How did people find out the effects of Natures, IVs, EVs, etc?

Question

So what I am trying to ask is, how did these things become discovered? They are all hidden features, so I am wondering how we, the Pokémon community, found out about:

• The effects of Natures
• EVs
• IVs
• Personal Values
• I'm sure there are more...

Was it through hacking? Accessing the coding? Did GF tell us? I'm just wondering, since they are hidden features.

Comments

Not really, most of GAMEFREAK themselves revealed most of these when they were released.

---

Where?

---

They didn't, what makes you think that? To my knowledge, the only thing they revealed themselves was the Masuda method, and even then, they never released the specific Shiny chances resulting from it or anything like that.

---

You're talking to Arcanine not me, right fizz?

---

pretty sure that people hacked the games and read their source code.

---

For natures, in the pc box when you search by nature, it tells you. Thats all i know

---

Oh, so your saying that GAMEFREAK didnt reveal EVs? Even though they invented super training to help players use EVs, and created characters that talk about EVs?! Lol

---

They aren't actually called EVs. While they are EVs, the game refers to them as Base Stat Points in Super Training.

---

In gen 6, on the PC, it clearly says it when you are searching by nature.

---

^ what I said. When you searxh by nature and it asks you to pick a nature to search from, it will say something that tells you which natures are boosted and unboosted. Ofc this can also be experimented with by taking different natures and testing them on the same Pokémon and looking over results

---

Okay Sapphy, but I don't play ORAS remeber. Aslo, people knew this BEFORE ORAS.

---

I'm just saying thats the easiest way to find out. Also, for before, as ive said, it isnt too hard to figure that out by experimenting with different natured Pokémon.

---

It was discovered before ORAS Sapphy

---

Yes I know. The comment wasnt directed specifially at you, nor was it stating that was the only way to find out. As ive said, not hard to experiment with

Answer 1

I believe these were discovered by a combination of game guides (which receive inside information from the developers) and reverse engineering the code of older games.

The actual Natures was most likely a simple presentation by a paid game guid. The EV's have had some in game evaluator for a while. After that it's all reverse engineering of the code.

You will see in some bulbapedia articles entire algorithms for how Pokemon are caught and for iv's what the internal memory structure looks like, etc. This information can only be obtained by putting the game into a computer card reader, pulling the binary data off the card then converting the opcodes to readable programing code. It is a very complicated process but Pokemon is a very popular game. Also with emulators, cheat devices (like action replay), and other such tools knowing the code behind it becomes well worth the hundreds of hours required to extract and dissect the info.

Here is an open source library you can use to reverse engineer and Recomplie Pokemon red https://github.com/kanzure/pokemon-reverse-engineering-tools