Why Video Game Luck Isn't Real (And How to Take Advantage of That!) | Tech Rules
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- čas přidán 15. 06. 2024
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Be sure to check out tasvideos.org/ if you want to learn more about tool assisted speedruns!
If you're interesting in getting further in depth about the games featured in this video, a great place to start would be their respective pages at speedrun.com. Speedrun communities are typically very knowledgeable and would likely be more than happy to answer questions you may have!
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Hey everyone! This video's going to be a little more laid back and simplistic than the rest of my videos. If you already have a solid understanding of how RNG works, there may not be much for you to take from this video. Additionally, I'm yet again restricted to my makeshift recording booth due to a certain current event that CZcams, for some reason, doesn't want me to talk about. For that reason, you'll have to overlook the audio oddities. Despite all that, I hope you'll find the video entertaining and worth the watch!
Also, show of hands...who would be interested in a stream sometime where I use RNG manipulation to catch some shiny Pokemon? 👀
reee ng
RNGeezus is my nemesis
Me also finally! Your one of my favorite game channels and I was like
*please don’t tell me hi quit CZcams*
Chase Ridgell Same
Hold up this was commented before this video was released... You planned this didn't you?
I might be if you include some f a c t s.
this is basically like when someone asks you to "say something random" and you look around the room for something to say.
I don't know about others, but I have a few things that my mind defaults to when it tries to think of something "completely random." Usually some oddly specific food item or old tv show or something.
@@AwfullyFawfully "potato"
Red bean to glee of the who where the what when the bean hits the ground floor to the elevator to the rye to dye of your print to hint to dent to rent to hell to fret
@@want-diversecontent3887 I have a great idea to me and I will send the money to get it done before I leave for the day and time I will be home eating and I will send you a picture of my first time 😊😀😊😉😉😉😊😀😉😁 they'd be a mod and a half to get the bedhead of a prank call it a little brother is in the game and the first one is cool with the definition on my way home eating and sleeping 😴😴😴
IanIsNotCool
Nope, not predictive.
Actual random words coming from my head is that that the guy is in a bad way to do this is the same amount that he is meant to be a part time and I don’t think I can do that that he is meant to be a part that I wanna is the day you get a chance and you have a lot to say to him that you can have not been able and you have a lot to say to him because I know that that you are always going through it but you gotta I wanna is the time I get home and then you have a lot of fun with him I think I can have it for all the day.
So the quote "I'm a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more luck I have." was just a foreshadowing to the gaming community?
Артем Багдасарян cough cough random crits
*nods in speedrunners*
*smiles sadly in Fire Emblem players*
Grind
Deep
Pokemon RNG on the DS is based on a combination of your trainer and secret ID. Both of these are generated at the start of the game based on the DS internal clock. You can then abuse this by changing the DS date and time to get a really specific trainer and secret ID which combined with a Pokemon with the ability cute charm drastically increases the odds of finding shiny Pokemon.
Actually, that's only for Gen IV. In Gen V, they add another factor, which is imo a pretty clever one: the MAC address of your DS's wireless card. This is a great way to ensure that everyone has different RNG, because, by networking regulations, all MAC addresses have to be unique and hardcoded. This is significant enough that every Pokemon Gen V speedrunner has to use a slightly different route.
@@snbeast9545 Well yeah I meant that was for DPP. In Black and White I do think you can manipulate RNG with stuff like the hidden grottos, but I never really got into it.
isn't there another one that randomises by frames for battle rng which may as well be luck unless you have save states. So beating things like battle factory is 75% luck.
Just dont dont use this for encounters with a partner trainer. You have a high chance of losing a Shiny due to the game not being able to process the data for both of the Shiny sprites
@@averytubestudios That wouldn't matter much anyway, because the shiny odds increase so drastically that you wouldn't have much trouble finding another of each.
Who is this TAS and why is he so much better at speedrunning than everyone else?
A filthy cheater, i think. none of his runs are even valid, except to his fans.
😂😂😂
8/8 bait.
While we were out partying, they studied the blade.
TAS stands for:
The Almighty Speedrunner, so he s p e e d.
When I was a kid, we used to go to a gas station nearby our school and play the poker machine.
If you pulled the plug it would always give the same cards initially. We slow slowly learned all the paths. We could have emptied it each time but that would have quickly been noticed.
The bug remained unfixed for almost a year so everytime I saw one of those machines I'd cash in :)
Viking Teddy delightfully devilish.
My Cousins taught me that, we both used to go to the same shop at certain Hour because he said that Apparently the Machine had an Internal clock that would Basically let You win the highest prize once.
Me didn't do that every single day tho.
We found a big at a ride in Chuck E Cheese. You could reach under and grab the tokens... Worked great while they had the machine to get a lot of free plays at their TMNT game!
We could make a film out of your experience. I'm picturing a group of primary school kids roaming petrol stations. They would be under the guidance of an assistant teacher. Someone call Kevin Spacey to be casted with the boys!
@@GrausamerKerberos holy hell, get on the couch with him yourself.
