and many QOL changes to boot.

Features:

All of the base features of pokeemerald-expansion version 1.9 including PSS, fairy type, and modern learnsets
Reusable TMs
Gen 5-style popups when you enter new areas of the map
Gen 6-style Exp. Share as a key item given you in Petalburg Woods like in ORAS
Mega Evolution with several Mega Stones available as items you can collect
With this in mind, the Items pocket of the bag can now hold up to 42 items (similar to FRLG) instead of the default 30
Pressing B toggles run instead of needing to be held to run
Any Pokémon you're traveling with can use a field move as long as the HM for it is in your bag
The Cleanse Tag will let you avoid all wild encounters if it's held by any of your Pokémon, and you can find one from the start of the game on your PC
Switch between the mach bike and acro bike at any time by pressing R
Pokémon now have soft level caps to encourage you to use different ones, especially early in the game
You get the S.S. Ticket halfway through the game instead of in the postgame, letting you go directly from Slateport to Lilycove and travel to previously champion-exclusive and event-exclusive locations (including, of course, the one where you encounter Mew)

Dex Completion:

All Hoenn Pokémon from the Gen III games can be acquired either through wild encounters or evolution, and the nine forms introduced in the Gen IV games can be caught as well. All three starter Pokémon and any trade exclusive Pokémon can also be caught in the wild, so fully completing this game's regional dex by yourself should be possible. Gengar is also in Hoenn now because I like Gengar. The game's full encounter table can be found here.

There are also several changes to dialogue and characterization tweaks to account for the fact that you're a Magma Grunt and to make the hack feel a bit more unique. This isn't a complete story overhaul like some of the other villain hacks, as I wanted to preserve as much of the original gameplay as possible, but there will be some surprises. If you decide to try this hack, please let me know what you think, and if anything breaks, definitely let me know then so I can try and fix it.

Enjoy!

The patch can be downloaded at this link.

If you want to view this hack's source code or make your own changes to it, you can find the GitHub repository I worked from here.

Credits:

Team Magma back sprites from necrolichmon on DeviantArt (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Code used from:
ROM Hacking Hideout (see GitHub for all contributors)
Devolov
pcg06
LOuroboros
Fyreire

 

[Inner Rhymes]

This looks amazing, gosh! Thought I would ask, is it just a re-telling of emerald from the perspective of a Magma grunt, or is it in the vein of Team Rocket edition that adds lore, fan-fiction and underlying explanations for events? Lastly. is it safe to assume this is complete?

 

[jicem]

This looks amazing, gosh! Thought I would ask, is it just a re-telling of emerald from the perspective of a Magma grunt, or is it in the vein of Team Rocket edition that adds lore, fan-fiction and underlying explanations for events? Lastly. is it safe to assume this is complete?

This hack is complete! I'll admit that there's a little bit of fan fiction, and the motivations for Maxie as well as Archie are expanded, but outside of those things the story doesn't diverge from Emerald's too much.

I've also just included a fix that would only affect May playthroughs. If you've been playing as Brendan or don't mind one text overflow, you can ignore this fix. I'll continue doing playthroughs to iron out any bugs, but you can still feel safe downloading it as there isn't anything in the hack that's game-breaking.

 

[Inner Rhymes]

Thank you for letting me know! Do we only play as a grunt, or is there a promotion system, like going up as an admin?

 

[OmegaBlazerX]

This reminded me of a manga the protagonist dating a female Magma Grunt looks good have to try it out if there was a version of this but with team Aqua that would be nice to see.

 

[Rizack]

I may (pun kinda intended) have encountered a bug.
In another comment you talk about a bug related to chosing the girl so idk if it's related to that or the male protagonist has it too.
Basically, i am at slateport beach, fighting trainers, and one of them had a bad egg (tentacool) level 99, asleep and died next turn with a poison animation. Next mon was the normal tentacool, the bad egg was like an extra pokemon, and it gave me 1 exp. The trainer is the left tubeboy under the beach umbrella, where you get the item above them

I hope this won't cause problems later in the game.

I'm trying to play like a real magma grunt, so with fire and dark pokèmon (there are not enough fire ones and they have mightyena) plus i made an exception for aron since aggron learns surf (i don't want to use water) and i chose ground too for the magcargo line

I've just thought that i need someone to use waterfall too, mhm. Only non water choices are masquerain (bug/flying), azurill (but kinda useless without evolving) and latias/latios/rayquaza xD which i may use at that point, as an hm slave ofc xD there are more pokèmon but not in the game i guess

Right now my team is Torchic, nuzleaf, aron (but will use the nidos, rhydon or tyranitar if i find them, to keep the 3 selected typings), mightyena and sableye. I'll add a numel for sure, and probably change sableye with torkoal (i can't think of other possible candicates for now)

 

[Danidark97]

And after Team Rocket, we have also the Magma Version
Can't wait for the next teams

 

[Rizack]

And after Team Rocket, we have also the Magma Version
Can't wait for the next teams

there are other team versions, even magma, this can't be compared to Team Rocket edition (both FRLG or emerald)

 

[jicem]

Thank you for letting me know! Do we only play as a grunt, or is there a promotion system, like going up as an admin?

