Pokémon Red/Blue Transfer Farming

This is a guide for how to quickly use arbitrary code execution (also known as ACE) to produce boxes full of Pokémon to transfer via Pokémon Bank. One major use for this is to transfer many dittos, as Pokémon Bank transfers from generation 1 always have at least three perfect IVs, and so by transferring large quantities we can quickly obtain 4 IV dittos, and 5 IV dittos with reasonable frequency. Unfortunately a 6 IV ditto will still take 32768 transfers on average, so while this is a reasonable method for obtaining one it will take a while.

While this setup will allow you to obtain Mews, Pokémon Bank has additional checks for Mew transfers, which this setup does not help with. Refer to my other writeup for transferring Mew. This method will likely include a mix of familiar and unfamiliar glitches for many of you, but none of it should be difficult to execute if you follow the directions carefully.

This video follows along with this setup. If any of the steps are unclear, you can check the video to see what I do. You should also be sure you are playing on the English VC release of Red/Blue (not Yellow). You might try it with other language versions but it is likely that this setup will not work.

Quick Links

Starting the Game

Before starting, clear your existing save file with Up+B+Select at the title screen. This is probably only necessary if your existing save was corrupted, but you'll be overwriting the save anyway so there's not much harm.

When you start this game, pick any name for yourself and give your rival a two letter name (AA works nicely). Your chosen trainer name will show up as the OT for the transfers, so pick accordingly!

Pallet Town

Before you leave your room, get the potion out of the PC. Then trigger Oak's cutscene and pick Bulbasaur. You can give Bulbasaur a nickname if you'd like, a one character nickname will be the fastest. When you fight Charmander, keep using tackle and use the potion if you drop to 4 HP or below.

Route One

As you walk up and down route one to retrieve Oak's parcel, do not fight any encounters. Simply run from any encounters you get at this time.

Viridian Forest

While walking through the forest, you can avoid most encounters by following the path shown in this image. Pick up the antidote that's along the way. If you do get an encounter, just run from it. Once you get to the trainer with the level 9 weedle at the end of the forest, pick up the hidden potion that's in front of him and fight. Growl the weedle once and then tackle until it's dead, and use the potion if you're at risk of dying.

After defeating the weedle, you should reach level 7 and learn leech seed. Now comes the first glitch setup. You want to set up the following things:

To set this up, kill one wild encounter. Swap growl to slot 3 and tackle to slot 2 (use select to change the order of your moves), then growl and tackle metapods and/or kakunas until you have the appropriate amount of PP.

Pewter City

Before actually executing the glitch, we'll get some items for later. Go to the Pewter mart and buy a Pokéball, a Potion if you no longer have one, a Burn Heal, and an Escape Rope. At this point your inventory should look like this.

  1. Antidote x1
  2. Potion x1
  3. Pokéball x1
  4. Burn Heal x1
  5. Escape Rope x1

Brock Through Walls

Here comes the first real glitch! Open your start menu and move your cursor to save. Then walk toward route 3, staying a tile away from the Youngster that would take you to Brock's gym. He should talk to you on this tile. When he says "Follow me!", press B and then start (X is bound to start on the virtual console versions). If you did it right, your start menu should pop up before he takes you to the gym. You won't be able to move the menu cursor, but because you already put it over save, you can save the game. Save the game, then reset (you can hold A+B+Start+Select to do a 'soft reset').

Now walk to the right to this tile to load route 3, then up to the top and back left until you're directly to the right of the youngster. Open your Pokémon menu (to show your party), then close it again and talk to the youngster from the right. If you did it right, you'll be able to walk through walls. Walk to Saffron Pokémon Center avoiding any out of bounds areas that crash the game. Hold B during this walk to avoid the start menu repeatedly popping up. You can see the path I take starting from 13:40 in the video. If you do crash the game, don't worry! You saved just a moment ago so you can just reload that save and try again. If you find that after talking to the youngster you cannot move, check that your PP is set up properly and also make sure that you opened the party menu before talking to him.

Saffron City

Once you're safely inside Saffron Center, heal your party. This will set your teleport location to Saffron, which we'll be using a couple times throughout the rest of this guide. Afterwards, walk out the left guardhouse toward Celadon City. The guard will let you right past.

Once in Celadon, get the Coin Case from the man at the top left of the hotel. Then get enough coins from the game corner to buy an Abra. If you're on Blue version, you'll only need 120 coins and you can pick up 100 coins here and 20 coins from this NPC. If you're on Red version, you'll need 180 coins total. You'll be able to find the rest that you need lying around.

Now that you have 120 or 180 coins, go to the prize counter next door and buy an Abra. Then walk outside and use the Abra to teleport back to Saffron City. Once back, deposit Bulbasaur in the PC.