Man, your youtube history is bizarre. You started out of nowhere with a 3DS hacking video. And now 8 videos later, you already have almost 200k subs and is already receiving sponsors. Youre blessed my man
Yeah his 3ds video got recommended to me and well, you'd have to be blind to not see the potential this channel has after releasing such a good first video.
Henrik Lbn thats true. I started following it back them. But what amazes me is that, there are thousands of new channels with huge potential being created every week, and youtube just decided like: “Let’s give THIS guy a chance.
its called real life rng manipulation.
Maarten HAHAH
Real life RNG manipulation... Holy shit, quick guys, write down the release date of his video, the title AND recreate the thumbail. Next year we release it at the exact same moment and we make it big! Let's go!
Soooo, me as a kid repeatedly pressing A when throwing a pokeball was my first attempt to manipulate rng
KID HACKER
Don't hack all the kids, though.
For some reason my method was to squint my eyes really hard and tilt the DS back and forth. Idk why I did that.
Hax
@@ezshroom lmao
(stonks face). hac
One of the earliest things I learned as a programmer is that computers require VERY specific instructions for everything they do. This means that you need to tell it how to pull a random number which means it by definition cannot be random. You can get close via using very specific time stamps or using weather patterns but it’s never entirely unpredictable, never truly random.
Clearly just hook it up to AlphaPhoenix's muon-powered, universe-bifurcating, random number machine. /lh
I remember manipulating rng in final fantasy 12, it was so easy there was no reason not to, you just punched yourself till you were at the point you wanted in the rng seed, then you could get anything you wanted from the chests with 'random' loot.
Excuse me? I have never heard of that.
And this is someone who has put 600+ hours into it. Im going to look into that
There was also a method involving reks iirc though it’s been a while.
@@zadan7659 yeah i only heard of it years after the release when i went to replay it, and watched a vid on youtube
lol
I know nothing about final fantasy but the image of some guy just repeatedly hitting themself in the face and then opening a chest full of gold is just too good.
well i guess RNGesus is a false deity now
nah he exists he is just the computers tools bringing you fortune or adversary, if i had savestates in life: luck wouldn't exist anywhere,
depends, if it's online-only and hosted on some server that actually has dedicated hardware RNG, he could be real.
for instance: raspberry pis have a true random number generator, and i've used it a LOT
not saying it's used at all in most games, or at all in games, but you could
these days most devs actually want SOME predictabilty, for pity timers and MTX and the such.
@@dutchdykefinger you could only get true random generation by listening to quantum events, even atmospheric presure changes are still pseudo random, just totally impossible to predict but still not true random
kinda like Jesus
Quantam computers would like to know your location
"I don't know anyone who can play a game frame perfectly"
*laughs in Stryder7x*
Eventually he'll perform 4853 frzme-perfect inputs to speedrun waking up from his coma. Hopefully he'll show Yrimir how to do it, too.
im 99% sure he TASes that
@Kyaru Momochi im a nerd connoisseur
@@jacobsmash1 He does TAS a lot of examples you see, but there are times where he can input things frame perfectly, such as that swing thing he does when exiting rooms, or, in the case of that one video where he and his friend take the camera out of bounds, manage to do the Blue House Skip without even looking. But that's more of muscle memory.
@@goldenpig6453 And that will, in turn, crash Paper Mario.
Every looter rpg: "Wow who knows what you may find, maybe something rare and powerful, with random stats and drops you never know what you'll get"
Also every looter rpg: "btw there's extremely rare legendary items that have fixed stats that are better than every random item in the game and we're going to leave it right here on this specific boss, rendering the rest of the game pointless"
Lmao poe if oppsite of that all all except for 1 legendary in poe will be outclass bu craftable items
Bl2 without the fixed stats
You just cant make it right with players today xD BL3 had to rework the loot system because people WANTED to farm bosses
To add on to what was said about Fire Emblem: in the case of the fourth game in the series, Genealogy of the Holy War, if you were to start a new game and follow the same exact steps as someone else from the beginning of the game, you would always have the same outcome as that person (there's a good explanation of it in Chaz Aria's castle guide video for FE4 at 5:20 - czcams.com/video/xLBRhinQX6E/video.html ). So no matter what you do, the game is fixed to certain outcomes based on prior actions.
You could think of it like a branching timeline, in a way. It always starts the same, but different decisions split the timeline.
Oh shit that's actually kinda helpful.
That's why you gotta keep sending Arden to the arena to get his ass kicked to burn RNs till you get that crit you needed
To also add to the Fire Emblem point
there's no 'auto-saves' or 'checkpoints' in FE-GBA or almost any FE to abuse the RN system.
there's one save per chapter. you can suspend the game, but of course that's not the same as saving. you can't reload a suspend.
there's no possible way to manipulate the RN(or rather, know what RN you're even on) without abusing save-states, which aren't a thing on actual hardware. 'cursor-dancing' is thus only a thing capable of abuse on emulators. you can still do it on actual hardware, but it's basically just rolling a dice again without knowing what the roll was in the first place.
