It turns out you don’t always need a Big Buizel in Pokemon Legends: Arceus

There was a time when players would be traversing the wilds of ancient Hisui, working their way through varied locations, and capturing dozens of Pokémon at a time—and yet the only thing on their minds would be if the fabled Big Buizel exists or not. Now, more than eight months after the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, we know that not only does it exist, but there are ways to cheat your way through one of the most specific side quests in the game. 

Very early on in your Hisuian adventure, you will get a request titled “Big Buizel, Little Buizel” and be tasked with bringing Dorian of the Security Corps a “bigger specimen” for the Buizel species to compare and raise alongside his existing Buizel. 

This might sound easy at first because there are multiple places to catch Buizel right outside of Jubilife Village very early on. But that ease of access to Buizel is deceptive, as many players spend countless hours trying to catch a “Big Buizel” to show Dorian. 

You can’t just catch any Buizel for this quest because Dorian specifically wants to see a Buizel with a height of 2’8” (0.80m) or larger. You can easily check the size of each Pokémon you catch in their Summary screen, but that size is a variable that you can’t control in most cases—meaning you have to get lucky when catching the Water type to finish this very small quest. 

Now, almost a full year removed from the rush of trying to complete the game, Pokémon data guru Anubis has discovered that you actually don’t need to find the specific Buizel Dorian is requesting to finish the job. 

According to their testing, Dorian, otherwise known as Big Buizel Man will actually take undersized Buizel if you get lucky. Specifically, if a Buizel is 2’7” there is a 3/22 chance that he will accept it. That number then expands to 861/16,512 for non-Alpha Buizels being accepted overall. 

This is tied to the internal storage value for height being set to 0/255, which is generated “triangularly” at 0-127 plus 0-128, with Alpha Pokémon automatically being set to 255 for the species. 

Dorian will accept Buizel that are set to a size value between 215 and 255, which can be achieved by Buizel listed at 2’7” because they have a chance of holding a range between 196 and 217. So it is an extremely small chance, but you can get lucky and get a high roll. 

This really doesn’t change the approach most players will take since you will need to get lucky regardless when catching Buizel in the wild—but it is a cool look behind the code.