Pokemon Black speedruns will never be the same as new method breaks records

Pokemon Black speedrun records are being broken, thanks to an exploit involving dust clouds that let players avoid mandatory battles with members of Team Plasma.

A new speedrunning exploit in Pokemon Black has been breaking records, as it shaves several minutes off the time needed to finish the game, thanks to being able to skip mandatory trainer battles and rush to the end of the game.

The villain teams of the Pokemon series (barring the past few entries) usually have their own side plot, where the player needs to foil their wicked goals. This often involves visiting their main base and fighting their individual grunt members before working up to a climactic battle with their leaders.

For speedrunners, the villain teams are a huge nuisance, as they add unnecessary battles to the game. This is because finishing the Pokemon League challenge (beating eight Gym Leaders and the Elite Four) is the goal of the game, so groups like Team Rocket and Team Galactic just waste time.

The Pokemon Company/Game Freak

Pokemon Black dust cloud exploit is breaking speedrun records

A new video on the PulseEffects YouTube channel outlined an exploit that speedrunners use to complete Pokemon Black records. Unfortunately, it requires much more work than the usual Pokemon glitches and exploits to perform.

The new speedrun method involves dealing with Team Plasma, as there are lots of mandatory fights against their members, each with an annoying intro cutscene featuring the team’s logo.

Pokemon Black & White has a mechanic where dust clouds can appear in the player’s path, which can be used to block the line of sight of the Team Plasma members, allowing them to be avoided.

To pull off this exploit, an outside program is used to determine the RNG values of the game to work out how many steps it takes to kick up a dust cloud. Then, they must catch a Lilipup with the Adamant Nature, as it’s ideal for the run. With these steps in mind, the player can measure when a dust cloud will appear. There are a lot of working parts to this trick, so make sure to check out PulseEffects’ video for more details.

Thanks to this new method, the English and Japanese Pokemon Black speedruns on Speedrun.com are topped by players who are using the dust cloud exploit. The trick has yet to find mass adoption among speedrunners due to how frustrating it can be to find out the RNG and all of the messing around it takes to pull off.

Pokemon Black & White are next in line for remakes, which means Unova should be seeing a comeback in the near future. This means a new era of Unova speedrunning is almost here, so the Pokemon Black & White players will have to make the most of these new exploits if they want to shave the record time down as much as possible before Gen V is reborn on a new system.