@@MegamanStarforce2010 Sorry that's not true. Loading a suspend in GBA-FE does not change the RNG. So what you can do is cursor dance to determine, which of the next random numbers are above 50 and which are below 50 and then reload the suspend. Since cursor dancing isn't an action that is saved by the game, the RNG-string remains unchained and you can leverage the gained knowledge to effectively double growth rates and your chances for favourable events to occur. Further like in Fe4 the RNG-string starts at the same point every playthrough. So in a speedrun you will get the same RNG everytime, if you do everything the same again (including cursor movement of course).
Fun Fact: On an emulator like Visual Boy Advance you can go even further to manipulate the RNG by writing in the game's RAM itself. So you can set it to 0 to get perfect level ups and crits all the time or to a high number to dodge.
@@Hamstermanscher Because of the way the game auto-saves, this is impossible to abuse on a physical console without meticulous planning and perfect execution over a long period of time.
The example of Maniac Mansion also works in the original Link's Awakening for GB/C.
The path through the Wind Fish's Egg is randomized every time, and can only be known if you complete the trading sequence, giving you the ability to read a book in the library that tells you the correct path
However, if you never check that book, the path through the Egg is known (and quite easy)
Really? I wish I knew that a few years ago
11:15 Gen 1 DOES have shinies, as long as the pokemon has high enough ivs. Basically, only the legendaries can be shiny but if you catch a pokemon with the correct ivs, it will be shiny when you trade it to gen two.
You're kinda right except in Gen 1 and 2 they were called DVs. The specific DVs you need are a 10 in special, speed and defense and a 2, 3, 6, 7, 10 11, 14 or 15 in attack. This is why breeding a shiny Pokemon makes it way more likely to produce shiny offspring, because DVs are passed down from the parents
True. I didn't find it worth mentioning because, as far as I can tell, it's impossible to get the correct IVs from a normal wild Pokemon encounter, and as far as I know there aren't any known manipulations to get the correct IVs from one of the special conditions. In the end, I couldn't really find a relevant place for it in the video.
Yep. Only certain encounter types in gen 1 will be able to generate the correct DV spreads-- normal grass/cave/surf encounters are not among them.
@@TechRules if you trade the shiny gyrados from gen 2 and mimic a ditto's transform the wild DVs get overwritten with shiny ones
There are gen 1 glitches that use Mimic, Transform, and other such badly-coded moves to make a Pokemon in gen 2 shiny, but that's what they are-- glitches. Not exploiting RNG manipulation.
"how to take advantage of that"
Oldschool RuneScape players: I'm listening
Waiting for woox.
My first thought as well...
Guilty as charged
I believe in the heart of the cards and everything goes my way.
Even as a child i always cringed at that xD
And by "the heart of the cards" I mean I just forced myself a good seed
Dude you just killed me with this joke😂😂😂
Fun fact, that "heart of the cards" bullshit is actually Yami using the millenium's puzzle ability called "Destiny draw", wich lets him draw any card he wants, basically cheating.
@@johanhernandez4870 It's not technically cheating at first, as he doesn't even realize he's doing it (hence him calling it the heart of the cards) but once he's doing it on purpose then yeah, it's like he's exploiting a glitch in the game.
Its so cool to hear how the GBA Fire Emblem RNG works, I remember reloading levels to prevent my characters from dying and being confused at to why everything seemed to happen the exact same if I moved my characters and the arrows the exact same way.
Heroes seem to work like that as well - since Tactic Drills exists
that confused me to no end back then. i remember playing sacred stones and wanting to save someone that got killed by a 10% chance hit. Imagine the shock when after 2 hours of resets that bastard still hit every single 10% xD
Doom's RNG is actually based on your inputs, so if you can replicate your inputs to an exact T, you'll have the same RNG every time. This makes it so that demos would work properly.
That moment when you realise that even something as simple as saving an RNG seed would have made the files a lot bigger for the time if you had a lot of them.
i thougth it´s based on what frame-from-boot you start the game sets the rng
Actually Doom's "RNG" is based on a table of 255 hardcoded values starting at 0, and everytime a line of code asks for a random number (for the screen melting effect, damage dealt by you/towards you, and lots of other stuff), the function gives you the current value and than moves to the next position, and if it reaches the end it loops back to the starting value of 0. Decino has a video on his channel explaining how it all works.
The King's Bounty digging on the starting tile is amazing for a TAS, but take a moment to consider someone actually playing the game only to find out it was on the very first tile, that person would not be a happy camper.
The question is, why the hell would they make it even possible
An oversight or lack of programming experience maybe? That issue would have been easily solved by a simple check that would reroll RNG in case it landed in tiles too close to the beginning. The reroll would put it on the exact same other place anyway, but at least it wouldn't be right there on the starting tile, lol.
@@AndresLionheart that would be an EPIC end to the game. I would never forget that ever.
@@Benkenobi8118 -- You sent me on a multi-month quest through countless mortal perils and hordes of evil monsters to retrieve your missing relic from the clutches of evil, but the whole time it was in a bush next to the castle where the young prince dropped it one morning?!?! That's it, I'm defecting.
