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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 Red 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 Red, as well as three of the Eeveelutions and three Fossils, with the Red 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.