Assorted PSZ research dump - weapon min ATP, RNG, etc (some help wanted)

posting the sheet at the very top of the page so you don't have to read my musings:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

the rest of the thread:

Hello friends. You may or may not know me from such smash hits as "stop using Dolz Soul" in NGS, and I loathe to announce I've been poking and prodding around in PSZ to try and find info that's been missing everywhere else.

As of right now, with a little help from users in various PS servers, I've been slowly trying to stab at the various files in PSZ to try and find information I just couldn't find elsewhere.

I am currently unsure just how known some of this stuff has been, but I couldn't find anything on quick searches.. so I just went at it myself.

THE IMPORTANT NON-TECHY STUFF

The most important notes thus far are simply just the fact we now have weapon minimum ATP on top of their displayed maximum, but I've also poked around enemy drop formats and found some various bits and bobs.

In regards to enemies with more than one drop, each drop slot has its own drop pool it rolls on. Our current databases show enemy drops as if it's a massive loot pool, but each item drop slot can only roll on that slot's specific loot pool.

While Heaven's Mother has 16 total drops, only one of them can be the rare armors (Noble Cloak, etc). It then rolls five each of Melee, Range, and Tech - while all five can drop their respective Zero weapon, only two of the Melee weapons can roll on Claire Doubles.

As another example, Reyburn has six drop slots, and while all six of them can roll Draken Horn, only one of them can roll on Heat Protect. Similarly, Humilias can only roll on Milas Breaker on three of its loot slots, while the other three roll on White Barrel.


SLIGHTLY NEAT TECHY STUFF

The (primary) seed for randomized events is sixteen bytes long and stored at 0x0211C844 in RAM. Using an emulator with a RAM watch feature such as DeSmuME lets you watch it in realtime.

This is given a random value at startup before you even get to the "Licensed by Nintendo" splash screen. It is based off the current system time as of game boot, down to the second.

The seed rolls in a deterministic order based on the current seed, and is consumed every time a random event occurs - footstep dust clouds, enemy behavior, accuracy checks, particle generation... etc. Ambient events on the overworld can advance it as well, such as light ray generation in town as well as butterfly movement (which forces it to advance every single frame), various humming in Eternal Tower, etc. Techs in particular are very chaotic in terms of advancing the seed, but for most purposes you likely would want to just advance it via footstep dust clouds.

Notable is that there are no dust clouds in the underground, so you can't advance the RNG by walking around, but you can advance the seed by talking to NPCs.

Items have a listed drop rate ranging from 1 to 50000. What the actual effect on this means is still unclear; the current theory is that the game checks drop rates against a seeded value and if the rolled number is within a specific range, you get it. If anyone has actually researched this, please let me know and point me in the direction of said research! I've kept hearing things like "nothing is worse than 1/4096" but that's just a video game number that happens to be a multiple of 1024, which is also a video game number.. which this game shouldn't need to have to respect, since it's a DS title. I could be wrong, though.

Order is likely to be monster rare drop -> area rare drop -> generic drop -> Meseta. Basically every monster's most common rare is around a notated value of 7500, so this means in general monsters have about a 11% chance to drop anything "rare" before going on in the pool.

Enemies seem to have a "Drop Anything Rate" in this game which is more akin to the "do not drop Meseta" rate. In general, this is about 33%.

The base items from a Treasure Box and any Crates in the sector are determined the current seed the moment you enter the sector, and anything you do inside it will not change them. The order you defeat enemies, how long it takes you to defeat them, etc, will not change the actual base items, but Attribute%, random Elements, and Element levels are rolled based on the current seed.

As an example, if your boxes drop three Meseta crystals, a Difluid, and an Askalon, you can only change factors on the Askalon by advancing the seed. The Meseta drop values and Difluid will be static.

Leaving and re-entering the sector will re-roll the base drops from the Treasure Box and crates, for whatever that's worth.

All in all, every totally 0'd item you got was entirely your own fault. Just hit the box better, dummy.

Finally, we're not quite sure what's going on with the boost enemy drop rates. The going assumption is that the second value is the actual drop rate when the enemy isn't boosted (as you can still drop Ainsraiffe from a non-boost Helion) but the first rate seems to be a sort of factor? It's higher on items with low drop rates, and lower on items with high drop rates. If anyone knows better, please offer input!

Over the coming weeks I plan on parsing the rest of the area drop formats, as well as the enemy stat formats, and seeing if I can get anything else funny,

I also found the damage formula online and threw a quick damage calculator together. If anyone knows the ATA vs EVP formula, that'd also be awesome, since I'd like to make one of those as well.

"this game is like fourteen years old why are you doing this now"

1) i wanted to know the ATP range on my Blaze Roar
2) most of the info links seemed to just go to now-dead JP wikis
3) no, really, i just wanted to know the ATP range on my Blaze Roar
4) i simp for psycho wand harder than i do most fictional women and wanted to know its rate

Drop rates are being cooked up as we speak!

Something we need to know is if the 1.25x free roam/online boost is actually real, and if it is, what exactly does it apply and not apply to. I'll try to publish rates under every assumption after I'm done with "offline/quest" rates since those are at least the base rates.

These rates are definitely phantasy star rates... you can get a peek at them in a less human-readable format in the document above. Everything is out of 50000 and scanned from the top down. Formatting is a heavy work in progress featuring mistakes such as me forgetting about the sub tables and not leaving room for them.

And just for fun, there are some wacky Sega typos/errors. Rika's Claw's boosted rate, Phantasma Gauntlet's boosted rate, and less notably, Heaven's mother giving a 6* rate to a 7* item in her 16th drop table.