@@TlalocTemporal not to mention your only rewards are a farm, a medal and a high score xD Fck that kingdom
I managed to break apart the randomness of card drops in Kingdom Heart Re:Chain of Memories. Whenever the game boots or is soft reset, the game resets to a blank seed and then sets the seed once you load the file. The seed is based on what cards you have in your equipped deck so if you have the exact same deck equipped every time you load, its the same seed. From there it appears to act like Fire Emblem is explained in the video where every action that is "random" calls a number and then pushes the number forward. Whenever you attack or dodge roll, the game calls the number to ask for a random voice clip. Among other things, jumping makes no grunt so it doesn't push it forward and breaking objects push the number really far ahead likely because it has to call for the direction, speed and bounce height of every HP recovery orb it drops. With this, you can effectively use rolls and breaking objects to reroll what cards you get from chests, objects and shops and use save points with soft reset to get duplicates of anything you can find the right combination for. Enemies however mess with the rng a lot so this can only be easily done either in rooms with no enemies or rooms with sleeping enemies.
Very interesting. That's cool how you managed to figure that out on your own.
This was likely done to save space. The GBA had to cram a lot of space in a small amount of memory. Using a list like this uses such little memory and data space that it can maintain a high level of gameplay while still maintaining the element of luck.
There are plenty of ways that old games could have had something closer to true randomness.
One way would be for an NES game to have an antenna (just a wire, no tuner needed) and amplifier in the cartridge. The output from the amplifier would be fed into the console through one of the expansion pins. That could then be used to seed the PRNG. Since the untuned signal would just be noise, it would be basically random.
More tricks could be added.
You could also build a circuit to get the noise from the console's power supply, the voltage of a possible save battery, etc.
@@duuqnd All of those work. One of the simplest hardware RNG circuits is just gathering the thermal noise from a resistor.
Nothing so difficult needed, really. Just measure how long between button presses, or how long it's held down for. A little bit of entropy every user input, as no user can time their key-actions to the milisecond.
@@vylbird8014 Depends on the console. On a super simple 8-bit system like a 2600 or NES continuously measuring time between button presses in the background would be stealing valuable cpu cycles. Better off with a super simple, but non secure, PRNG in such a case. That way you only use cycles when you actually need the number.
@@vylbird8014 That's manipulatable; TAS runs can time inputs down to the frame.
"The battery also stores your save data."
I learned this terrible truth as a kid when my battery for crystal version died and I couldn't save anymore
A friend I had in elementary school has the same problem but with a copy of Pokemon yellow but I'm sure yellow doesn't have a need for an internal battery
@@vivimannequin The battery for GSC games runs out before RBY, which may have led to this misconception. Yellow does indeed have a save battery.
@@Skasaha_ why though?
Vivi mannequin Probably because GSC has color, and RBY doesn’t. Game Boy Color games, relatively speaking, take far more power than Game Boy games because the Game Boy has only four “colors,” or rather, shades of grey, to work with. Conversely, the Game Boy Color not only has to worry about shades but also hues, of which there are many. That, and GSC is more complex in terms of mechanics and sheer amount of data that must be saved, especially taking the clock into account.
No, it's purely because GSC's batteries have to feed both the SRAM and an RTC, while RBY only use SRAM.
4:39 “That’s a lot of G’s”
Me: Geez.
Bro, as a Fire Emblem fan and actual hacker, seeing Lyn on the thumbnail is really exciting, as I know that the Fire Emblem RNG has seen many different iterations. I personally prefer single roll RNG, which was used from FE1-FE5, all of which released in Japan only. Although, FE15 (Echoes) used it too.
All I’m hearing is that you like seeing 80% chance hits miss
@@hiraeth437 Eh, it's possible, and I know to accept them.
Also, Hiraeth is the name of my hack, so this is really wild.
I got excited at seeing the tumbnail too! GBA FE RNG is wild af. You can literally make any move hit by spinning your units in circles. I never bother with spinning though, I use RNG manips to get the same perfect level-ups every time in FE8 in skirmishes/tower of Valni.
Only a 1% crit chance. What could possibly go wrong.
I had a lot of great memories of playing through Fire Emblem 8 on GBA, and using that pathing RNG manipulation to get specific floor layouts in the Tower of Valmi. It was wild to me as a young game player that I could actually have any deliberate impact at all on something I wasn't ever supposed to be able to touch.
Ah, GBA Fire Emblem. Your RNG might be exploitable, but I love you all the more for that.
RNG abused me when I was trying to catch an Azelf in Platinum with a Quick Ball. Easily over 100 encounters later, along with FIVE triple shakes, I caught it.
Then I caught both Dialga and Palkia within less than a minute of each other because of course I did.
i've been feeling the same with azelf in pokemon go this month >:(
So you’re saying the Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon’s RNG manipulation is *iconic*??
Hehe
Punny
I don't get it
it is an icon.
@@iamnotinvolved1309 Watch the video, then.
Me: Abusing RNG algorithm? I want to experience the game in both good and bad ways!
Also me: Save scumming through literally every games.
mood.
Haha I always say that when I start a new fire emblem run but as soon as somebody dies...
