Cobblemon Balance Project

A datapack for Cobblemon that intends to make Pokemon more fun to use throughout the Cobblemon PvE campaign alongside PvP, with more tools and more viability!

Started and maintained by Noobzin and Shadowboxed, we have been working together to make a datapack that helps balance out Pokemon within Cobblemon inside of fights, intended for both PvP and casual PvE, that can hopefully be used as an easily adaptable base for anyone to build upon. It'll be out when it's out.

It's inspired by plenty of sources such as romhacks like Pokemon Unbound, Radical Red, various pet mods on Showdown, a thread in the Cobblemon discord server, and of course some of our own ideas.

Though we have plans to change and add things like abilities and moves, as of right now, Cobblemon only has native support for editing/adding new Pokemon. So, that's what we'll be focusing on for our first few releases. Hopefully, the changes to said abilities and moves won't make anything drastic.

You can download the datapack here: (link to be added)

And view the documentation here: (link to be added)

Note: Changes to types, abilities, and moves will probably only be applied when support for that comes into Cobblemon officially.

This pack affects Pokemon jsons in the "species" folder directly, due to the current limitations of the species addition function such as not allowing forms of Pokemon to be changed through that. Anything from stats, typings, and move learnsets are changed in these. If you have any mods or datapacks that change Pokemon json files within the species folder, make sure to compare the lines. This means that if you have an addon that adds in models to Pokemon that only have a Pokedoll for their model, their sizes could be affected among other things.

If you're playing on a pre-made map with trainers with pre-made teams, please do not use this data pack in that world unless the map maker specified that they used this pack. The reason why is because some Pokemons' Atk stats and Special Atk stats have been swapped. Which while it makes them stronger in the long run, won't exactly make sense when Pokemon such as Nidoqueen and Gourgeist, which have their attack stats lowered in favor in SpA, are out there still using mostly physical moves late-game.

This does, however, seem to work just fine with the Radical Red Trainers mod as is -- but if there's any severely glaring issues, please let us know.

The following Pokemon have had their main stats switched around:

>Swapped Atk for Special Atk: Nidoran-F, Nidorina, Nidoqueen, Pumpkaboo, Gourgeist

>Evened Out: Gigalith

>Swapped Special Atk for Atk: Mr. Rime

>Turned from defensive to a bit more offensive: Alolan Muk

>Start with a release of mons that are available in the base mod. Start by tweaking fully evolved forms, then dripfeed them to their pre-evolutions (but keep some consideration for Little Cup).

>For now, a support thread for it works, but maybe opening a discord to alert people to new releases and take more varied input? It could also be used to help recruit people to punch in numbers into datapacks.

>Between new Cobblemon versions that add more Pokemon officially, updates can be focused on Pokemon that are brought in from add-ons.

>Start a cheap/free minecraft server on MineHut or something with these buffs and advertise to let people fight and give feedback (we can use permissions mods ((if Aternos lets us)) to give people the pokegive command for themselves, and command blocks to give people sample sets)

>The "tier" for testing this should ideally just be OU, though unfortunately I don't think we'll be able to take Pokemon like Annihilape or Palafin out of Ubers to play since the Pokemon in Ubers are just straight-up unbalanced for Singles 6v6 play.

>Pokemon should only be re-nerfed if they are SEVERELY broken. Such as being incredibly centalizing. If Little Timmy gets swept by a Feraligatr that he allowed to set up on him for instance, his "NERF FERALIGATR PLS" suggestion should not be taken too seriously.

>This might have to wait 'til Doubles are added in though, to test them in both Singles and Doubles enviornments. And hopefully by then we'll have enough people wanting to fight each-other lol. (actually, seems a git release does have SOME Doubles/Triples support)

>Until then, taking opinions from people using the pack also helps.

>After everything is finished, wait for move/ability datapack support and figure stuff out from there?

The end goal is to have every fully evolved Pokemon be able to run some kind of niche that no other mon could do better at the very least in OU or UU, but preferrably the former in terms of PvP, and in terms of PvE, let more mons not be total trash in there. Lower tiers ideally will still be a thing too, since no matter how you slice it, there's just gonna be Pokemon that are easier to use. For example, Radical Red Showdown is not immune to this sorta thing and has their own OU, UU, RU, etc.

