I am attempting to complete an entire shiny living dex in Generation III of the Pokémon series. For those who don't know, a living dex is a type of fan made challenge in the Pokémon series where the goal is to have one of every single Pokémon and all of its evolution stages in your PC. There are lots of different types of challenges like this, such as a living form dex, a final form dex, and then shiny variants of all of the preceeding. It is kind of the true embodiment of the series: Gotta Catch 'em All!
On top of that, you can make this challenge even more challenging, and do a Professor Oak Challenge! A Professor Oak Challenge is another type of fan made challenge where you must catch and evolve every Pokémon to the highest evolution possible before every single gym battle and the Elite Four.This challenge by itself can be very grueling, especially in the early routes of each game, as getting enough experience points to level up Pidgey to Pidgeot is a brutally tedious task when all you can knockout are Caterpie. BUT, then you add on the fact that you have to raise two Pidgey to level 18 only knocking out Caterpie, and you can see how this challenge gets exponetially longer and more tedious.
Soooooooo, to that point... I have decided to try and siphon off a lot of the tedium of this challenge. I started doing a Living Dex Professor Oak Challenge on my hard copy of Pokémon Leafgreen, and I am still hacking away at it, but I've put over 30 hours into that save and haven't even beat Misty yet. It takes FOREVER. Imagine doing that with shiny Pokémon! It would be impossible. I won't even say nearly impossible. I believe it would be physically impossible to complete this challenge in a human lifetime, unless MAYBE all you did literally 24/7 was play Pokémon. Which, just so happens to be the perfect segue into what I am doing now.
There is an incredible piece of software called PokéBot Gen 3 by a person named 40Cakes. This piece of software is essentially a Python script that automates away the tedium of various aspects of the Pokémon franchise, especially the older games. Gamefreak has made it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to shiny hunt, breed for competitive IVs, EV train, etc. in the more recent games. But I grew up on the OLD games, dammit! I wanna see a beautiful collection of every possible shiny Pokémon in a nicely orgainzed system in my literally, physically copy of Pokémon Emerald. And I don't want to cheat. I know some people will consider this cheating, and that is okay. We can agree to disagree. For me, the fact that this program is not changing any of the data in the game or generated by the game, and is instead literally just pressing the digital "buttons" the way that a human would on a physical console, makes it legit enough for me.
Now, that being said, I am doing one more thing that I imagine many people will also consider cheating, and again, totally fair, but this is my challenge, so I can do whatever I want. I have the emulator that this program is playing the games through speed up. I know, I know, the games can't be sped up on real hardware, so this isn't legit, blah blah blah. Listen, dood. I have been running this thing 24/7 for like, 2 months now, with both Ruby and Emerald at the same time, and I STILL haven't even caught all the Pokémon necessary to beat the second gym in either game. It is actually bananas how long this is going to take. Even sped up as much as my computer can handle, it is still going to take likely more than a year for this project to be completed.
SO, in conclusion, that is a baseline explaination of what my goals are. Those are the caveats you will have to accept, or not. With that out of the way, it is time to get started!