Welcome to PolishedDex
What this site is, what this feed is for, and the four updates that landed this week: comparisons against each game's own vanilla base, level caps on boss pages, Game Corner prize counters, and the badge progress gate.
PolishedDex is a companion site for Pokémon ROM hacks -- dex pages, encounter tables, trainers, shops, guides and tools -- covering 11 games, from Polished Crystal to Ghost Grey.
This is the news feed. It exists so the things changing under you get written down: a game added, a table that was quietly wrong, a tool that finally reads a format it used to skip. Releases link out to their own pages. Everything else gets written up here.
Four things landed this week. None of them are new games, and all of them are the sort of thing you only notice when it's missing.
Each game measured against its own original, not against Polished Crystal
The across-games pages (Pikachu, for example) already put every game's sprites, typing and base stats side by side. Each row now also shows how that game changed the species from the game it was actually built on -- Crystal, Emerald or Red.
That distinction matters. Heart & Soul isn't a mod of Polished Crystal, and Polished Crystal was never the right yardstick for it. Charizard's Fire/Flying becoming Fire/Dragon is a Polished Crystal change. Pikachu's Attack going up 10 is one too. Neither says anything about Heart & Soul.
Where there's no published baseline for a game, the row says so rather than guessing. Ghost Grey currently falls into that bucket.
Level caps, on the page where you're fighting the boss
Caps used to live only in the level caps tool. They now show on the Gym Leader, Elite Four and Champion pages themselves, along with the badge count in force for that fight.
Heart & Soul runs Normal and Hard caps: Falkner is fought at 11 on Normal and 8 on Hard, and the Elite Four and Champion are fought at the eight-badge cap of 56. Modern Emerald gets all four of its cap tables. The caps are placed by the game's gym order rather than the order the data happens to list bosses in, which is the difference between Jasmine at 36 and Pryce at 38.
As usual, a boss only gets a number where the game's own cap table gives one. Sour Crystal, Orange and Red++ use obedience levels tied to specific badges, and the data doesn't record which. Ambrosia, Emerald Legacy and Ghost Grey have no cap data at all. SoulGold and Johto Legends have cap data in a shape the site can't show yet. A cap is never worked out from a trainer's team.
Game Corner prize counters, and the shop lists that were missing
Game Corner pages used to show no prizes. Where a coin prize did surface, it was filed as a gift or a cash purchase -- both wrong.
Heart & Soul's Goldenrod counter now lists what it actually sells: Abra at 120 coins, Clefairy at 500, Munchlax at 2,800, Dratini at 5,500 and Porygon at 6,500, all at Lv. 15, with the coins clerk's rates sitting next to them. SoulGold's counter gets the same treatment, and Modern Emerald and Emerald Legacy get Mauville's coin rates and prize items. Only what's on the counter's own menu is listed, so leftover code and FireRed/LeafGreen prices stay out. (Goldenrod City is a good place to see it.)
The shop reader also understood only one of the ways these hacks write a mart list, and Heart & Soul uses three others. With all four read, Heart & Soul goes from 7 shops with listed stock to 30: Goldenrod Dept. Store 2F now lists its 21 items, the Flower Shop 23, Pewter City Mart 8.
Telling the site what your badges can't reach yet
Last one, and the most useful if you're mid-playthrough. On Heart & Soul, set your badge count and the site marks what that stage can't get to: Surf and Rock Smash encounter rows on area pages, gifts behind a badge requirement, and field-move TM/HM rows on Pokémon pages.
The unlocks come from the game's own code -- Flash and Rock Smash at one badge, Cut at two, Strength at three, Surf at four, Fly at five, Dive at seven, Waterfall at eight. Fishing rods and Headbutt show as conditions rather than getting marked, because no badge unlock for them is published. Marked rows stay on the page with a reason attached; they don't disappear.
Only Heart & Soul gets this. The gate runs where the game's source states the rule, and it's the one game here whose level-cap table is indexed by badge count. Everything else gets nothing rather than a guess.