@@kingofthejungle5338 Thank god Three Houses has Divine Pulses. lol
Literally me injecting event wonder card pokémon in the save via pkhex, because I want to enjoy game in its totality but the official event isn't more available
comet sighted
lose 1 stability
There'll always be a special place in my heart for homemade Windows Form apps released with the default icon.
*Windows Form
5:19 "I don't know too many people who can play through a game frame-perfectly"
Kosmic: Hold my beer
Shoutout to Simpleflips
Did he play through a game frame perfectly? If he did please send me the video! I would love to watch that speedrun!
@@jet100a Mario Bros is a great example of a near frame-perfect played game just because if you'll lose just one half of second and you can start over. Watch some explanations, there are a bunch of videos.
So there’s this man called Mangs I would like you to meet.
Is he as much as an bald egghead and lucky as Northonlion?
Luck is the best stat isn't it
does he fucking suck at fire emblem?
N E V E R P U N I S H E D
@@inari3217 He memes too hard and doesn't always pay attention. He's superhuman ability to abuse the seed saves him a lot.
So yea, he's a dumb egg, but we don't go there for perfect gameplay. We go so that we can watch him crit himself with the devil axe.
Don't remind me about the battery in Gold and Silver. At this point, that battery has basically gone dead in most cartridges (or at least it has in both of mine) so all save data is gone. 100s of hours gone...
The other week my pokemon sapphire battery ran dry. :(
One of many reasons why emulation is superior.
@@stormbornapostle5188 itll never be the same.
Is that Lyn in the thumbnail?
The thumbnail piqued my curiosity, stayed for the vid.
Also, I still don’t get how damage calculation works in Yggdra Union.
Pokémon Emerald’s RNG is really weird compared to every other game in the series. The RNG always starts at the exact same place every time you boot up the game. This makes soft resetting for a Shiny in Emerald pretty much impossible unless you happen to have a Shiny Frame within that window.
Back in the day (2017-mid 2018), I used to play Pokemon competitively, and one day I got bored and decided to learn RNG Manipulation. Did some research, say how difficult it really was, and decided that Black and White was the easiest to do since RNG was dependent on the second the game started, compared other games which were based on the frame. I got a few really good pokemon, but this was at the time I started falling out of Pokemon, so I didn't get to do any of the real crazy stuff. Still, really cool video man, great work!
Mathtron 5000 do you think there are ways go to get moves to always hit with certain frame rules in any of the pokemon games
This video: *exists*
Dream: Write that down!
This is a good video. I was only let-down a little that you didn't explain clearly what entropy is, how it's collected, and mentioned that outside the confines of games we can collect enough very real, random entropy to create effectively truly random numbers. Phones will, for example, use the input from the accelerometer (amongst other data) to gather entropy when a random number is required. The microscopically small motions of the user's hand, shaking of the floor from the water pipes in their house, air currents, etc. are truly random environmental effects that can be gathered.
I know you brushed-up against the concept, but it would have been nice to see it more explicit that, in practical usage, programmers use a library for whatever language they're writing in, that will pull a number from the operating system's number generation, which will use every input it can conceivably find to hand a random number back to the program. I can see how in this video, people unfamiliar with this topic might become worried that all computer programs are susceptible to this kind of manipulation.
Edit: I'd also just like to add, the only reason I say so much in this critique is because I _really_ like your videos. They come so rarely, but they've been consistently informative.
Math, physics, and extreme computing future predicting would like to know your location.
ok boomer
"In computing, a hardware random number generator (HRNG) or true random number generator (TRNG) is a device that generates random numbers from a physical process, rather than by means of an algorithm. Such devices are often based on microscopic phenomena that generate low-level, statistically random "noise" signals, such as thermal noise, the photoelectric effect, involving a beam splitter, and other quantum phenomena. These stochastic processes are, in theory, completely unpredictable, and the theory's assertions of unpredictability are subject to experimental test. This is in contrast to the paradigm of pseudo-random number generation commonly implemented in computer programs."
i use the HWRNG on my raspberry pis all the time, saves you feeding a lot of bollocks data with shit entropy for say encryption
well, environmental effects like that are unpredictable (for us), but still not truly random. If you want true randomness you have to delve into quantum physics.
He can write short stories but can't Google entropy. One of the universes favourite words.
Finally a new upload! You’re killing it dude! Keep on creating! The waiting is worth it!
Zoomzike's "identifying Luck" series wants to know your location
Haha
Oof im waiting for him to do mario party 4
Eli Skaggs
4 hours long
@@YourAverageSpelunker
I actually streamed that a long time ago and rage quit. I bought 4 stars, my opponent bought 2 and got TWO stars for free from hidden blocks. Yea, you can guess who won that shit. . . never playing with that on ever again.
Battle for Wesnoth: oh, I have 5% to save one of my elite units? Well then, I am ready for about 20 save reloads.
