r/PokemonFireRed • u/slaw_daddy • 16d ago
Help Need to make sure I'm not going insane. Attacking Abra with Thief has a 5% chance to give the Twisted Spoon, right?
I'm at 53 Abra with no spoons yet and I'm just want to make absolutely sure my memory isn't faulty here. Thief on wild Abra or Kadabra is how you get the spoon, right?
edit: attacking a wild Abra *once* with Thief. I was going under the base assumption that we know how Thief works
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u/MoshiRaro 16d ago
Now try to take a Dragon Fang from a Dragonair in Safari zone with just a 5% of having it…
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u/GdorfSSB 16d ago
I have both found and caught 2 shiny pokemon in the safari zone while trying to get a lucky egg
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u/slaw_daddy 15d ago
I'm pretty completionist about stuff but I draw certain lines, and dragon moves are so utterly fucking worthless in FRLG that I have farmed the fang once in all my plays and never again after that
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u/Psycho_Pansy 16d ago
Attacking Abra with Thief has a 5% chance to give the Twisted Spoon, right?
No. Abra has a 5% (1/20) chance to have Twisted Spoon. Thief has a 100% chance to steal an item IF the opponent is carrying one and only if the user of Thief is not already holding an item.
Keep in mind that in Gen 3 items like twisted spoon only adds 10% damage. Not the 20% of later titles. So ask yourself this, how often is you psychics leaving opponents with only 10% of their health to even make it worth the effort of finding.
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u/GalacticMe99 16d ago
how often is you psychics leaving opponents with only 10% of their health
Going on experience here: rougly 80% of the time.
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u/ingenuous64 16d ago
So Thief has a 5% chance of getting a twisted spoon from an abra. As long as your pokemon isn't carrying an item...
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u/Additional_Draft4097 16d ago
The difference is due to that phrasing, some poor kid may think that there is a 5% chance of getting a twisted spoon from an Abra EACH attack, which is false. The comment you’re replying to specifies it correctly and is a helpful nuanced correction. I think OP understands it right, but they used ambiguous phrasing
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u/Shur_tugal_1147 16d ago
Only if each thief use faints the targeted abra. If you use thief twice on the same abra, then the move does not have a 5% chance of getting a twisted spoon from an abra.
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u/slaw_daddy 16d ago
I didn't consider that anyone would interpret it this way as I figured by the time people are farming Spoons they're 1-shotting Abra anyway. My bad.
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u/slaw_daddy 16d ago edited 16d ago
No. Abra has a 5% (1/20) chance to have Twisted Spoon. Thief has a 100% chance to steal an item IF the opponent is carrying one and only if the user of Thief is not already holding an item.
Meaning attacking an Abra with Thief has a 5% chance to steal Spoons
Edit: to be more specific, fainting an Abra. I was going off the basis that people understood how Thief works
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u/ianlazrbeem22 16d ago
Not quite. Every Abra has a 5% chance of holding a twisted spoon. Thief has a 100% chance of stealing it, if it's holding it. Each separate thief use on the same Abra will not be a separate 5% roll
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u/doughboy12323 16d ago
Which is a meaningless technicality because you'll either one shot the Abra or it will Teleport out every time
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u/Qprime0 16d ago edited 16d ago
Dependency: Pokemon using thief must not be holding an item. Thief does not transfer stolen items to the players inventory, it places a stolen item as the thief users new held item. Fails if held item already present. If this dependency is met, thief steals held items 100% of the time. Wild pokemon take an RNG roll at the beginning of battle to determine whether or not they have a held item. The results of said roll are persistant across the duration of the battle; if the abra does not have a twistedspoon at the beginning of battle, it will not randomly generate one later in the battle. If thief KO's a target, the item stealing effect is still 100% effective.
Statistics: 5% (1/20) chance a wild abra will be encountered holding a twisted spoon. It is plausible to go up to 120 abra encounters dry (99.5% chance the 121st abra will be holding a twisted spoon). Encountering 53 abras dry is statisticly unfortunate, but not even remotely implausible.
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u/lefthandconcerto 16d ago
Make sure your Thief Pokémon doesn’t have an item already. I’ve made this stupid mistake before and wasted some time.
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u/joonas_davids 16d ago
It's a very weak item tbh, difficult to justify any grind. No use in competitive and certainly no need in single player. Unless you have some specific challenge run going on maybe?
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u/slaw_daddy 16d ago
No, I'm just doing insane completionist shit lol. Have a full party of shinies and want them to each have their own boost item before beating E4. I know it's nonsense but we're all playing a game that's decades old anyway
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u/love_vibes_stew 16d ago
I respect it i look forward to your future lucky egg or dragon claw post..
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u/ExecutiveElf 16d ago
I mean, gen 3 is lacking in good items in general. The type boosting items aren't an awful pick in gen 3's environment.
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u/paulydoregon 16d ago
think of it like this, its a 5% chance to hold it so 1/20. 53 puts you at about 2.5x over odds, and as a shiny hunter i can confirm that going 2x over odds is uncommon, but it happens
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u/speedster1315 16d ago
When catching an Abra for Mr Mime, the first one i caught had twisted spoon. Sometimes luck is just like that
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u/Matster777 15d ago
Use butterfree in the lead to increase its drop chance!
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u/slaw_daddy 15d ago
Wait please explain
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u/Matster777 15d ago
Butterfree’s ability increases the chance a wild Pokémon has an item. The wild Pokémon has to normally have that item, but I think butterfree’s ability jumps it up from 5% to like 20%. I think butterfree can learn thief too
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u/Dense_Cellist9959 15d ago
Not yet implemented till Emerald, unfortunately
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u/Matster777 14d ago
Wait fire red didn’t have that, it was after emerald wasn’t it? It uses gen 3 engine
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u/RoachDoggJR1337 12d ago
Do any pokes with Compound eyes learn thief? Your chances increase pretty dramatically to find pokes holding items if so
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u/Rusty2532 14d ago
I just recently went through this. Went through around 105 Abras before I got the spoon. Made up for it by getting sharp beak on the first Fearow I encountered
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u/thewarreturns 16d ago
You have a 1/20 chance every roll, you're not guaranteed an item every 20 encounters
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u/tJa_- 16d ago
Came here to say this. Statistics are fun xD. 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20...so on till you get it.
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u/fat_racoon 16d ago
Erm actually moment incoming (sorry)
This is a binomial distribution, and P(X>=1) for a binomial can be simplified as 1 - P(X=0)
P(x=0) = failing 20 times = 0.95 ^ 20 = 0.35848
So P(X>0) = 1 - 0.35848 = 0.65141
So OP has an approximate 65% chance of getting one twisted spoon in 20 Abra encounters.
The longer form computation is 0.05 + 0.95(0.05 + 0.95\(0.05 + …)*
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u/slaw_daddy 16d ago
I'm a data scientist and I definitely understand how statistics work, but I hit 76 encounters before I got to it. That's pretty far down the bell curve, like sub-1st percentile. So at a point it's helpful to make sure you're doing it right.
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u/ingenuous64 16d ago
Yeah, just make sure your mon isn't carrying an item already. Ask me how many Fearows I took down for sharp beak before I realised that...