mathiasbynens / pokebot

The automated Pokémon speedrunning machine

PokéBot

An automated computer program that speedruns Pokémon generation 1 games.

Pokémon Red (Any% Glitchless) personal best runs:

• 1:50:14 (13 April 2015)
• 1:51:11 (23 June 2014)
• 1:56:45 (7 May 2014)

Watch live

twitch.tv/thepokebot

PokéBot’s official streaming channel on Twitch. Consider following there to find out when we’re streaming, or follow the Twitter feed for announcements when we get personal best pace runs going.

Run the bot locally

Running the PokéBot on your own machine is easy. You will need a Windows environment (it runs great in VMs on Mac/Linux too).

1. First, clone this repository (or download and unzip it) to your computer.

2. Download the BizHawk 1.6.1 emulator and extract the ZIP file anywhere you like to “install” it.

   Note: BizHawk v1.6.1 (Windows only) is the only version known to work.

3. Run the BizHawk prerequisites installer, which should update a C++ distributable needed by BizHawk.

4. Procure a ROM file of Pokémon Red (you should personally own the game).

5. Open BizHawk.exe, then drag your ROM file onto the window, and Pokémon Red should start up.

6. If you want to test the full run, set RESET_FOR_TIME in main.lua to false instead of true.

7. Under the Tools menu, select Lua Console. Press the “open folder” button, and navigate to the PokéBot folder you downloaded. Select main.lua and press “open”. The bot should start running!

Seeds

PokéBot comes with a built-in run recording feature that takes advantage of random number seeding to reproduce runs in their entirety. Any time the bot resets or beats the game, it will log a number to the Lua console that is the seed for the run. If you set CUSTOM_SEED in main.lua to that number, the bot will reproduce your run, allowing you to share your times with others. Note that making any other modifications will prevent this from working. So if you want to make changes to the bot and share your time, be sure to fork the repo and push your changes.

Other Categories

The bot is designed to run "any% glitchless" (beat the game as fast as possible, without major glitches) categories - the most popular in the speedrunning community. However, the bot can easily be adapted for other purposes including use in testing frame data for human players, or to run different categories of the game.

Red Any% No Save Corruption by Marc-Andre Boulet

If you're interested in adapting the bot to other categories or games, we'd love to see it, and are happy to help answer questions.

Credits

Developers

Kyle Coburn: Original concept, Red routing

Michael Jondahl: Combat algorithm, Java bridge for connecting the bot to Twitch chat, LiveSplit, Twitter, etc.

Special thanks

To our Twitch chat moderators who help answer questions, and make the stream a great place to hang out.

To LiveSplit for providing custom component for integrating in-game time splits.

To the Pokémon speedrunning community members who inspired the idea, and shared their knowledge on ways to improve the bot.