What Low Budget Crystal changes

Levels are worked out from your badge count

Almost nothing in this game has a fixed level. When a wild battle starts the game takes the number stored for that slot and adds it to a wild base; when a trainer sends a Pokémon out it adds that Pokémon's number to a trainer base. Both bases come from one table, keyed on how many badges you have. A wild Pokémon also gets a random 0 to 4 on top, so the same patch of grass is not the same twice.

That is why the whole map is open from the start and why the guide shows wild levels as “Base+2” rather than as a flat number: the flat number would be wrong for every reader except one. Trainer levels are shown as real numbers, worked out at the badge count the game itself needs before it will field that team.

Fishing tables, headbutt trees, gift Pokémon and the Bug-Catching Contest are the exceptions — those levels are fixed and the guide prints them as they are.

The level cap is optional

When the game starts, Professor Oak asks whether you want level caps on. With them on, a Pokémon stops gaining levels at the cap in the table above, which is your badge count's base plus sixteen, and rises by two more after each league you beat. With them off nothing stops you. Because the cap comes from your badge count rather than from the next gym leader, this guide does not publish the usual per-boss level-cap page — the table above is the real answer.

Gyms in almost any order, and what that costs the leaders

There is no badge check on the road between regions: the Fast Ship at Olivine Port goes to Vermilion, and a sailor at either port will take you to Slateport. The only hard gates in the game are the Indigo Plateau, which wants all eight Johto badges, Ever Grande, which wants Wallace beaten and at least eight badges, and Mt. Silver, which Professor Oak opens at sixteen.

The gym leaders keep up with you instead. Each one has three teams, and the gym's own script picks which you face: the first up to 3 badges, the second from 4, the third from 14. This guide lists all three, and says on each which badge count it belongs to.

The World Tournament

A bracket in Hoenn — qualifiers, four rounds and a final — with its own trainers and its own versions of familiar faces. Those fights are listed separately from the trainers' ordinary teams and marked as World Tournament fights. Nothing in the game records a badge requirement for entering, so their levels are shown here at no badges, the earliest they could happen.

Abilities, on a Generation II engine

Crystal has no abilities. This game adds 32 of them, and it does it by listing the species that have each one rather than by giving each species a slot, so a Pokémon can carry more than one. The summary screen shows the first that applies. 491 of the 525 Pokémon have at least one.

Three places to start

The game has a working starter lab in each region — Professor Elm's in New Bark Town, Professor Oak's in Pallet Town and Professor Birch's in Littleroot Town — and each offers the same eighteen Pokémon at Lv 5: Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, Chikorita, Cyndaquil, Totodile, Treecko, Torchic, Mudkip, Rowlet, Litten, Popplio, the Chikorita, Cyndaquil and Totodile variants, and Honobea, Kotora and Kurusu. The game's own catalogue page calls this alternate starts.