A list of off-site resources for various & sundry Pokémon things. Wondering why I have this when Bulbapedia and Serebii exist? See the paragraph at the bottom.
PokéBip: Looks to have some of the most accurate encounter table and general location information for most areas in Pokémon. Only problem - it's in French. Which is why I intend to create my own area info, but their layout is definitely superior.
The Cave of Dragonflies calculators: Capture calculators for all gens.
The Cave of Dragonflies mechanics: General research into many mechanical aspects of the games, including Gen 4 honey trees, Gen 1 stats, and Gen 1 Safari Zone.
Inundata Sheets: A compilation of sheets that includes some Battle facility info for Crystal, Gen 5, Gen 6, Gen 7, and Gen 8, and data on Gen 3 and 4 Contests and the Contest properties of moves.
Smogon Battle Facility Threads: All games with a Battle Facility have a thread here, and every original post (or one close after it) contains links to resources specific to that Facility.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus Pokédex Checklist
Pokémon Legends: Arceus Maps: Found on this site.
Gen 2 Headbutt Trees Calculator
Gen 3 specific Pokédex completion site
Professor Oak Challenge Guides: The Professor Oak challenge involves catching and evolving every available Pokémon before moving to a new Gym. Even if you don't want to play the challenge, the guides contain some of the most accurate information on getting as many Pokémon as possible without trading that there is. I plan to write my own pages about "single-player Pokédexes" at some point as well.
Smogon In-game Resources: A plethora of in-game guides, including RNG manipulation for Gens 3-7, Shiny Hunting guides, item locations, Tips and Tricks, breeding mechanics, EV mechanics, and more.
Inundata Sheets also includes opponents and rental Pokémon for all three Stadium games, including content exclusive to both Japanese and International versions of PMS2 / Stadium 1.
Mystery Dungeon Spreadsheet contains information for every Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game. Highlights include postgame flowchart for Red/Blue Rescue Team, IQ and Gummi mechanics, Spinda's Café mechanics, links to Recruit 'em All guides, and Pokémon spawn infomation for every game except Super Mystery Dungeon.
Explorers of Sky Damage Calculator
How to Play New Snap
New Snap High Score Guide
Wiiware Recruitment Tracker
Explorers of Sky Recruitment Tracker
Rescue Team DX Recruitment Tracker
Pinball (GBC) locations and mechanics found on this site.
Watch this space for me to post Pinball R/S information.
BobChao's Pokédex Tracker: Can be used for any game where you have any sort of Pokédex. I may post a compilation of json files for various completion goals that can be loaded into this tracker at some point.
Contact me on Github (altissimo1) or Discord (Altissimo [hash] 7178). I'm amenable to throwing up any guides, tables, maps, etc. that you have and want to host, too, so long as you're OK with the minimalist design of the site.
To clarify: I am largely very grateful for the existence of both sites. They do a ton for the Pokémon community and the fact that they're both largely independent of any corporate interests which so often plague other fan communities, especially when you consider that Pokémon is literally the largest multimedia franchise in the world, is hugely valuable. But just because they do cover lots and lots of Pokémon related things doesn't mean they're always the best source for it - much as you're told not to cite Wikipedia when writing research papers in school, so too should both Serebii and Bulbapedia be considered a good "hub" or jumping-off point, but not the be-all end-all resource many want to treat them as.
Regarding Serebii: The site has a page for pretty much everything and has been very, very consistent to update basically since day 1. The problem is that information is not always trustworthy, because it very seldom gets updated after the initial blitz of information. If you've ever read one of those day-1 or top-10 guides from a game journalism website that claims something about a game that just isn't true, it's largely the same experience with Serebii. Especially for older games and especially for side games, you can frequently expect to find names of locations or characters that still refer to localizations of the Japanese original rather than the English localizations, off-hand statements that are not actually supported by anything (such as the statement that Rank affects recruit rate in Red/Blue Rescue Team), false claims that are easily verifiable (such as that Octillery appears in Crystal - it doesn't - or that the trainers in Viridian Forest in Red/Blue change parties depending on your version - they don't), and really all-around just poor quality control.
