Pokémon FireRed: Rocket Edition
Play FireRed from the other side: a new Team Rocket grunt who steals Pokémon from beaten trainers, climbs the ranks, and uncovers what Lance, Giovanni and Professor Oak were really doing while Red collected badges.
More about the game
Pokémon FireRed: Rocket Edition is a completed FireRed ROM hack by colonelsalt in which you are a low-ranking Team Rocket grunt, not a ten-year-old with a starter. Every grunt gets a Rattata; after that, the main way to build a team is to steal one Pokémon from any trainer you beat, with the trainer classes you may rob unlocking as your Rocket rank rises. The story runs parallel to FireRed's: Red is out there earning badges while you run Rocket missions from Celadon HQ to Mt. Moon, Cerulean, Lavender, Pallet, Cinnabar, Silph Co. and eventually the Indigo Plateau, and the game's own take on Kanto's back-story (the war with Johto, Mewtwo, MissingNo., Oak) is the real plot. A notoriety system tracks your thefts after Lance goes on TV: policemen reward a clean record, Rocket admins reward a long rap sheet, and a high bounty shuts marts in your face. Mechanically it sits on MrDollSteak's Decap and Attack rombase: the physical/special split, the Fairy type, later-generation moves and abilities, running everywhere and early Fly, with wild encounter rates cut hard so stealing stays the point.
What's different, point by point
- You play as a new Team Rocket grunt, not a trainer: the story runs alongside FireRed's from the villains' side
- Steal one Pokémon from any defeated trainer; who you may rob is gated by Rocket rank (Grunt: children and the elderly; Admin: women and teenagers; Executive: everyone but Gym Leaders and the Elite Four; Boss: everyone)
- A notoriety/bounty system after Lance's TV broadcast: police gifts for a clean record, Rocket admin gifts for thefts, marts that refuse you at high bounty, and an ending shaped by it
- 386 species with later-generation learnsets and second abilities, 18 of them retyped to Fairy; MissingNo. as a real, catchable species
- 485 moves including Generation 4 to 6 additions, with the physical/special split
- 77 wild encounter tables with the hack's own cut-down encounter rates, and 339 trainer fights with rosters read from the game itself
- Story bosses instead of a badge ladder: Red, Blue, Mr. Fuji, Daisy, Bill, Blaine, Lance, Agatha, Professor Oak and Champion Red, plus all eight Kanto gyms
colonelsalt
This guide is built from colonelsalt's own documentation. The game, 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.
What this guide covers
Every guide here is built from the game's own documentation. Where a ROM 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 game itself | Every grass, cave, surfing, rock-smash and fishing table on a Kanto map, read from the game's own wild-encounter data. Scripted one-off encounters (Mewtwo, MissingNo.) are story events, not tables. |
| Encounter rates | From the game itself | Per-table encounter rates are the hack's own (printed in each table's note); per-species percentages are FireRed's fixed slot weights summed per species. |
| Wild levels | From the game itself | Every level range is read from the game's own slot data. |
| Stats, abilities and movesets | From the game itself | Base stats, types, both abilities, level-up learnset, evolution method and TM compatibility for all 386 species in the game (385 of FireRed's plus MissingNo. in Latios's slot). |
| TM and HM compatibility | From the game itself | FireRed's 50 TMs and 8 HMs, unchanged; compatibility per species read from the game. |
| Where TMs are found | From the game itself | Item balls, hidden items and NPC gifts on Kanto maps, read from the game's map events and scripts. TMs the maps don't place are marked as not found rather than guessed. |
| Trainer and boss teams | From the game itself | Every trainer battle a Kanto map's scripts can start, with species, levels and held items from the game; movesets are stored ones where the game has them, otherwise the engine's own level-up rule. |
Credits
- Pokémon FireRed: Rocket Edition, creator: colonelsalt (Sondre Agledahl)
- Release thread and downloads: PokéCommunity
- Scripts, ASM, graphics and music used to build the game: colonelsalt/Rocket-Edition on GitHub
- Music: Magnus Nyborg Berg and the composers credited in the game's readme
- Sprites and tilesets: strange_kid, Brolunite, Paul Aamodt Brandal, Bacson Dias Graça and the artists credited in the game's readme
- Engine base (Decap and Attack rombase, hacked engine, ASM routines): MrDollSteak, JPAN, FBI, CinderGhost, zel, ipatix, Alisa180/BlankPoints, The Shadow Knight, Navenatox, Jambo51, Touched, knizz, HackMew
- Inspiration: ckret2's Pokémon Toxic Purple
- Sprites via PokéAPI; base move and TM data from PokéAPI and Bulbapedia.