I was looking for comments about XCOM, but when I read this I remembered how much more frustrating Battle for Wesnoths RNG felt... ow
Hey bro, just wanted to say that I've been watching your videos since you first uploaded, and the quality of these videos never ceases to impress me. Keep it up :)
Golden Sun (and Golden Sun: The Lost Age) is one of the games that use player input (even more selectively, player actions) as a source for the randomness in an easy-to-break way. You can guarantee basically any rare drop from the first encounter after a soft reset by just choosing correct actions in the battle. That includes some of the best equipments in the game (or the ores to forge into some of the best equipments in the game), as well as any consumable including the "full recovery" ones.
Can't forget about abusing the Lucky Medal Fountain RNG. I spent a lot of time doing that, lol.
Man, the Golden Sun series was such a good game. The lore and the puzzles were excellent
@@JethroYSCao Piers calling Kraden "young man" and Briggs the Pirate simulating the flu not to go pay for the stuff he stole once he can
@@Alche_mist
- all the cool summons you acquire from the tablets
- the vast array of side quests scattered across all the towns in the huge world (after you get the ship in the Lost Age)
- going back to a city/town you've visited already after some plot development, and unlocking some new pathway or plot line
such an amazing game, just reminiscing makes me want to play it again :D
Was looking for this comment :). Back in the day I was looking for which monster to get a rare drop from online and learnt about this RNG method.
I appreciate you mentioned the GBA Fire Emblem games as their RNG and the community's interaction with it is fascinating. As someone who plays a ton of GBA Fire Emblem and watched friends spending up to 40 minutes moving the cursor around (or arrow wiggling as we call it) it's kinda insane how much a simple RNG script can trivialize the game and make optimization of games a joke for anyone with the patience and knowledge of the game's design. It's at the point where people in the hacking community have developed a patch for the games that make the RNG change with every frame, and many fan games using the GBA engine are now introducing said RNG to their project, but this led to a point where you literally just rewind with the emulator and wait another second before doing the same action and just repeat until you get the outcome you want, it's a very interesting situation
7:12 This is very similar to how OG Doom generates randomness; everything that needs some kind of variation pulls the next number from a list. It's because of this predictability that the game can generate demos-a record of a player's run stored as inputs that can be played back on any device. Decino has a wonderful video that breaks down how it work, what applications it has, and even what can be accomplished via manipulation.
after a few videos, ive decided that i really enjoy your content! Subbed!
(also yes, i comment a lot, i learned that it boosts engagement and the more comments you get, the more likely youtube is to promote your content to a wider audience. so my comments may seem empty and kind of pointless at times, but im tryin to get in the habit so i can support creators i like)
Dude, I really enjoy your content. My only gripe with your channel is that I wish you could upload more frequently, but I also understand that videos can be hard to make, and you've probably got stuff outside of CZcams that you're doing right now. Just keep up the good work, and I hope things move in a way that I could see more of your content more often.
Omg this makes so much sense... Personal anecdote, I noticed that when I was playing Fire Emblem 3 House, whenever I would use the time rewind mechanic to try and get the game to re-roll, say, a critical hit that an enemy made that killed my unit, the turn would play out exactly the same way every time. But if I rewound further back into my own turn, even if I ended up making (what I thought was) the exact same moves, the numbers would be shuffled again, whereas the numbers would not shuffle if I just used the rewind to redo the enemy's turn. I'm sure this game uses a more complex set of rules for determining its RNG based actions than the first games in the franchise did, but this video did help me to understand why this was happening.
I never thought to rewind further. I just figured that was the roll I got and just had to deal with it.
Three houses does not delete the RNG as you use divine pulse. If you do everything the same, you will have to same outcome. The thing is, though, there are many checks in the game so even if you rewind, it can be hard to take advantage of. Its not impossible however. Ive found myself taking my enemies crits and using them myself. Or perhaps if a weaker character crits, ill just rewind and have the stronger character crit instead. You have to be careful though as this will not work if one character has a crest and the other does not.
Another neat fact about Maniac Mansion I found out: The Keypad required for entry to the 2nd floor hallway in the DOS releases exists in the NES version too, and randomizes what would correspond to instruction manual symbols when it's attempted to be used, using the normal 'phone' numberpad instead. While the numbers are never shown to the player, they actually have a 1/20,736 chance of entering the 'correct' sequence, which avoids a self destruct and opens the door (This is also the only time the * and # keys are a part of a correct sequence).
I think this is the only channel that I've watched every single upload. Sure, there's not many, but I never wanna stop watching. Man, this channel is good.
Wow, what a throwback! It reminded me how I used a second-hand Action Replay to mess with my GBA and ended up checking Boktai's code just to figure out how it worked. Really entertaining video, thanks! 👍🏼
Me before watching: Oh cool, I'm gonna learn how to manipulate RNG! I can be somewhat good at video games now!
Me now: *my brain having melted and now dripping out of my ears* ...welp, nevermind, that's complicated as hell. Just gonna go back to playing 3H on easy mode with permadeath off-
I think my introduction to RNG exploitation was manipulating item drops in Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Good times...
Same, dude
Dude, Lost Age makes me nostalgic enough to cry. Childhood favorite right there.