There is also the fact that this information is almost never updated, no matter how much you point out an inaccuracy. If a site that claims to have information won't correct false claims, then maybe it's just me, but that seems like a poor substitute for actually well-researched information by individuals who care more about getting it right than getting it quickly. It's a great starting point for learning about something, but the existence of the resources here is largely to point out "hey, here's a source that you might not have known about that can replace Serebii if you want to know more about [x]".
Bulbapedia is much better. The fact that it's an open wiki means that information gets updated, verified, corrected frequently. However, it still falls victim to the occasional false claim that doesn't get corrected simply because no one cares to update it - as of this writing, the page for Mr. Who's Den (a location in Trozei) claims that legendary Pokémon can be found there. The fact that I've never seen one led me and a few friends to poke at the game's internal files, and we've determined that this is almost certainly a falsehood.
Of course I can make an account and correct it if I want. But a simple mistake about a game no one cares about isn't my real issue with the site - it's just a demonstration of how you shouldn't take it at face value. My real issue is more about the difficulty of finding information about one specific thing. Because the site is an encyclopedia of all Pokémon related media, its pages end up very bloated as they attempt to contain every thing related to the article subject in a single place. Which, I'm not complaining about - it's great that they do that - but if I know what I'm after, I would rather look for the information I need in a source that caters to the thing I want to see, because there's a better chance of getting a cleaner, more concise source that has exactly what I'm looking for from the get-go.
Think of it like you're reading a book about French artists and you want to know about Monet. Well, your book is certainly going to tell you about Monet, and you can probably trust that it will largely be accurate. But if you really just want to know more about Monet and don't care about other French artists, you'd probably look for books written about Monet specifically. In my mind, Bulbapedia is much the same - you can trust that if you search for a Pokémon you will in fact find some information about it, and it'll be correct, but I personally would rather know a site that tells me just I want to know about the Pokémon and no more. That's largely the driving principle behind the collection of links here. To continue the Monet analogy, there are specific books about Monet out there, but if everyone you ever talk to just says "just read the book Great French Artists" and every search engine only returns results for Great French Artists, it might be nice to know the website "booksaboutmonet.com" exists to tell you all the books about Monet that you could ever want.
My goal here is for this page to get passed around like the hypothetical booksaboutmonet.com could be passed around Monet enthusiasts. It's meant to be a resource of resources. The endgame I'd want to see is for people who have questions about a Pokémon game to come here first and see if there's a more specific resource before checking Serebii or Bulbapedia, or for people who want to know something very specific to come here first. It's meant to help correct some of the misconceptions that spread due to bad resources, like the common Rescue Team DX statements about where you can find Mew, which are often incorrect.
The second half of the title, in addition to being a Dr. Strangelove reference, refers to the several times I've taught myself something about coding or scripting or file structure explicitly so I could get some sort of Pokémon content. With the help of a friend, I briefly learned to interpret the WiiWare Mystery Dungeon games' code structure in order to extract spawn rates. I worked with C# parsing programs, jQuery, and JSON files in order to work on making English-language location pages for main series, and I learned how to make an app that compiles in Java to calculate spawn rates in Explorers of Sky. As for JavaScript, I learned it exclusively to create the Legends: Arceus maps - and it got me the job I have now. They always say "if you want something done right, do it yourself". I do not believe I have the capacity to make and manage a Pokémon website or wiki that handles all the issues I have with Bulbapedia and Serebii, at least not as one person, and so many people have already put much more effort than I could ever hope to into many things in this series - why not give credit where credit is due and link to the sources I know are proper, while supplementing that info with the stuff I can do?
If it doesn't get used the way I described above, it's no skin off my back. Wouldn't be the first time I put effort into something where the amount of effort was very disproportionate relative to the usage by others. But if you're interested in seeing more accurate and specific sources for things you care about, I recommend passing this around.
Thank you for your time.