third time's a charm : chikorita in heartgold // soft resets

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my love letter to chikorita line, or how i got the 'mon first phase but ended up getting all 3. this is a real long post, so grab something to eat or drink to keep you company as you read :-) apologies for the length, but this hunt was multiple years in the making, so the it is necessary ^^'

this is technically a new hunt, but really it's just a continuation and reclaim of chikorita from my very first real hunt. while i said in my intro thread that i had been hunting much earlier, and this is true, this is the first hunt i ever actually did seriously. before this, i'd do wild encounters or resets, but never with a real goal in mind or counting encounters, etc. i'd pick up games and put them down. 

also in my intro thread, i cited this soulsilver shiny badge quest as my inspiration to begin hunting. as influenced by this thread and user as i was, naturally i wanted to start one of my own - or at least get the starter! so i reset over my soulsilver file some time in high school and started hunting for cyndaquil, the same one that deltheor (the creator of this particular thread/quest) had obtained randomly. he was a huge inspiration to me and the cause of me starting to shiny hunt, so of course i wanted to be like him (lol). this disregarded my own personal favorite being the chikorita line, but really i love all the johto starters. 

i don't remember how long the hunt took, but i remember doing it in a combination of physical tally marks and this shiny hunt tracker, pokemon shiny tracker, which saves your entered data in cookies so you can close the tab and resume your hunt later (i still use this sometimes on my laptop, and am currently using it for my friend safari petilil hunt which will likely make an appearance later this month). it shows you the actual statistics for your hunt (how likely you are to have gotten it by your current encounter or reset count, and how many resets or encounters it will take to get to a 90% chance you'll have encountered it), which i think is really cool.

in november of 2019, i was surprised with this:


unfortunately, the paper i used to do tallies has been lost to time, and the shiny tracker has been used to do other hunts, so i have no way of knowing how many resets this was as i didn't take down any sort of other record. in a later phase, i gave ~4k resets as the count for this phase, but i'm unsure how accurate that actually is looking back. i didn't give the chikorita a name, because this was my first phase for cyndaquil and i felt i had no choice but to reset over it, but i remember that it was female and modest.

i didn't have anywhere else to put it, because i didn't own any other gen 4 games other than my very untrustworthy diamond copy (gotten used, had been action replayed by someone too many times and the file was permanently corrupted even if you erased all your data). i walked around with the chikorita a little bit, trying to figure out what to do - this was the starter i originally picked, but this was a phase, and not the starter i was hunting for. i reset over it, but as soon as i did, i felt incredibly guilty. i still wanted the cyndaquil, but part of me also immediately wished i could take it back. i went back to hunting with a slightly heavier heart. maybe getting the cyndaquil would absolve me of erasing one of my favorite pokemon from existence (i was the kind of kid who got extremely attached to inanimate objects and felt guilty if all my stuffed animals weren't on the bed with me - this is also still somewhat true many years later).

the second phase of my hunt was actually a failure. a few days after the first phase, i was resetting on the way to an appointment (unsure how many resets after the first phase, at this point i was just kind of mindlessly going for it) and i had just enough time to see the orange leaf on top of chikorita's head before the screen went back to the starting screen. ouch. this was pretty demotivating for me, and while i kept hunting, i stopped this particular hunt until the next year. i told myself if i got the chikorita for a third time i'd keep it, although i was still mainly hunting for cyndaquil.

in 2020, i restarted the hunt counting from 0 resets and got my third phase at 1664 resets (4992 seen) - this time, not the chikorita or the cyndaquil.


i was pretty torn about whether or not to restart the hunt, but i ended up transferring him to my copy of platinum where he is living very happily as a feraligatr on my main team :-) i bought platinum over the course of this hunt (on amazon for $40, not something i would recommend lol, but it's real) as i was afraid of this exact scenario and didn't want to reset over anything else.


after the totodile, i got pretty burned out from this hunt and turned to others for a pretty long time. in the spring of 2023, i finally picked the hunt back up during a period of time where i was constantly traveling back and forth from my college to my hometown and needed something to do.


i hunted pretty on and off on my soulsilver copy for awhile, but i also purchased a pretty cheap copy of french heartgold to double hunt on (although i only ended up using the soulsilver). this would come in handy later. a few months later in july, my boyfriend/partner encouraged me to hunt a little bit before bed and i ended up with the cyndaquil i had been looking for for so long, at 2463 resets (in my twitter post about this, i said it was 7248 seen, which is just incorrect lol, that's 7389 seen).


i got the cyndaquil! but along the course of that spring hunt, i had decided that i'd be okay with either the chikorita or the cyndaquil. when i got the cyndaquil, i was happy, but i still wasn't fully satisfied with the conclusion of the hunt. the lack of chikorita and my resetting over two of them was kind of eating at me, especially considering chikorita line was my favorite of the johto starters. because i'd gotten the heartgold, i still had a copy left to hunt on without having to reset my progress in soulsilver. i did put the hunt down for almost a year to focus on other shinies, because i burn out of hunts pretty easily and need to take breaks in order to stay invested, but i came back to it last month at the start of april. my boyfriend and i started to make a habit of watching regionals streams together, and this gave me something to do while we did that, and when we went over to a friend's house pretty regularly to watch movies/tv and play video games as a group. and last night, i found the third and final chikorita after 1718 resets (5154 seen).


his name is lemon loaf (i may change it to be all lowercase later, as i think it looks better that way), and he's sassy :-) i accidentally messed with the time on my 3ds at some point, so it says 2019, but he's really from last night.

i'm very glad to have finally gotten another chikorita and concluded my hgss starter hunt with finality after all this time. because now i have all three starters shiny, i don't predict that i will be coming back to this hunt unless it's on someone else's behalf. i don't know if i'm going to do a badge quest for the heartgold, although i did originally want to for the soulsilver - i want to get through the game so i can hunt pikachu for a raichu ribbon master in a moon ball. but we'll see how things go - i do have a large amount of pokémon i'd like to hunt in these games, and wasn't able to fit all of them on one team, so both of them will definitely see some heavy use. while the soulsilver is my childhood copy, heartgold has some exclusives i would love to hunt (kyogre, latias, growlithe). i'm looking forward to finally playing through gen 4 johto again after all this time (i first played soulsilver at 9-10, and i'm turning 23 this year). i have a lot of childhood memories tied to these games, and am really excited to get to experience them again.

lastly, although deltheor will in all likelihood never read this thread, i do want to give thanks to him and his soulsilver badge quest. without that lake valor thread, i would have never gotten into shiny hunting in the first place. younger me really loved following along with his storyline at 13, and his badge quest and thread gave me inspiration during numerous shiny hunting droughts. when i was feeling down about a hunt or about pokémon, i'd always go back to the original thread that started it all and i'd feel better - i still do this on occasion. the thread is like a touchstone for me, even after almost 10 years. i'm grateful that he made the thread that got me back into pokémon and shiny hunting. without it, i don't know where i'd be now - all of my friendships and my relationship are through the pokémon community. he'll never know it, as i've never spoken to him and have no intention of bothering him as a complete stranger, but that badge quest genuinely had such a positive impact on my life.