Crystal hack: Shining Crystal [Complete, increased difficulty, QOL additions, + more]

[Poltergeyst]

Shining Crystal is a Crystal rom hack that adds significant difficulty and many quality-of-life features while remaining largely true to the original game.

Spoiler: Features and changes

All boss teams are updated, often with more challenging pokemon with stronger movesets.

There are modifications to the trainer and wild level curves. These are especially prominent in the postgame.

Opponent status moves no longer have a 25% accuracy debuff.

Many bosses have buffed DVs.

Badge boosts, including attack type and stat boosts, are removed from the game.

More opponent pokemon now hold items.

TMs are reusable.

Certain TMs previously only available in the post-game are now accessible earlier.

There are new TMs added.

HMs are deleteable.

All wild enocunter tables are updated. Trade, gift, and egg pokemon are also changed.

Some pokemon have increased catch rates. This makes them more suitable as early game encounters for nuzlockers.

Fewer pokemon flee and pokemon with roar or whirlwind in their level up learnset have it removed. The roaming legendaries still always flee unless trapped.

Some previously unavailable pokemon are now catcheable. All legendaries including the Kanto birds, mew, and mewtwo are catcheable before the pokemon league.

Some gift and trade pokemon are replaced with new pokemon.

Eggs hatch with fewer steps.

Friendship accrues quicker.

There are changes to the starter options.

Many pokemon have learnset upgrades.

The evolution stones are now purchaseable in certain marts. There are some other changes to mart items.

All marts have rare candies available for 1 pokedollar. This is to eliminate the need for grinding, especially for nuzlockers.

Kurt gives apricorn balls instantly.

Select moves are buffed.

A few pokemon have their base stats buffed. For example - feraligatr, noctowl, and arcanine's special attack and attack stats are reversed compared to the vanilla games. Ie - feraligatr now has 105 special attack and 79 attack.

DVs are no longer associated with gender. Hidden power type is still based on DVs.

The clock change procedure is simplified. From the title screen you press Down + B + Select to reset the clock.

There are a tradeback NPC and move reminder added to the game.

Almost all trainers have buffed AI.

No new pokemon or fakemon are added.

There are no changes to the map.

The physical-special split, abilities, and natures are not in this game.

Spoiler: Screenshots

I've played through this several times and currently have no known bugs. I've enjoyed creating and playing the game, and I hope others will too.

Here is a link to Github with a UPS and IPS patch and documentation of all changes including trainer parties, movesets, encounter tables, and more: https://github.com/ArthropodAssault/Shining-Crystal-Patch

I only play pokemon as hardcore nuzlockes, and much of this game is designed with that in mind. That does not detract from non-nuzlocke play.

Many thanks for the Pret team for their work on the disassembly, which made this possible, and to the Polished Crystal dev team, whose project I used as reference for some of this work.

 

[Poltergeyst]

Exovdo pointed out that the patches weren't working with some vanilla ROM files. This should be fixed now at least for the vanilla crystal ROMs downloadable from Reddit's ROMs megathread. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[FeraligatrMaster]

I've been playing this ROM hack, and I've enjoyed it so far. However, I've noticed something odd. When I fought the rival at the Victory Road, he had a Zubat at level 7, a Gastly at level 3, a Smoochum at level 87, and a Kabutops at level 202. For your information, I picked Totodile as my starter.

Why is Grimer Poison/Dark while Muk is still pure Poison? I'd either give Muk the Dark type, or make Grimer pure Poison again.

Also a few suggestions:
-Make the player able to run and surf faster by holding B
-Make Meowth available in Kanto
-Add wild Machop, Mankey, and Nidoran F to the wild before Whitney

 

[Poltergeyst]

Thanks for reporting the bug. The Victory Road rival issue was a problem with an incorrect trainer type. That has been corrected and the battle should function normally now for all starter choices. I've reverted grimer to pure poison type. I had it and muk as dark/poison earlier, and then decided to change them back but overlooked the grimer edit. There were initially several type changes that I've now reverted back to canon. Thanks for the other suggestions as well. Hope you enjoy the League.

 

[FeraligatrMaster]

Why does Blaine have a Suicune? According to Github, he shouldn't have one, he should have a Gyarados instead. But when I went to fight him, he sent out a Suicune instead.

 

[Poltergeyst]

Thanks for the question. I have updated trainer parties over the the past month. There are only about half a dozen parties affected, but Blaine's party was among them. So the patch you used is slightly different than the current patch & documentation. Apologies for the inconvenience.

 

[Poltergeyst]

There is a glitch where the move relearner menu is displaying the wrong move type (normal, fire, etc) for some moves. The moves are of the correct type and function correctly in battle. I'll post if able to correct this.

 

[AlderMerrick]

So far it's been interesting. How far in is the tradeback character?

 

[Shinyumbreon28]

I downloaded this rom hack yesterday and noticed that all wild encounters are female. Is this something anyone else has noticed?

 

[Poltergeyst]

So far it's been interesting. How far in is the tradeback character?

She's in the Lugia speech house in Ecruteak in the current patch. But in a previous patch she was in Goldenrod in the PP speech house, so she may be there for you. This link (https://github.com/ArthropodAssault/Shining-Crystal-Patch-and-Documentation/commits/main/) will show you the dates of updates to the patch, so you can tell where the tradeback NPC is in your ROM if you know when you downloaded it. New patches can be used with preexisting .sav files, so you can update anytime. If you are logged in to Github you can search the repo. You could search for "tradeback" and it would tell you the map the character is located on. This applies to anything you might be interested in - base stats, move data, egg hatch rates, etc.

