hack Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Alpha (3.0.3, last update 3/10/2025)

[Lord Woodrow]

Hello!

 

I made an account to ask, is it worth waiting for the 3.1 update it should I just start playing now?

 

It all looks very good and best of luck with all the coding and such!

[V_Menace]

I'm having trouble applying the patch. i've seen a few times that it might be due to the nds file not corresponding to the US-Version of the game.

However i just did a patch of Explorers of Fortune using the same nds file and it worked perfectly fine.

 

I kow why you cannot post it here, but it elludes me how there is not a single patched download out there.... at least none that come with 2 gigabytes of chinese spyware for free.

 

any suggestions? do fortune and alpha behave differently?

[Zoofyooo]

On 9/19/2025 at 7:11 AM, theSLAYER said:

Okay everyone. I have been summoned here.

I don't care who started it. I don't care who retaliated. I don't want to hear any explanations.
Just stop.

I just have one clear message:
Any further rude or aggressive behaviour, and you'll get official warnings, that can and will lead to bans.

 

And for goodness sake, just report actual bugs and give brief words of thanks.
There is no need for a wall of text; ain't nobody got time for that.
 

---

@Alphadaemon sorry to hijack your thread, but it's been getting so out of hand that members have been reporting the current debacle. Anyway don't be bothered by it (I've hidden the posts), and carry on with your good work

Why did you hide my comment where all I did was report a bunch of glitches and feedback? 

I don't see how that was necessary. I feel like you didn't pay attention to the comments you've hidden. 

Now unless they wrote down somewhere all of the glitches I've reported, they don't know what to fix. 

Edited September 21 by Zoofyooo

[theSLAYER]

9 hours ago, Zoofyooo said:

Why did you hide my comment where all I did was report a bunch of glitches and feedback? 

I don't see how that was necessary. I feel like you didn't pay attention to the comments you've hidden. 

Now unless they wrote down somewhere all of the glitches I've reported, they don't know what to fix. 

I have sent them the hidden posts, and they will judge whether those were justified bug reports.

Have a nice day.

[Alphadaemon]

16 hours ago, V_Menace said:

I'm having trouble applying the patch. i've seen a few times that it might be due to the nds file not corresponding to the US-Version of the game.

However i just did a patch of Explorers of Fortune using the same nds file and it worked perfectly fine.

 

I kow why you cannot post it here, but it elludes me how there is not a single patched download out there.... at least none that come with 2 gigabytes of chinese spyware for free.

 

any suggestions? do fortune and alpha behave differently?

The patch is meant to be applied with xDelta UI on a Clean US Rom, as stated in the OP. The tool to use is important as it ensures you don't have a messy patched game as the output.

16 hours ago, Lord Woodrow said:

Hello!

 

I made an account to ask, is it worth waiting for the 3.1 update it should I just start playing now?

 

It all looks very good and best of luck with all the coding and such!

3.1 is mostly bug fixing and QoL improvements, playing 3.0 should give you roughly the same experience!

12 hours ago, Zoofyooo said:

Why did you hide my comment where all I did was report a bunch of glitches and feedback? 

I don't see how that was necessary. I feel like you didn't pay attention to the comments you've hidden. 

Now unless they wrote down somewhere all of the glitches I've reported, they don't know what to fix. 

I didn't answer because it didn't really warrant an answer to me as it would have been a "fixed, fixed, irrelevant, fixed, irrelevant, fixed" kind of answer, but I noted the few relevant points and reports in your post and worked on them already. They were taken in consideration.