Reading the tables
VersionBuilt from the game's own v1.0.2 release (the FINAL v102 patch of 2020-04-09, base ROM 1636 Pokémon FireRed (U) Squirrels) with every table read from the patched game itself rather than from documentation, because the creator published none beyond the source repository. The numbers here are what the ROM holds.
RankStealing is the game's main way to get Pokémon, so most of a route's trainers are also its catch list. Which classes you may rob depends on your Rocket rank: Grunt takes from children and old people, Admin adds women and teenagers, Executive everything except Gym Leaders and the Elite Four, Boss everyone. The VS Seeker lets you go back for trainers you outranked earlier, one Pokémon per trainer, ever.
RatesEncounter rates are the hack's own and are much lower than FireRed's (Mt. Moon and Cerulean Cave run at 1 where FireRed uses 7; Route 1 at 10 instead of 21). Each table's rate is printed in its note. Slot percentages are FireRed's fixed slot table, merged per species.
LevelsWild levels follow the Rocket route order, not FireRed's: Route 1 is Lv 17 to 20 because you reach Pallet mid-game; Viridian Forest is Lv 17 to 21. Where a species appears in more than one slot the range shown covers all of them.
FishingNo Old, Good or Super Rod is handed out anywhere in this game's maps or scripts (the Fishing Guru sidequest pays out other items), and the only HM06 Rock Smash sits on the Sevii Islands, which the story never visits. Those tables are in the ROM and are listed for completeness; treat them as unreachable.
TrainersEvery trainer battle a Kanto map's own scripts can start, with species, levels and held items read from the game. Where a trainer has no stored moveset, the moves shown are the ones FireRed's engine assigns at battle time: the last four level-up moves at that level from this hack's own learnsets. Bosses with hand-written movesets (Red at Mt. Moon, for one) show those. One data quirk belongs to the game itself: Mr. Psychic's middle party slot in Saffron is corrupt in the ROM, so only his two readable Pokémon are listed. 59 vanilla FireRed trainers that only exist on Sevii Islands maps were left out because the story never goes there.
AbilitiesFireRed's trainer data stores no ability slot; a trainer's Pokémon rolls its ability from its personality value, so the ability column is left blank rather than guessed. Species pages list both possible abilities.
ProgressThe stage list follows the creator's own mission order (from the plot outline in the game's repository): Celadon HQ, Mt. Moon, Cerulean, Vermilion and the S.S. Anne, Lavender, Viridian, Pallet, Cinnabar, Silph Co., the gyms, Viridian Forest, Cerulean Cave, Cinnabar again, Oak's lab, Routes 22 and 23, the Plateau, then the post-game. You can Fly from the start, so most of Kanto is physically reachable early; a stage here means "the mission that takes you there", not a locked door, and areas outside any mission are left at the first stage.
MissingnoMissingNo. is a real species in this game (Flying/???, 120/80/80/80/130/100, ability Trace, catch rate 3) that occupies Latios's internal slot, so there is no Latios. It is caught in a scripted event on Cinnabar Island and learns its own move, Super Glitch.
MovesThe move table is the Decap and Attack rombase's: later-generation power, accuracy and PP values (Tackle is 50 power, 100 accuracy), the physical/special split, and Generation 4 to 6 moves. A handful of the added entries look unfinished in the ROM (Moonblast reads as a 95-power, 40 PP status move); they are shown exactly as the game stores them.
TmsThe TM and HM list is FireRed's own, unchanged. Locations come from the game's map data: item balls, hidden items and NPC gifts on Kanto maps. HM02 Fly and HM03 Surf both come from the scientist on the top floor of Team Rocket HQ at the start; HM04 Strength from the nurse in Pewter City or the biker leader on Route 16.