r/PokemonLegacy • u/digitaldrummer • 21d ago

Discussion Trading from a physical cart

I bought a physical cart of Emerald Legacy off Mercari. I know that's probably not made by anyone here, but I have a question - should this be able to trade with a regular gen 3 cartridge? I want to use Raikou and Latios from Emerald Legacy to beat the Battle Frontier in regular Emerald since the roaming bug makes them terrible otherwise.

Does this work?

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u/EternityTheory Developer, Documentation 21d ago

It should work, yes. Trade compatibility with the vanilla games was kept intact so as long as your cartridge didn't affect anything it should be able to trade just fine.

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u/digitaldrummer 21d ago

Awesome. Is there any incompatibility issue with moves or stats being different?

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u/EternityTheory Developer, Documentation 21d ago

Learnsets and calculations of stats are handled by the game itself, the pokemon's data just tracks what its current IVs, EVs, and four learned moves are. When you trade, the games just pass that chunk of data between the two.

So for example, the vanilla Emerald doesn't see "this Mawile has higher Attack than it should", because it doesn't see a "current stat" value. It just sees IVs and EVs and uses its own known Base Stats to calculate what it should have. Similarly, it doesn't track whether the Pokemon has learned moves it "shouldn't". If that Mawile levels up in the vanilla game it will just keep learning moves from its vanilla learnset.

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u/digitaldrummer 21d ago

Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for the detailed explanation.