Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link

The Elite Four moved into world generation, starting a run over became something you can do, and the roads got people on them — swimming, rowing, and keeping score. 🏆

• Restarting hands you the starter screen back. /pokemonrestart emptied your run and then left you with nothing and no way to get anything — the game still remembered you had taken a starter, so it never offered one again, and the type-lock question rode on that offer. Both come back now.
• Gyms stand on the ground. They were landing a block or two up, worst of all Misty's, whose water gym carries its own platform. The ground is brought up to the doorstep and a little way past it.
• You can get in the door. Nothing used to check that the terrain in front of a gym was not simply standing there. The way in is cut now — through hillside, never through anybody's building.
• Half the trainers on a water crossing are in a boat. Restricting the water to swimmers made every crossing the same person; a boat lets anybody be out there.
• Chests at roadside camps are rare, and the ones that are not chests are rarer. Also fixed: with Lootr installed the trap quietly never worked at all.

1.4.1 — Trainers who swim, and chests that bite. 🌊

• Water crossings have trainers on them. They used to have none at all — every spot along a crossing was thrown out for being wet. Swimmers, sailors and fishers now hold the water the way anybody else holds the road, treading at the surface instead of sinking. Which trainers count as water folk is configurable, so any pack's roster works.
• Being challenged on the water no longer takes your mount away. There is nowhere to set you down out there, so the fight happens where you are. On land nothing changes.
• Not every chest at a rest stop is a chest. Some of them are a Gimmighoul waiting very patiently. Which ones is fixed by the world, so a chest you leave behind is the same one when you return — and meeting it counts as your encounter for that zone, like anything else you find out there.

1.4.0 — Start over when a run ends, gyms that stand beside the street instead of on somebody's house, trainers who remember what they have done to you, and storms that find you in the air. 🔁

• /pokemonrestart. A nuzlocke ends when it ends; this is how you begin again. It clears your log, empties your party and your PC and lifts a game over. It asks first — type it twice within 30 seconds — because there is no undoing it. Your run and nobody else's.
• Your type lock waits for you to really start over. Restarting clears it, but the picker does not come back until the next time you reach for a starter, which is when the game actually begins again.
• Restarting a Soul Link leaves it, it does not break it. Everybody else keeps their links exactly as they were. A pair that is left alone in a zone is set free rather than left waiting forever for a partner who is not coming back.
• A gym stands at the mouth of the town's street. It used to be dropped a fixed distance off the centre in one of four directions, which is how it ended up on top of a village house. It now goes where the town's own street grid was left unfinished — paved, facing out, and clear of everything the town already built. And ground nobody has loaded no longer counts as empty ground.
• Route trainers stay where you left them, and they keep score. They no longer despawn. A trainer's tally follows the trainer rather than the body: beat one Youngster Joey and the next one down the road already knows. Any who have ended a run wear the count in their name.
• Lightning finds you riding out in a storm. In the air or out on open water, mounted, in a thunderstorm — there is nothing above you and something notices. Diving is safe, and the chance is configurable.
• Reviving can be aimed at one route, and it understands Soul Link. /nuzlocke revive … zone "Route 7" brings back only what was caught there; reviving a soul-bound Pokémon brings back its whole group, because half a link is a Pokémon that cannot fight.

1.3.31 — The Elite Four is part of the world now, not something dropped into it afterwards. ⛰️

• The league is built by world generation. It used to be placed onto finished ground once you had walked far enough down a road, which meant it never got the one thing every other structure gets: the terrain moulded to fit it. So it stood on whatever was there — half-buried in a hillside, or on a pedestal of untouched ground — and its interior kept whatever the hill had put inside it. Generated with the world, it sits on a foundation and is hollow inside, like a village or a mansion.
• Still one per world, still out on a road between two towns, still far from where you start. Where it goes is now decided by the world's seed rather than by which road somebody walked first, so it is the same place every time you load that seed — and it will not be built over water.
• The Elite Four appears on your map the first time you get near it, as its own settlement.

1.3.30 — Settings that actually take effect on a server, a shared death that waits its turn, trainers who stop challenging you to fights you cannot have and start holding their post, gyms that stand on the ground and stop repeating themselves, and a Soul Link log you can read at a glance. ⚙️

⚖️ Rules

• No trading. A Pokémon you did not catch yourself is not part of your run, and a trade is the one way to put a team together without ever spending a zone on it. Player-to-player trades are refused; it is a setting, so a group that wants them can have them. Duelling another player is untouched and deliberately has no special rule: it resolves as a battle against any other trainer, and whatever would die in one dies in this.