Happy gaming!

 

[Poltergeyst]

I downloaded this rom hack yesterday and noticed that all wild encounters are female. Is this something anyone else has noticed?

If so, that is a glitch. I'll check in to it later when I get a chance. It might be helpful for Whitney's miltank :).

Edit: There are both male and female pokemon in the wild, but I think there may be some skewed gender ratios causing the perception that Shiny Umbreon endorsed. I'll check on this further.

 

[Shinyumbreon28]

If so, that is a glitch. I'll check in to it later when I get a chance. It might be helpful for Whitney's miltank :).

Edit: There are both male and female pokemon in the wild, but I think there may be some skewed gender ratios causing the perception that Shiny Umbreon endorsed. I'll check on this further.

nearly all pokemon I've encountered are female with the exception of kadabra who is always male.

Also, my larvitar evolved on lv 18 instead of 30. Aside from a few bugs ive had a lot of fun with the game!

 

[Poltergeyst]

nearly all pokemon I've encountered are female with the exception of kadabra who is always male.

Also, my larvitar evolved on lv 18 instead of 30. Aside from a few bugs ive had a lot of fun with the game!

I had set all wild encounter DVs to perfect, which was skewing gender ratios. The gender-DV association is changed in this game so that high attack DVs do not always yield a male gender. After some consideration, I've returned wild pokemon DVs to random, which has returned wild gender ratios to their normal state.

Dratini and larvitar evolve at level 18 to make them more useable in the midgame.

I'm glad to hear you are enjoying it!

 

[artichurdle]

Thanks for reporting the bug. The Victory Road rival issue was a problem with an incorrect trainer type. That has been corrected and the battle should function normally now for all starter choices. I've reverted grimer to pure poison type. I had it and muk as dark/poison earlier, and then decided to change them back but overlooked the grimer edit. There were initially several type changes that I've now reverted back to canon. Thanks for the other suggestions as well. Hope you enjoy the League.

Bro I totally experienced the same thing. I downloaded the game like maybe about a week ago or so and have been stuck on that recently. I rare candied a snorlax up to 100 to have a chance and it did seem feasible until it brought out a dewgong at level 247 which was fucking impossible to get by. That's what instigated me to look for answers cuz I wondered if that bullshit was on purpose. I'm putting off that part for now cuz I did a lot a prep and grinding to no avail. Anyways it's my first time playing a hacked rom so I was wondering if there's a way to fix that bug while still continuing my current play save or if I have to start over with the new patch? Maybe that's dumb question but I honestly don't know.

 

[Poltergeyst]

Bro I totally experienced the same thing. I downloaded the game like maybe about a week ago or so and have been stuck on that recently. I rare candied a snorlax up to 100 to have a chance and it did seem feasible until it brought out a dewgong at level 247 which was fucking impossible to get by. That's what instigated me to look for answers cuz I wondered if that bullshit was on purpose. I'm putting off that part for now cuz I did a lot a prep and grinding to no avail. Anyways it's my first time playing a hacked rom so I was wondering if there's a way to fix that bug while still continuing my current play save or if I have to start over with the new patch? Maybe that's dumb question but I honestly don't know.

Did you download the patch from the Github (https://github.com/ArthropodAssault/Shining-Crystal-Patch-and-Documentation) rather than visualboyadvance.org? The latter is not maintained by me and may not be updated regularly, although I do appreciate VBA promoting the game. I've asked VBA to post an updated patch just now. If you are using the old visualboyadvance.org patch, you can patch your ROM with the updated Github patch and continue playing with your current .sav file. I played the rival battle in victory road on 8/27/2024 without issue with totodile as my selected starter. If you are using the Github patch, can you verify that the victory road rival battle is the one giving you problems and what starter you chose?

As an aside, I noticed while checking on this question that there is a Youtube page called Pokemon Shining Crystal with some documentation for a ROM hack. That page is not associated with the ROM hack discussed in this thread and the documentation in their Google doc does correspond to this ROM.

Edit: The VBA website's patch is now updated to the most current patch as of 9.16.2024. Thanks to the VBA team.

 

[B4F4]

Currently there's no way to find ekans/arbok in the game, not in the wild, not in headbutt trees, not in either game corner, not in trades and not even in swarms. Also did not receive the egg for togepi.

 

[Poltergeyst]

Currently there's no way to find ekans/arbok in the game, not in the wild, not in headbutt trees, not in either game corner, not in trades and not even in swarms. Also did not receive the egg for togepi.

Thanks for your comment. Making all 251 pokemon catchable for Oak's challenge is not currently a goal for this game.

 

[MaiaOlorin]

Hey @Poltergeyst,

I've been playing your ROM for 40ish hours now, but I can't get to update it with your last update from October 5th, and I can't dl the latest version from GitHub either. Can you help?

 

[Poltergeyst]

If I understand: you're trying to patch your current Shining Crystal ROM with the UPS patch that was pushed on October 5th and you encounter an issue when you do that? What happens when you try to patch it? The patch from that date is patching vanilla crystal (MD5 9f2922b235a5eeb78d65594e82ef5dde, obtained from the ROMS megathread) fine. The patch is downloadable. If you are looking for a patch under my repo pokecrystal3, I don't have a patch up for that currently. That's just a project I've been playing around with for myself. I am hoping to continue making some changes including adding some additional pokemon like gliscor and mammoswine to complete some evolutionary lines. I may post a patch for it at a later date.