[Alphadaemon]

On 9/20/2025 at 6:58 AM, eeveeinabox said:

I made an account here just because of your rom hack. Thank you for the amazing work and I'm looking forward to future updates! Here are some of the bugs/feedback that I've noted after just having unlocked Marine Resort in Expert mode, version 3.0.3:

 

Gamebreaking bugs

• Mt. Travail will randomly freeze/crash on the setpiece floors (8 and 16). This was reported in a previous version and supposedly fixed, but it's still happening in v3.0.3. This happened to me when using the free camera as well as after using an attacking move (Nasty Plot). From what I can tell, there's no way to prevent this from happening except hope that whatever you do doesn't trigger it.
• The first time you go to Shaymin Village, there is an option to skip the cutscene. If you choose to NOT skip it, once the cutscene ends, your partner's sprite disappears/glitches out and it's possible for the game to freeze. You can avoid this crash by choosing to skip the cutscene.
• There is an option to skip the story Volbeat/Illumise cutscene. If you choose to skip, you bypass the usual end-of-day scenes and immediately get warped back to Treasure Town and lose several levels (probably reverts back to the stats you had at the last save or something). I actually quit playing a different EoS romhack because of a similar bug where completing ZIN also hard warped you back to Treasure Town, causing you to keep the ZIN softreset stats instead of your original ones. So I went from level 100 to ~30 or something. Stuff like this is not technically gamebreaking, but one of the few things that would make me (and possibly others) ragequit.

 

Other bugs

• Scorching Sands functions as a physical move, even though it should be a special move (affected by Atk/Def stats and modifiers, not affected by SpA/SpD)
• Trying to pick up an object on the ground in manual mode sometimes just won't work and it will skip your turn. This happens most often with guests/escorts but can also happen with your teammates and even your leader.
• In Spinda Cafe, when you unlock an unexplored area after a drink, it never actually unlocks anything and kicks you out of the drink menu. You can also unlock the same dungeon such as Oblivion Forest multiple times through different events such as Wynaut once and then later through story progression.
• Your Pokemon abilities shown in the Summary screen in Treasure Town are the ones they get post-Darkrai, even when you haven't defeated Darkrai. For example, A-Ninetales shows Snow Cloak / Snow Warning in Treasure Town, but change to Snow Cloak / Cute Charm when you enter a dungeon.
• Some move descriptions are incorrect. Example: Dragon Rush says single-target melee when it's a line-of-sight move.
• Possible bug: Attacks can miss against a No Guard user (wasn't recording, but it happened with Hurricane Articuno in Hail vs enemy Machop in Lost Wilderness with no other effects that I'm aware of, like Neutralizing Gas)
• Possible bug: it seems that if you don't have someone that can walk on water, you will softlock on the Froslass setpiece floor (Crystal Crossing B7F), since you have to cross a 1-tile water spot to get to the stairs, and there's no other way to leave the floor besides getting timed out? Unless I'm missing something...
• Possible bug: some Pokemon seem to have abnormally high HP regen rates in snow and hail. For example, K-Vulpix and K-Ninetales both regen 5% HP per turn in these weathers (when they normally regen a lot less in Clear), and it feels like some enemy Pokemon have insanely high regen in bad weather as well when they shouldn't.
• The Croagunk Shop does not give you the option to trade for Sylveon's tier 3 item when all other tier 3 Eeveelution items appear.

 

General feedback

• After you unlock Mysteriosity, a lot of jobs can't be done on days with high Weirdness levels because you often spawn the max number of enemies on a floor, which prevents rescue and outlaw Pokemon from appearing (a.k.a. "but where's the target Pokemon?") If it's possible, you should cap the enemy spawns to 15 out of 16 on these floors so there's always room to spawn the target Pokemon. I've even had monster houses spawn nothing because of this.
• Enemies on heavy darkness floors will use room moves that can't hit you (such as Draco Meteor) because they only have 1 range under these conditions but they always "see" 2 tiles away. Similarly, enemies standing at the edge of rooms can use room moves that won't hit you in a corridor.
• Idk if this is possible but it would be nice QoL to have enemies show up (as red dots) on the minimap based on your whole team's vision at all times. Right now, you only see enemies on the minimap when you're focused on the ally that's "giving vision" of that area. Similarly, it would be nice if stuff like Radar and Scanner Orb applied to everyone. As an RTS player (SC2/AOE4), minimap usability is a huge deal for me.
• If there have multiple competing weather abilities, is there a way to randomly decide which one activates at the start of each floor? For example, right now if you have both Drought and Snow Warning in your party, Drought will always activate, never Snow Warning. I've tried changing the party order and using different combinations of weather setters, but it seems like one weather ability always takes priority over another.
• It would be cool if you could somehow hack stat caps to be based on the Pokemon's actual stat distribution instead of a flat 999/255/... for everyone. It just feels wrong for Blissey and Bastiodon to eventually have the same HP, Attack, etc. with enough stat boosting items.