You only play as a grunt.

 

[Filipe86]

Does this have new abilities on the pokemon, like for exemple, Technitian on Scyter, or No Guard on Machop?

 

[MegaMilotic]

This looks great!

What's the difficulty like? (Nuclocke/monotype appropriate? Or has the difficulty been enhanced significantly?)

 

[jicem]

Does this have new abilities on the pokemon, like for exemple, Technitian on Scyter, or No Guard on Machop?

It has all abilities up to Gen 9.

This looks great!

What's the difficulty like? (Nuclocke/monotype appropriate? Or has the difficulty been enhanced significantly?)

I haven't increased the difficulty a lot, but there are soft level caps to keep the game from getting too easy, and you can keep Exp. Share off in addition if you want a greater challenge. The AI for other trainers is also improved in the version of expansion I'm using, so it's harder than vanilla Emerald but not as hard as most of the hacks that focus on difficulty.

 

[Rizack]

any news about that bad egg?

 

[Guddodoy]

Do you have any documentation regarding the pokemon(s) evolution guide/chart and learnsets. Would really help a lot since I'm trying to play as a real grunt (only using certain types. ie: ground, dark, fire, poison)

 

[tretality]

It's been pretty good so far, but I'd recommend adding back in Pokemon removed from RS. For example, Mawile, which was available in Ruby in Granite Cave, is not in Granite Cave in Emerald. Also, Masquerain lacks Bug stab until level 40+ - may want to revisit Gen 9 learnsets and how they stack up to Gen 8 learnsets in terms of moveset availability.

 

[jicem]

any news about that bad egg?

I haven't gotten around to testing it yet but I will keep a note of it.

Do you have any documentation regarding the pokemon(s) evolution guide/chart and learnsets. Would really help a lot since I'm trying to play as a real grunt (only using certain types. ie: ground, dark, fire, poison)

It uses the Gen 9 evolutions and learnsets, which I haven't modified at all, so if you get info on those, it should be accurate, though certainty let me know if you find something that isn't.

It's been pretty good so far, but I'd recommend adding back in Pokemon removed from RS. For example, Mawile, which was available in Ruby in Granite Cave, is not in Granite Cave in Emerald. Also, Masquerain lacks Bug stab until level 40+ - may want to revisit Gen 9 learnsets and how they stack up to Gen 8 learnsets in terms of moveset availability.

I did try to have Pokémon exclusive to RS in their original locations, but since Mawhile was already in Emerald, I didn't alter his encounters, so he's only on Victory Road. I'll see if I can fix that for Mawhile and other Pokémon that had their encounters changed in a future update. As for the learnsets, I prefer keeping Gen 9 learnsets, but could make some of the post-Gen3 moves available as TMs you can purchase in the department store as a compromise.

 

[pudean94]

I'm really having fun with this rom hack ngl , though as a dex completionist i seem to have encountered a dead end regarding clamperl, documentation does not include gorebyss/huntail, so how am i supposed to obtain those 2 ? Thanks in advance!

 

[jicem]

I'm really having fun with this rom hack ngl , though as a dex completionist i seem to have encountered a dead end regarding clamperl, documentation does not include gorebyss/huntail, so how am i supposed to obtain those 2 ? Thanks in advance!

Gorebyss is in the underwater route 124 and Huntail is in the underwater route 126. I'll add them to the encounter table if they aren't there already.

 

[jicem]

I've updated the wild encounters in the game so some of the rarer Pokémon like Mawhile, Seedot, etc. can be found in more locations based on where they could be found in Ruby/Sapphire. The full list of changes is in the spoiler below:

Spoiler: Encounter Changes

Mawhile added to Granite Cave, Cave of Origin, and Sky Pillar
Lunatone added to Meteor Falls (Land and Water)
Machop added to Route 112 (Land)
Seedot added to Route 114 (Land)
Surskit added to Route 114 (Water)
Surskit added to Route 117 (Water)
Surskit added to Route 120 (Water)

They've also been updated on the Google Sheet, of course.

 

[JustMonikaThings]

Hack seems pretty cool from what I've seen. It's weird how nobody really cares that you're going around as basically an ecoterrorist but it's fair if the hack doesn't end up going into it much.