Loved the video dude, great info and intriguing subject. One critique, and this might only apply to me - maybe cause of my low-key ADHD. I found I lost focus during your video cause of the pokemon visuals - I understand it's relevance, but if I see squirtle doing bubble gun while you're talking about a different, quite complex subject it's hard to compute. When relevant visuals came up with the audio/chatting the info stood out far more. Besides that great stuff, you got a sub from me.
I've always wondered about RNG, but I didn't want to have to read through super complicated explanations of it. This video was a concise and interesting way to present them!
I figured you'd bring that one example up in pokemon where your name determines the first 3 pokemon you'll catch and their level at a specific spot if you use surf on it, I always found that example cool
I always find find it crazy how people find all these ways to exploit games that the developers never intended
I love hearing some more RNG talk and seeing you bring up 3DSRNGTool was great, since I'm a huge Pokémon fan and got into RNG manipulation in the gen 7 games a while ago. c:
Regarding Pokémon and RNG, I can't not mention that Pokémon Emerald has a malfunctioning seed generator which males it so that the initial seed is always 0. That makes soft-resetting on it pretty much impossible and it's something shiny hunters have to deal with as well.
I can’t express how much I love your videos!!! Thank you!!
Getting multiple sponsors by your 8th video is pretty impressive!
Great vid man! Keep up the good work!!!!
The quality of your output is amazing
This man has never felt the pain of a gacha game
4:38 When RTGame makes a rollercoaster
A fellow man of culture
Awesome to see another upload! Appreciate this. Thank you
Wow this video explained a phenomenon I discovered more than 10 years ago but could never figure out why. I used to play Sega Genesis games on a PC emulator, which allows save-states (i.e. I can save & load whenever I want). While playing a monopoly type game, I noticed that my and other players dice rolls, or any random item drops are always the same no matter how many times I load a save-state as if it's been written in some sort of prophecy, UNLESS I do something different such as using an item before rolling the dice.
I've exploited save states to find the specific monsters I wanted in the beastlands in Final Fantasy 6 - unlike other parts of the game, the encounters in the beastlands are sequenced like in the Fire Emblem example you used, so on an emulator, if you have a save state in the world of ruin you can just keep fighting monsters in the cave until you get the sequence you want. It's time-consuming and a little harder than it sounds, but doable. It doesn't work on the original hardware since loading an in-game save will generate a new seed.
I feel substantially more educated after your videos :)
It's interesting that you explain the Fire Emblem on GBA. I played them on WiiU eshop this summer. I limited myself to one save state before the boss battle so as to preserve a lot of the challenge, but still give myself a good checkpoint. Anyways, one time I accidentally made a save state right before an enemy turn, and the first thing they did was shoot down my Pegasus Knight. Now, I saw the odds of it hitting were like 50/50, so I just reloaded the save state. I soon found that they would shoot at my Pegasus Knight every single time, and always hit. That was the first time I intuited that it wasn't an RNG in play.
You know, I'd just like to say thank you... for featuring clips from Pokémon Gen 7 so much in this video and not 8, so I can continue to be immersed in my alternate dimension where Gen 8 never happened and the series is still great.
Having played both soul silver and Fire emblem on an emulator, I've had the pleasure to figure out that : If taking the same actions, the results remained the same.
Though I hadn't figured out the arrow trick in fire emblem, I had successfully concluded that any combat action had either a 100% chance to hit or miss, with the number just giving an estimate of the odds of any of the two possibilities being true. (which is a roundabout way of agreeing)
On pokemon, having a desire to do things the fastest way possible I could discern predictable patterns, mostly by counting the number of shakes of the ball or its success. Sometimes intentionally overwriting a save-state to get a different seed though I wasn't aware of how exactly it functioned.
Good to know I wasn't mad, though being able to have save states really shows this.
I blame autism making me address the same problems in the same manner every single time reducing most tactical games to more of a puzzler than actual tactics.
Good input leads to good output. Nothing more, nothing less.
I was hoping to find a solution to my poor luck in minesweeper on my phone, but it seems impossible to figure out the RNG in it :(
There is a guy that created a fully deterministic version of minesweeper that is guaranteed to have no RNG choices. www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html
@@xeigen2 wait I remember that the windows one didn't have an RNG right?
@@igamse The windows one sometimes gives a board with things you have to guess. Perfect play results in about a 40% win rate on expert. My win rate is 31%. I'm not amazing but not terrible; 105 seconds expert, 36s intermediate, 3s beginner. Beginner sometimes gives you a board that is basically fully solved straight away if you play it enough.
@@xeigen2 I see, thanks :D
This is the only channel that always has me interested. I love this shit.
Very interesting! Thanks for uploading!
"Computers can't be random."
Accurate, but also omits several orders of magnitude. Nothing in the universe is random, to my knowledge. (Maybe something at the quantum level is random, or we don't know how to predict it.)
While a lot of "random" things such as atmospheric noise are actually just chaotic, truly random processes exist. Radioactive decay is a good example.
Prime number distribution is another example
@@xeigen2 Or we don't know how to predict it. We use to "know" the sun and stars were gods. Turns out we simply lacked what was needed to see the answer. We can't prove something is truly random as we can't reset things... even balls we make aren't perfectly round but filled with bumps and imperfections. Our tests use items which are imperfect and hence we should get varied results due to natural mistakes.