Finally for the long answer to this thorough feedback!
For the first two gamebreaking bugs I fought my way to hopefully have a consistent fix, I can't know as the bug is contextual and inconsistent...
The third one I cannot understand... In 3.0.3, I cannot even find a cutscene skip in the code, ingame I don't get the prompt either, but this skip was there in 3.0.1 at least... I don't get why there's this inconsistency between the report and the game itself, I got confirmation that some got a prompt though but idk what to think of all this

Other bugs, I fixed most of those.
About the Froslass floor you can explode a wall to pass through and I added a guaranteed Slip Seed on the previous floor.
Picking up items with guests/escorts not working is perfectly intended, but with partner/leader there's no grounds for this happening so I'm genuinely surprised... besides passing through the item as it's not automatically picking up items if you rush them with B+direction depending on the category

Special note and big thanks for your report related to "abnormal high HP regen", as it turns out Ice Body has 2 regen checks and not only one so I'll fix that! For the record I changed Ice Body so it becomes Flame Body for Frostbite, so I had to remove the Hail regen check for Ice Body.

About general feedback:
- Mysteriosity is more extreme than that and I will remove base spawns increase from it, but I will force more enemies to spawn over time if Mysteriosity procs this effect
- Darkness is poorly coded in base game, I have removed heavy darkness floors but it keeps appearing so I applied a more extreme solution to this problem
- Show enemies based on team vision is fairly hard with how base game works so I noted that down but no clue if I'm getting this done at some point
- Weather ability priority ensures it working properly, unlike main series there's no definition for how speed works and reworking this system requires a lot of extra work for a niche case so I keep that in mind but just like the previous point it's not a priority
- there's a main series stat hook for Zero Isle East, I plan to allow this game mode as a permanent one for 4.0 and it disables Vitamins, Gummi boosts, etc...

[Zoofyooo]

6 hours ago, Alphadaemon said:

I didn't answer because it didn't really warrant an answer to me as it would have been a "fixed, fixed, irrelevant, fixed, irrelevant, fixed" kind of answer, but I noted the few relevant points and reports in your post and worked on them already. They were taken in consideration.

Okay then, I understand

[Cryswar]

I've been noticing that escorts (including Magnezone) don't benefit from Reviver Seeds, so 1-2 enemy room clear moves ends the run. Would it be possible to give them higher IQ so they benefit from Item Master, like vanilla?

[Chelonia]

4 hours ago, Cryswar said:

I've been noticing that escorts (including Magnezone) don't benefit from Reviver Seeds, so 1-2 enemy room clear moves ends the run. Would it be possible to give them higher IQ so they benefit from Item Master, like vanilla?

I had brought up the same issue in the past, but AlphaDaemon said that it's an intended feature. Feeding clients Gummis won't raise their IQ for some reason, but Nectars will work. In a way, having clients be so vulnerable makes escort missions feel like how they were in Rescue Team.

[eeveeinabox]

20 hours ago, Alphadaemon said:

Special note and big thanks for your report related to "abnormal high HP regen", as it turns out Ice Body has 2 regen checks and not only one so I'll fix that! For the record I changed Ice Body so it becomes Flame Body for Frostbite, so I had to remove the Hail regen check for Ice Body.

Just wanted to make it clear that the bug is happening even for Pokemon that shouldn't have Ice Body, such as Kantonian Vulpix.

20 hours ago, Alphadaemon said:

- Weather ability priority ensures it working properly, unlike main series there's no definition for how speed works and reworking this system requires a lot of extra work for a niche case so I keep that in mind but just like the previous point it's not a priority

Since there are no speed tiers I just thought it could be random. And this scenario actually happens quite often as long as you have a weather setter (such as Alolan Ninetales) and you're in a dungeon such as Grumble Volcano or ZIN with its own weather setter mobs (such as Torkoal). But I understand stuff like this might not be trivial to implement.

