By Jill/Redterror117
Fuchsia City’s Safari Zone is the focal point of the city, being the home to many rare and exotic Pokemon that cannot be found outside of its boundaries, making it a stop that must be checked out by all trainers. However unlike the outside world, the Safari Zone has a few rules of its own. First of all, you have a time limit to how long you can stay in the Safari Zone, which in the first generation is determined by the number of steps are taken within its boundaries. The player is only given thirty special Pokeballs, and cannot fight traditionally against the Pokemon inside. Rather, they must use a combination of bait and rocks to make the Pokemon easier to capture, and even then the success rate is all by chance. It is because of limits like these that make that add to the challenge of the game. However there is normally a way around such things and the Safari Zone is no exception. In Pokemon Red and Blue versions, it is actually possible to enable the ability to capture the Pokemon of the first Safari Zone due to an oversight in coding.
Before entering the Safari Zone, make sure that you have a Pokemon with Fly and Surf handy. Enter into the Safar Zone as normal, paying the fee as you normally would. But as soon as you enter in, walk out of the Safari Zone, and out of the gate and into Fuchsia City. Without taking a single step away from the gateway entrance, open up your list of Pokemon, and fly directly to Cinnabar City. For those familiar with the Old Man glitch, this should be rather familiar, as the next step is to walk toward the eastern shore of the island, and proceed to surf up and down the coast line until a battle is imitated. So long as you don’t leave the coastline and go into another route, you will always be able to access Safari Zone Pokemon here.
The reason that this and the Old Man trick can occur is due to another oversight in coding. Every city in the game has a preset list of Pokemon that can occur within it, even if there is no grass or water or any other place for wild Pokemon battles to occur. The only exception to this is Cinnabar Island, which does not have such a list. Also, whenever a player travels from one location to another, the list of Pokemon that can be encountered is updated with the new area’s list. As the player leaves the Safari Zone and goes to Cinnabar Island, the list is not updated, because there is no new data to update the list with. So until new data is present, Cinnabar Island will use the data of the last location visited. In the case of the Old Man glitch, the player’s name has to be stored somewhere else temporarily so that the demonstration shows the ‘Old Man’ attempting to capture. In order to save space, the programmers used the list of Pokemon that could be encountered to store the player’s name, which would be reset upon traveling to a new location. However when going to Cinnabar again, this list is not updated, and upon encountering a wild Pokemon, the game attempts to pull data from this list. Instead all it finds is the name of the player (which is invalid for this purpose), so instead it uses a placeholder Pokemon, Missingno.
Tags: Nintendo DS, Red And Blue, Safari Zone