Missingno

The next step is to get 255 of an item. In our case, we'll be getting 255 escape ropes by encountering two Missingnos. You are probably familiar with encounter Missingno on Cinnabar coast, but that method is very long, so we'll use a much quicker setup. First, swap escape ropes into slot 6 in your inventory. Then, go south from Saffron City and set up a trainer fly on the first trainer. If you are unfamiliar with trainer flies, you set it up by walking onto the linked square from the right and holding start as you do so. If you do it properly, your menu will pop up with the trainer on screen, and you can then use Abra to teleport away back to Saffron City.

Once you've set up the trainer fly, walk to the fighting dojo and walk in front of the first trainer, leaving a gap. This trainer has a Machop with an appropriate special value to give us a Missingno. Once you've lost to the trainer, open your start menu and close it again, then walk out Saffron City toward the south. Your menu should pop up along the way and when you close it, Missingno will appear. Run away from Missingno and you should have 129 escape ropes.

Then open your menu and toss two of these escape ropes, so you are down to 127. Set up another trainer fly and follow the same procedure to get a second Missingno encounter. Once you've run away from that, you'll have 255 escape ropes. Now you are ready for:

Shopping!

Before we actually go shopping, swap the Escape Ropes up to item slot 3. Your inventory should look like this:

  1. Antidote x1
  2. Potion x1
  3. Escape Rope x255
  4. Burn Heal x1
  5. Coin Case
  6. Pokéball x1

Walk to the Celadon Department Store. Start with the right cashier on the second floor, and sell the first item slot 3 times. You'll notice that the escape rope stack gets duplicated each time, and on the third time you'll sell 255 for a lot of money, which will allow us to buy everything we need. Then buy the following items (one of each):

Take the elevator back to the first floor, exit, and teleport back to Saffron. At this point, your inventory should look like this:

  1. Escape Rope x255
  2. Escape Rope x255
  3. Escape Rope x255
  4. TM02 x1
  5. Great Ball x1
  6. Super Potion x1
  7. Awakening x1
  8. Fire Stone x1
  9. Lemonade x1
  10. HP Up x1
  11. Carbos x1
  12. X Special x1

Item Underflow

Here comes the next glitch. Now is a great time to save in case you get one of the next steps a little bit wrong.

If you did these steps correctly, the top item slot will be Escape Rope x0 and you'll be able to scroll down past your normal inventory size. This is called Item Underflow. Once you've verified that you've gotten underflow, it is reasonable to save the game.

Set your item quantities to zero

We've got 1 of each item right now, but we will want a lot more than that. In these games, an item quantity of 0 functions much like you'd expect a quantity of 256 to work, so by setting quantities to zero, we'll have essentially unlimited access to those items. We could use Missingno encounters to get enough of each item, but this method should be faster and easier once you get used to it.

To do this, walk to this column of tiles. The exact column doesn't matter, but you want to be unrestricted vertically. Do the following steps for each item that you have 1 of in your inventory.

When you do this, each item should become a stack of 0 instead of 1. Once you're done, go ahead and teleport and head back to Saffron Center.

Set up your bag

You're now ready to set up the bag. For this step swap the items into the correct order and toss to get the right quantities. Remember that you can use the down button for tossing large quantities. Here is what you want the first part of your bag to look like:

  1. Great Ball x0
  2. HP Up x211 (toss 45)
  3. Escape Rope x8 (toss 248)
  4. Carbos x(desired species)
  5. X Special x20 (toss 236)
  6. Awakening x(desired level)
  7. Super Potion x175 (toss 81)
  8. TM02 x72 (toss 184)
  9. Lemonade x0
  10. Fire Stone x211 (toss 45)

For the desired species, check The Big Hex List. For Ditto, you'll want 76, meaning that you toss 180 Carbos. For the desired level, I typically just use 100 (tossing 156), but if you want a particular nature you can use the experience formulas and try to find a level that gives you the desired nature based on this conversion chart. Levels over 100 are accepted by Pokémon Bank and get set to 100 upon transfer, but the experience as it is in the generation 1 game is what determines the nature.

Acquire the Pokémon!

The Fire Stone x211 stack is the entrypoint into the code that you've set up. To acquire them, swap the Fire Stone x211 into what we call the 'Text Pointer' slot of your item underflow. To locate this slot in Saffron Center, scroll down until you find a slot that is Coin x85. There will be one "click item" along the way. When you encounter that item, your cursor will stop moving and you'll need to press B once for each of the times you scroll with it on screen, a total of 4 times each time you pass by it. Go somewhat slowly here, since if you accidentally close the menu you'll have to scroll past the click item again to start the swap again.

Once Fire Stone x211 is where the Coin x85 used to be, talk to Nurse Joy. You'll get the Pokémon of your dreams!. You can keep talking to her until your box is full, then save and transfer that box to Pokémon Bank. If you decide you want to leave the Pokécenter at some point, it is highly recommended that you swap the Fire Stones back into your main inventory, as map changes will overwrite the text pointer and you'll have to set it up again.

Changelog

28 May 2018 - Updated pokeworld links to new site 16 Nov 2017 - Initially Posted