 

Anyways, thanks for taking the feedback and I hope to see 3.1 or 4.0 soon!

[Alphadaemon]

33 minutes ago, eeveeinabox said:

Just wanted to make it clear that the bug is happening even for Pokemon that shouldn't have Ice Body, such as Kantonian Vulpix.

Since there are no speed tiers I just thought it could be random. And this scenario actually happens quite often as long as you have a weather setter (such as Alolan Ninetales) and you're in a dungeon such as Grumble Volcano or ZIN with its own weather setter mobs (such as Torkoal). But I understand stuff like this might not be trivial to implement.

 

Anyways, thanks for taking the feedback and I hope to see 3.1 or 4.0 soon!

I didn't make myself clear, Ice Body activates for everyone now.

As for the random weather thing, I just can't. Random doesn't exist for thie specifically and the way weather is determined follows a predetermined list of actions I cannot do anything about without breaking weather altogether...

[eeveeinabox]

On 9/22/2025 at 2:56 AM, Alphadaemon said:

Picking up items with guests/escorts not working is perfectly intended, but with partner/leader there's no grounds for this happening so I'm genuinely surprised... besides passing through the item as it's not automatically picking up items if you rush them with B+direction depending on the category

Here is an example of failing to manually pick up an item with your partner (just fyi): 

 

[Cryswar]

21 hours ago, Chelonia said:

I had brought up the same issue in the past, but AlphaDaemon said that it's an intended feature. Feeding clients Gummis won't raise their IQ for some reason, but Nectars will work. In a way, having clients be so vulnerable makes escort missions feel like how they were in Rescue Team.

Hey, thanks for the response. It's a very... strange decision, but at least now I know.

Edited September 23 by Cryswar
fixing a typo

[Brendell]

On 9/20/2025 at 5:45 PM, Alphadaemon said:

After evaluation, it's 10 seconds gained for 6 months of work, and 6 months of work on something poorly documented and way too complicated to setup for no real long-term benefit

Pffft! Yeah, that's SOOOoooo not worth it xD

[Alphadaemon]

10 hours ago, eeveeinabox said:

Here is an example of failing to manually pick up an item with your partner (just fyi): 

 

Ah this! If it wasn't there in Manual mode you could brick your save because picking up items that way on anything that's not your leader either crashes your game or prevents your leader's turn from coming up ever again

9 hours ago, Cryswar said:

Hey, thanks for the response. It's a very... strange decision, but at least now I know.

The true reason behind this is more of a mixed bag actually. I got reports of people pissed that any enemy picking up a Reviver Seed means the Reviver Seed is lost to the player. I also got reports that most players in previous versions were pissed that clients ate all the reviver seeds before still failing the mission. There's no opting out when a client has Item Master enabled. Allowing the player to manipulate a non-player's IQ skills can lead to quirks in case the client leaves and then you recruit someone in place of it. So I gave the player an option to opt in using Item Master or not. Having the client eat a Nectar is your opt-in. I don't think I can initialize any random client's IQ dynamically considering the complexity of setting Magnezone and Magnemite's stats already so this is the solution I came up with

[Maxime]

Hi sorry for the bother....where is the white silk and normal dust...i only miss there for the destiny tower.

[Alphadaemon]

30 minutes ago, Maxime said:

Hi sorry for the bother....where is the white silk and normal dust...i only miss there for the destiny tower.

Marine Resort

[Maxime]

3 minutes ago, Alphadaemon said:

Marine Resort

thanks u life saver!!!!!!!

[eeveeinabox]

Got another bug for you. Having the Ability Monitor in your inventory prevents you from picking up items despite not having a full bag (see video). From further testing, it looks like the bugged limit is 43 items. If you have more than that, you can still use items and swap them for the same slot, but you will not be able to pick any more items up until you have less than 43 or get rid of the Ability Monitor.

 

[Brendell]

10 hours ago, eeveeinabox said:

Got another bug for you. Having the Ability Monitor in your inventory prevents you from picking up items despite not having a full bag (see video). From further testing, it looks like the bugged limit is 43 items. If you have more than that, you can still use items and swap them for the same slot, but you will not be able to pick any more items up until you have less than 43 or get rid of the Ability Monitor.