Saying we know something is factually random or not as an argument is frankly stupid as we don't know any more then the people who saw the sun moving around the Earth and assumed it was a god or we are the center of the universe.
Remember, we are imperfect and our results will be.
Actually computers have a fair amount of randomness in them, due to quantum effects. We mitigate that through error correction codes and the like. So saying "computers can't be random" is not the full truth.
I miss Kent, Sain, And Lyn so much 🥺
in earthbound you can reroll the rng for crits, misses, damage numbers etc. by going in and out of menus in battle, I also found that outside of battle you can interact with items in your bag that do nothing to reroll rng for what enemies appear in the next room. this is especially usefull because earthbound doesnt determine what the enemy rng will be when you enter the room, but rather before you even enter the door. Also I found in my earthbound adventures that many if not all rooms have set layouts of enemies, and it just switches between them. Yes I found this out, yes it was all on my unhacked switch, no I do not know all the intricate ways of the rng changing.
I cant believe that a channel with less than 10 videos has 171K subs. Great video man keep it up.
I knew Fire Emblem's RNG wasn't truly random, but I had no idea it was _that_ simple.
The example given is only for the GBA games (Roy and Eliwood’s stories) to be clear. I know it was changed later on, but I don’t know how exactly
@@historiansayori2089 also 8
@@leaffinite3828 Thanks for the correction!
@@historiansayori2089 np
I don't know why, but the fact people call it "Random Number GENERATOR" instead of "Random Number GENERATION" irks me to no end.
because games tend to have many generators for different purposes, for example, Doom has one for gameplay and one for aestethic effects (wich is not synced in multiplayer)
isn't all RNG in Doom synced, since it's timer based?
@@zoromax10 No, that's the thing, only essential RNG is synced, things that don't alter gameplay are not synced (things like what effect to use for screen transitions and whatnot) and is controlled by a separate generator
Really?
Damn, that's weird
You have somewhere that I can read upon it?
@@zoromax10 czcams.com/video/pq3x1Jy8pYM/video.html&ab_channel=decino
12:22 my mann with the dave's theme
What was that strategy on the Dorcas mission lol
Fun video. interesting stuff
6:55 Is a simple/easy to reverse-engineer RNG a bad thing though? For speedrunners, it makes runs more consistent, while casual players won't care or even notice.
when attempting to use RNG for security it is absolutely terrible
"You'll most often find RNG used in videogames"
CRYPTOGRAPHY would like you access your location
I remember RNG manipulation was super easy on the first Golden Sun game. If you reset before a battle, and spent a specific amount of turns doing specific skills, you could guarantee loot to drop every time you killed an enemy. It was a super easy way to get rare item drops, like Lucky Medals and top-tier equipment. You could also use it to get specific drops from the Lucky Medal fountain. I remember farming several stacks of Lucky Medals to transfer into the second game, as they weren't farmable in that one.
just started a hgss save and im so excited to try this
Video starts at 2:27
5:19 have you heard about Paper Mario (64 and TTYD) players?
This was fascinating, thanks!
This is a great explanation of what speedrunners are talking about when they mention "RNG Manipulation".
Monster hunters desire censor is real i swear. The moment you want that Gem the chance of getting it turns to 0.
Just pet Poogie before the hunt, that's how you manipulate the RNG.
Definitely dropping a like just for putting Lyn in the thumbnail
Doom uses a "list of numbers" random generator as well, but to its benefit. Since the same RNG calls will always generate the same numbers in the same order, the game can generate a record of someone's playthrough just by storing which buttons the player pressed at any given time. This made playbacks of those record, or "demos", have much smaller filesizes than a video or state dump and allowed for easy sharing.
RNG manipulation is very fun, I do it constantly on the main Pokemon games for 3DS and Switch. This video is a great reference point I can share to people I meet who want to also learn how RNG works. Thank you for this video.
2:27 Skip Ad
thank you!
@Beep Boop Thanks, now I know! I installed it and it is a dream to watch youtube with ublock origins and sponsorblock.
And it all started with being kind to people. And then those people laughing at me.
@Beep Boop Thanks for the tip!
This should be pinned.
@@thealientree3821 I think only the creator can pin things.
The creator wants you to watch the ad.
And the creator wants the moneys.
It has been like... 50 years since your last upload. You must be very bored in quarantine.
Its been 2 months are you mad
There is one important thing to note for the GBA FE games: for FE7 (the first game released in America) and Sacred Stones, random numbers aren't pulled in isolation. Each individual attack, for instance, pulls multiple numbers and averages them to determine accuracy, and it has to pull even MORE random numbers to determine critical hits and skill activation, even if the last option isn't relevant (in FE7, skill activation applies to only one class in the entire game)
I remember that Etrian Odyssey 3 had a set up where you guarantee an instant death effect on a boss by soft reseting before the fight and having everyone defend while having the last member use the skill with a chance of instantly killing.
4:34 What a missed opportunity! "Hmm, that's a lot of R's 'n G's" was there for the picking.