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Completing a Living Dex With Gen 1 (Pokémon Red)

A "living dex" is a fan designation for when a player completes the Pokédex and has one of each species in the PC or the party at the same time. It's often considered to be much more difficult and time-consuming than a regular Pokédex because it often involves, for instance, playing the same game multiple times to get multiple copies of a Legendary Pokémon.
With Gen 1, the Legendary Pokémon are not a concern, but getting multiple Starters is, due to the lack of breeding.

The method by which you can get a completed Pokédex on Red is described here. This page will focus more on requirements specific to a living dex.

Version Exclusives

This is just to note that you will need to trade for multiple version-exclusives, instead of just one. You will need two Sandshrew, two Vulpix, two Meowth, and three Bellsprout from your copy of Green/Blue.

Mutually Exclusive Pokémon

The real issue with a Gen 1 only living dex lies in the mutually exclusive Pokémon. To have a living Dex, you will need all of the following on your file:

If you have access to Pokémon Stadium, you can get all of these by defeating the Elite Four and Rival.

Otherwise, to complete this living dex on Green/Blue alone, you will need at minimum nine separate save files for Gen 1 in order to get every Pokémon.
If you have access to Yellow, this number changes to four separate save files - one Red file and three Yellow files. With Yellow, you can collect each starter on each of the three files and trade it to Green/Blue, as well as three of the Eeveelutions and three Fossils, with the Green/Blue file providing the fourth Eeveelution and Fossil. In this scenario, each of the starters traded from Yellow can be evolved to a different form.

Without access to Yellow, your save files would have to look something like the following:

  1. Pick Starter #1. Trade it to another game for holding.
  2. Pick Starter #2. Trade it to another game for holding.
  3. Pick Starter #3. Trade it to another game for holding.
  4. Pick Starter #1 and evolve it to its first form. Trade it to another game for holding.
  5. Pick Starter #2 and evolve it to its first form. Trade it to another game for holding.
  6. Pick Starter #3 and evolve it to its first form. Collect Eevee and Fossil #1, and trade them to another game for holding.
  7. Pick Starter #1 and evolve it to its final form. Collect Eeveelution #1 and Fossil #2, and trade them to another game for holding.
  8. Pick Starter #2 and evolve it to its final form. Collect Fossil #1 and evolve it. Collect Eeveelution #2 and Hitmon #1, and trade them to another game for holding.
  9. This file should be your "final" Red file. Pick Starter #3 and evolve it to its final form. Collect Fossil #2 and evolve it. Collect Eeveelution #3 and Hitmon #2. Trade back the rest of the starters, Eeveelutions, Hitmons and Fossils from your holding game.