Polished Crystal Guide
Crystal rebuilt from its own source: sixteen badges, Gen VI mechanics on Game Boy Color, the Orange Islands, and wild levels that grow with your badge count.
- Author
- Rangi
- Base game
- Pokémon Crystal
- System
- Game Boy Color
- Version
- 3.2.3
- Region
- Johto
- Difficulty
- Moderate
Every fight the hack's documentation covers, in story order: gym leaders, your rival, the villain admins and their boss, the Elite Four and the Champion, plus any post-game rematches. Numbers on move chips are base power. Click a Pokémon for its full stats.
Search a route to see what's in the grass, water and hordes, or search a Pokémon to see where it lives. Click any Pokémon for its full moveset, TMs and stats.
Rangi
This guide is built from Rangi's own documentation. The hack, the ideas and the work are theirs — the site just makes the numbers searchable. Play it from the official page, and send them the feedback and the thanks.
About Polished Crystal
Polished Crystal is Rangi's long-running rebuild of Pokémon Crystal, made directly from the pokecrystal disassembly. It keeps Johto and Kanto and adds the Orange Islands, brings the battle engine up to roughly Generation VI (Fairy type, the physical/special split, abilities and natures), restores Pokémon and areas cut from Gold and Silver, and rebuilds every trainer. Two patches ship from the same source: the Polished build with the author's own stat, type and ability changes, and a Faithful build that — in the author's words — “keeps the canon Pokémon stats and move attributes”. This guide publishes both, and every table says which build it is showing.
What's changed
- 289 Pokémon plus 46 regional and other variants and 56 cosmetic forms
- Sixteen badges — all of Johto and all of Kanto, with the Johto League in between
- The Orange Islands as a new region with its own routes and encounters
- Fairy type, the physical/special split, abilities and natures on a Game Boy Color ROM
- 81 TMs and 31 move tutors, and TMs are reusable
- Wild levels on many routes scale with how many badges you have
- Morning, day and night encounter tables on every route
- Gym leader rematches and post-game content after Red
- Two builds from one source tree: Polished and Faithful
What this guide covers
Every guide here is built from the hack's own documentation. Where a hack changed something but never published the numbers, this says so rather than quietly filling the gap with the original game's — which would be worse than leaving it out.
| Section | Source | |
|---|---|---|
| Wild Pokémon by area | From the hack | Every wild table in the hack: grass by time of day, surfing, all three rods, headbutt trees, swarms and the Bug-Catching Contest. |
| Encounter rates | From the hack | Read from the hack's own probability table and per-map encounter rates, not assumed from Crystal. |
| Wild levels | From the hack | Fixed levels are printed as they are. Where the hack stores LEVEL_FROM_BADGES ± N the level genuinely depends on your badge count, so those slots are shown as Base ± N with the badge table on the stage picker. Roughly a fifth of Johto's grass slots and almost all of the Orange Islands' work this way. |
| Stats, abilities and movesets | From the hack | Base stats, types, abilities, learnsets, egg moves and evolutions from the hack's own tables, for both the Polished and Faithful builds. |
| TM and HM compatibility | From the hack | All TMs, HMs and move tutors, with per-species compatibility. |
| Where TMs are found | From the hack | Locations are the notes the hack writes beside each TM, HM and tutor. They are places or people, not stage-gated checkpoints, so no story stage is claimed for them. |
| Trainer and boss teams | From the hack | Every party in the hack's trainer file. Some rosters carry only level and species — the source says so itself — and those are published as-is. The file does not record where a fight happens. |
Credits
- Pokémon Polished Crystal: Rangi
- Source code and releases, which this guide is generated from: Rangi42/polishedcrystal (tag v3.2.3)
- The Pokémon Crystal disassembly the hack is built on: the pret team
- Battle engine, ability and nature code, and much else: FIQ, luckytyphlosion, MeroMero, darsh and the contributors listed in CREDITS.md
- Sprites via PokéAPI; base move and TM data from PokéAPI and Bulbapedia.
Reading the tables
BuildsEverything here is the Polished build unless it says otherwise. Where the Faithful patch differs, the Pokémon page says so and the boss list carries a separate Faithful team.
LevelsMany wild levels are not fixed. The game stores them as “base level ± N” and resolves the base from your badge count: 0→Lv 4, 4→Lv 20, 8→Lv 36, 12→Lv 49, 16→Lv 61. Those slots are shown as Base+1, Base, Base−3 and so on rather than as a made-up flat number.
RatesSlot percentages come from the hack's own probability table — 30/30/20/10/5/3/2 for the seven grass slots and 60/30/10 for the three water slots. The per-map “N% of steps” figure is that map's own encounter rate. * marks anything at 5% or less.
TimesWild tables are split into morning, day and night. The hack's clock also has an evening, which uses the night table.
AreasAreas are named after the hack's own map constants, so floors and halves of a route are listed separately, the way the game stores them.
BossesTrainer teams come from the hack's party file, which carries held items, abilities, natures, EVs, DVs and moves — but not for every fight. Its own header says “boss trainers need better movesets, held items, natures, and abilities”, so where a roster has no moves this guide leaves them blank rather than inventing them.
Trainer_PlacesThe party file does not say where a fight happens; only the phone contacts carry a map. Fights the source does not place are marked “Location not published”.
TmsTM, HM and tutor locations are the ones written beside each entry in the hack's own TM table. A name rather than a place means that person gives you the TM.
ItemsThe item list is shop stock, read from the hack's mart tables. Item balls and hidden items live in the map scripts, which are not part of the data this guide reads.