 

Oh! I think I know this one. Each of the eight Ultimate Items reduces the maximum bag size for as long as they are in there. Notably, if that item is being held by a pokemon, it doesn't reduce the max size. This might be mentioned in the first post, and I think Alphadaemon has mentioned it at least once in the other pages in this thread.

I actually ran into this because of randomizing the items and floors. It took me a bit to figure out the reason for my bag being like, 24 items was because I had several of those ultimate items; only to find I couldn't sell the ones I had to buy apples. Fun challenges of Randomizer runs!

Anyway, it would be nice if the descriptions of the ultimate items listed this feature, though I don't know if there's space in the text box for that? Or if an NPC that you interact with who gives you one would inform you; though I'll admit I was blasting though the dialogue, so maybe I missed that.

[Alphadaemon]

11 hours ago, eeveeinabox said:

Got another bug for you. Having the Ability Monitor in your inventory prevents you from picking up items despite not having a full bag (see video). From further testing, it looks like the bugged limit is 43 items. If you have more than that, you can still use items and swap them for the same slot, but you will not be able to pick any more items up until you have less than 43 or get rid of the Ability Monitor.

 

First, Ability Monitor shouldn't even be available. Second, Ultimate Items cut bag slots. If I didn't state that in the doc then that's my bad.

[eeveeinabox]

4 minutes ago, Alphadaemon said:

First, Ability Monitor shouldn't even be available. Second, Ultimate Items cut bag slots. If I didn't state that in the doc then that's my bad.

Ah ok, I don't think the doc stated what Ultimate Items were. I just used the search function in the thread for "Ability Monitor" and it didn't come up with anything. Sorry for posting if it's already known!

1 hour ago, Brendell said:

I'll admit I was blasting though the dialogue, so maybe I missed that.

I always hold B during dialogues out of habit, so I hope modders don't bury one-time hints in the text! But yes, it would be nice if the penalty was mentioned / consistently applied.

[Modified]

Hello, when input with IDs for your starter/partner, they have Form 1 and Form 2 which seem to be non-shiny & shiny, right? Are most pokemon supposed to have both forms? Is that part of this patch or base game thing?

Edited September 27 by Modified

[Cryswar]

On 9/23/2025 at 10:56 PM, Alphadaemon said:

Ah this! If it wasn't there in Manual mode you could brick your save because picking up items that way on anything that's not your leader either crashes your game or prevents your leader's turn from coming up ever again

The true reason behind this is more of a mixed bag actually. I got reports of people pissed that any enemy picking up a Reviver Seed means the Reviver Seed is lost to the player. I also got reports that most players in previous versions were pissed that clients ate all the reviver seeds before still failing the mission. There's no opting out when a client has Item Master enabled. Allowing the player to manipulate a non-player's IQ skills can lead to quirks in case the client leaves and then you recruit someone in place of it. So I gave the player an option to opt in using Item Master or not. Having the client eat a Nectar is your opt-in. I don't think I can initialize any random client's IQ dynamically considering the complexity of setting Magnezone and Magnemite's stats already so this is the solution I came up with

I appreciate you explaining the logic behind it. I'll keep the nectar thing in mind for the future, I have a decent stock of them so it's not that hard.

Enemies still use reviver seeds now, though, in case that isn't intended?

[Alphadaemon]

10 hours ago, Cryswar said:

I appreciate you explaining the logic behind it. I'll keep the nectar thing in mind for the future, I have a decent stock of them so it's not that hard.

Enemies still use reviver seeds now, though, in case that isn't intended?

I have places where you can farm Reviver Seeds and IQ is minimal in these places. If IQ for Item Master was minimal, they would eat your reviver seeds

15 hours ago, Modified said:

Hello, when input with IDs for your starter/partner, they have Form 1 and Form 2 which seem to be non-shiny & shiny, right? Are most pokemon supposed to have both forms? Is that part of this patch or base game thing?

No they are not shiny/non-shiny. They are Male/Female or variants for mons with a single gender.