With the leaked source code of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, more information about the inner workings of the games are being discovered each day.
In one of the most recent info dumps, it has been discovered that playing any of the games on certain dates will result in players having increased or decreased encounter rates.
This only applies to a handful of specific dates that relate to new beginnings, important dates, or tragedies that have impacted the world. There are still more dates being discovered, but as of now, they are split into two categories, with the encounter rate being increased or decreased by five percent or 10 percent.
Here are all of the dates listed in that code, with most of them being common holidays.
Five-percent encounter rate increase
- Jan. 11 – Opening the Mirror
- Feb. 3 – Setsubun
- Feb. 11 – National Foundation Day
- Feb. 12 – Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday
- March 3 – Hinamatsuri
- March 17 – St. Patrick’s Day
- Match 25 – Viernes Santo
- April 1 – School Entrance Ceremony
- April 25 – Italian Liberation Day
- April 29 – Greenery Day
- May 3 – Constitution Memorial Day
- May 5 – Children’s Day
- May 8 – End of WWII, France
- May 28 – Whit Monday
- June 2 – Festa della Repubblica
- June 21 – Unknown
- July 4 – Independence Day
- July 14 – Fête Nationale
- July 24 – Unknown
- Aug. 15 – Obon (assumption)
- Aug. 28 – Bank Holiday
- Sept. 15 – Mid-Autumn Festival
- Sept. 20 – Unknown
- Oct. 3 – Tag der Deutschen Einheit
- Oct. 12 – Fiesta Nacional de España
- Oct. 30 – Halloween (assumption)
- Nov. 1 – All Saints’ Day
- Nov. 11 – Veteran’s Day, WWI Armistice Memorial Day
- Nov. 16 – Volkstrauertag
- Dec. 6 – Día de la Constitución
- Dec. 8 – Virgin Immaculate Conception Day
- Dec. 23 – Emperor Akihito’s Birthday
- Dec. 24 – Christmas Eve
10-percent encounter rate increase
- Jan. 12 – Junichi Masuda’s Birthday
- July 7 – Tanabata
Five-percent encounter rate decrease
- Aug. 13 – Obon Lantern Festival
- Aug. 14 – Obon
- Aug. 15 – Obon
- Nov. 3 – Culture Day
- Dec. 31 – Christmas Day
- Dec. 31 – New Year’s Eve
10-percent encounter rate decrease
- Jan. 1 – New Year’s Day
- March 21 – Spring Equinox
- Aug. 6 – Hiroshima
- Aug. 9 – Nagasaki
- Sept. 11 – 9/11
- Sept. 23 – Autumn Equinox
On top of all of the information about encounter changes, there are also a list of dates that increase Egg hatching speed by 10 percent. Many of those dates match this newer list too, with other inclusions like Nov. 28, the release date of Diamond and Pearl in Japan.
All of these dates are confirmed to work in the sequel game, Pokemon Platinum, and coders are looking to see if this trend continued into HeartGold and SoulSilver, and perhaps into modern games too in some form.