>What's your ideology when buffing or nerfing certain Pokemon themselves? Not moves nor abilities.

Make most of them stronger without changing their playstyle TOO much (with some exceptions), or give them moves that just seem like they'd make about as much sense as Gamefreak would allow it to have. MOST Pokemon will be able to be used in the same way they were before, just with new tools. In some cases, we'll also give them a niche that helps them be able to take a team slot if the role they're trying to fill is suited by what would be a better Pokemon. And in the case they're some real impossible to salvage stuff, well... we'll see lol. The biggest takeaway is that we don't aim to make these Pokemon BETTER than their already-better counterparts you'd normally pick, just fill more niches for certain cases, just make them more fun to use, or let you be able to use them as a meme pick that could actually sort of work in the right hands.

>How do you treat legendary-exclusive or just exclusive moves/abilities?

Generally depends. Starting from Gen 5 and up, Game Freak more or less has lax policies on keeping SOME things exclusive, so that's the same here. However, we aren't just gonna go looking for legendary abilities to put on Pokemon willy-nilly. For example, the Ruinous abilities are gonna stay exclusive to the ruinous Pokemon due to "Ruin" being more of a title than an action. Nor are we putting Psystrike on Jynx (but she will be getting Freezing Glare!). Chances are that the availability of these legendary moves will be mostly post-game tutor moves depending on what we can do in Cobblemon.

>When do you consider a Pokemon way too powerful for something like OU?

In Noobzin's opinion: Gholdengo in pre-DLC Scarlet/Violet OU.

In Shadowboxed's opinion: if a Pokemon becomes WAY too centralizing over a lot of games... in Doubles. I also keep Singles in mind too (and will have to whenever we begin testing), but the game's PvP is getting less and less friendly for Singles enjoyers mechanically. At least several things that are way too OP in singles are overall fair in Doubles and sometimes vise-versa. For example, when ability support comes out for Cobblemon, we plan to reduce the effects of overly centalizing abilities in Doubles such as Unseen Fist and the Ruinous abilities. Sorry Wo-Chien.

>How can I help out?

When the very first release of the mod comes out, let us know if you wanna crunch some numbers with us. We add all these changes into the Pokemon data completely manually, meaning we've gotta sort through HUNDREDS of 'em. The more hands on deck we have with this, the better. And we aren't quite knowledgable enough to make a script that'd do it for us lol.

Otherwise, showing off your ideas to buff Pokemon that could use it, within reason, always helps. If you see some changes to a Pokemon that REALLY shouldn't be there, let us know too, a good amount of stuff in our changelog ends up going through revisions.

>Alright, what about changing abilities and moves, whenever they have datapack support?

HOPEFULLY nothing so drastic that it won't affect the casual PvE campaign when we can get to that. We're generally looking at moves that no-one would even use in a casual Cobblemon campaign in early/mid/late-game and making them have some kind of niche.

Abilities are much of the same, but keep in mind that moves/abilities are in a VERY early planning phase, mainly because we don't exactly know what Cobblemon might have in store for field-usage of certain abilities/moves.

>Why not just edit Showdown's code?

We're aware that Gravelmon Extended Battles does it, but at least for now we wanted to have it easily adaptable to mods that DO change Showdown code.

>SLOW, FRAIL, MIXED ATTACKERS get made... better??

Because Game Freak sure aren't making them any better. In some cases, their attacking stats get specialized to either Atk or Sp. Atk, some might get bulkier and slow, and some might just be FAST, FRAIL MIXED ATTACKERS. Cacturne for example gets better Atk and Sp. Atk to go with Sand Rush, or can even be a Stakeout user if you enjoy that boosted power. Some might end up staying slow and frail too, but at least they'll have some kind of niche.

>Pokemon (that could use it) get potential for an entirely new playstyle

The two biggest examples right now are Machamp and Gigalith. Machamp gets some more Special Attack to go with its No Guard tools such as Fire Blast, Blizzard, and Thunder to help make it different from Conkeldurr. Meanwhile, Gigalith (to make its Pokedex entry more accurate) gets more SpA and Solar Power for a VERY powerful... well, let's just say we found a move in Showdown's code that's better than Power Gem. It can still set up sand, but now there's a lot more flexibility for sets.