⛰️ Gyms

• No two towns get the same leader while a leader has no gym. Each town's gym was drawn from the town alone, so on a small roster the same leader turned up twice while somebody else turned up nowhere. A town now takes the next leader nobody has — and only once the whole roster is standing somewhere do towns start sharing again.

☠️ The Soul Link log is a table

• A row is a zone, a column is a player. Each cell is what that player caught there — so a row is a soul link, and you read the pairing off the shape of the table instead of hunting for it. The old log stacked everyone's encounters one under the other with nothing tying a pair together, and at three players it stopped being readable at all.
• An empty cell in a filled row says waiting. That is somebody's catch with no partner yet, and it cannot battle until the column fills. An empty row is just a zone nobody has spent.

⛰️ Gyms

• A gym stands on the ground its town stands on. Gyms could generate hanging in the air, or with half the building inside a hill. Three separate things were going wrong at once. The correction only ever pushed a gym up, so one that landed too high was never brought down. The height it was handed was then counted twice for any gym that follows the ground, which is what put one in the sky. And the ground it measured was whatever was tallest — a treetop, or the surface of the lake next door. A gym is now levelled against the ground under its own footprint, all of it rather than the single column under one corner, and the ground below is filled in to meet the building the way a village house gets its terrace on a slope.
• A town picks the flattest side for its gym. Of the four sides it could build on, a slope is passed over for level ground. It stays a preference: a town surrounded by hills still gets its gym.

☠️ Soul Link

• A shared death waits for the battle to be over. When a linked Pokémon died, every soulmate was struck down on the spot — including one in the middle of its own battle, which killed it inside a fight that was still being played. The loss now lands as soon as each soulmate is out of combat, however that combat ends: a win, a loss, a run, or an owner who logs out mid-fight. A server that goes down before it lands picks it up again on the next start, so a soulmate can never quietly outlive its partner.

⚔️ Trainers

• Gym leaders wait in their gym. Leaders were charging out and challenging players on sight like any roadside trainer. Leaders, the Elite Four and Champions are somebody you go and find: they hold their ground and the battle starts when you ask for it. Packs that name their leaders by region rather than by role — COBBLEVERSE among them — were the ones this missed entirely.
• Most trainers hold their post. Seven in ten now stand where they were placed instead of pacing the road — they still turn to face you, still challenge you, still fight; they just stop wandering off, so a trainer you walked past is a trainer you can walk back to. The rest keep roaming. It is a setting: all of them, none of them, or anywhere in between.
• A trainer puts you down before it fights you. Being challenged while flying on a Pokémon dismounted you in the air, so the battle opened with a fall you could not avoid. The challenge now sets you on the ground underneath you first — and a trainer with nowhere to put you, over open water or over a drop, does not challenge at all.
• No challenge you cannot answer. Route trainers were picking fights with players who had nothing to fight with — an off-type Pokémon in the party under the Gym Leader Challenge type lock, an unbound Pokémon under Soul Link, or nothing left standing at all. The battle was cancelled the instant it opened and the trainer simply challenged again: the stare, the ding, the camera snap, over and over, with no way to make it stop. A trainer now works out whether the battle can start before telegraphing it, and leaves you alone until you can actually fight.

✨ Naming

• The nickname prompt shows the types. They are what you name a Pokémon after, and under a Gym Leader Challenge they are what decides whether it can be on the team at all — so being asked for a name without them was being asked blind.

⚙️ Settings

• /nuzlocke set now changes what it says it changed. Fifteen of the fifty-three settings were read from a different place than the command wrote to, so the command answered in green and those fifteen quietly stayed as they were. On a single-player world it went unnoticed, because the world-creation screen sets them correctly on the way in — but a dedicated server has no such screen, which left the entire route-trainer and gym subsystem impossible to configure there by any means.
• /nuzlocke config reload gives the config file back. The first per-world setting you ever changed pinned the world to that snapshot permanently: from then on you could edit config/cobblemon_nuzlocke.json, restart, and watch nothing happen, with nothing anywhere saying why. This drops the per-world overrides so the world follows the file again.

🗺️ Capture zones

• A village is not a free encounter. Settlements were being offered as their own capture zone with an encounter available, which they are not — they are part of the zone around them. This showed up on villages the map had not painted as a town.