Weigh-In

Two Pokemon, one balance scale. Pick the side you think goes down, watch it tip, and keep the streak alive for as long as your Pokedex brain holds out.

How Heavy Is a Pokemon, Really?

Snorlax, everybody knows it is heavy. But is it heavier than Steelix, a 30-foot snake made of solid iron? (It is, by 132 pounds!) Weigh-In puts two Pokemon on a balance scale, one with its Pokedex weight showing and one mystery challenger, and you pick the side you think goes down. Get it right and the scale tips, the challenger's weight flips over, it slides across to become the new known weight, and a fresh challenger drops onto the empty pan. Get it wrong and the streak ends right there. Brutal, but fair!

The first three weigh-ins are warm-ups where one side is at least two and a half times heavier than the other, and then the gaps shrink, until after fifteen in a row you are splitting Pokemon that sit within 50 percent of each other. Pairs within 5 percent of each other never show up at all, in pounds or in kilograms, because a weight rounded to the nearest pound can flip the order of a close pair (more on that below). The Daily is the same chain for everyone on the same UTC date, drawn from all 649 Pokemon of the first five generations, and it tops out at 25 in a row. Endless lets you pick the regions and keeps going until you miss.

When the chain breaks you get one bonus question, something like how many Pikachu it takes to balance one Snorlax. Slide to your answer, hit Weigh it, and the scale unlocks. The bonus is scored on a log scale: the exact answer is 100%, being off by a factor of two in either direction scores 70%, and being off by ten times or more scores zero. The answer uses whichever unit you have picked, so for Pikachu and Snorlax it is exactly 78 in Red and Blue's own pounds (1014.0 divided by 13.0), or 76.7 in kilograms.

Who Is the Heaviest Pokemon?

Groudon, and it is not even close. The Hoenn legend weighs 950.0 kg (2,094.4 lb), a full 200 kg more than second place. Here are the heavyweights of the first five generations:

Snorlax is the heaviest Pokemon in Kanto, and it kept that crown through Gold and Silver too, since Johto's heaviest, Steelix, comes in at 400.0 kg, until Hoenn showed up with Metagross and Groudon. The regional champions are Snorlax for Kanto, Steelix for Johto, Groudon for Hoenn, Giratina for Sinnoh and Zekrom for Unova at 345.0 kg. My favourite line in that table is the last one. Wailord has the biggest Pokedex height of all 649 at 14.5 m, and its Black and White entry opens with "The biggest of all Pokémon." It still weighs less than Snorlax, 398.0 kg against 460.0 kg. A whale that loses a weigh-in to a nap. Incredible.

And Who Is the Lightest?

Gastly and Haunter, tied at 0.1 kg (0.2 lb), which makes sense for Pokemon that are mostly gas. Right behind them at 0.3 kg (0.7 lb) come Rotom, Uxie, Mesprit, Azelf and Tynamo. Now here is the wildest number on this page: when Haunter evolves into Gengar it goes from 0.1 kg to 40.5 kg, 405 times heavier, the biggest jump of any evolution in the data. And Groudon outweighs Gastly 9,500 to 1, so if you ever wondered how many Gastly it takes to balance one Groudon, now you know (the slider only goes to 2,000, so you will not see that one in the bonus round).

Which Pokemon Weights Are Just Plain Weird?

• Some evolutions go on a diet. Nincada weighs 5.5 kg and Shedinja, which the Pokedex calls "a discarded bug shell that came to life," just 1.2 kg. Venonat (30.0 kg) slims down into a 12.5 kg Venomoth, and Clamperl at 52.5 kg outweighs both of the Pokemon it can become, Huntail (27.0 kg) and Gorebyss (22.6 kg).
• Pikachu is 13.0 lb, not 13.2. The Game Boy games store 13.0 lb, and the familiar 13.2 lb comes from converting its 6.0 kg later. Snorlax works the same way, 1014.0 lb in the cartridge and 1014.1 lb converted.
• Golem is a gram off. Red and Blue list Golem at 662.0 lb, but its metric weight, 300.0 kg, converts to 661.4 lb. That is just past what rounding can explain, by about a gram.
• Nidoqueen weighs exactly as much as Pikachu in Japan. Japanese Pokemon Green lists Nidoqueen at 6.0 kg, the same as Pikachu, and the disassembly marks that line with a plain BUG, should be 600.
• Reshiram and Golurk are twins on the scale. Both weigh exactly 330.0 kg, so you will never see them weighed against each other here.

How Are Pokedex Weights Stored?

In tenths, always, but tenths of what depends on the cartridge. The American Red and Blue store each weight as a two-byte count of tenths of a pound, so Pikachu's entry literally reads dw 130, and the Pokedex screen prints it as five digits, then slides the last digit one tile to the right to squeeze in a decimal point. There is even a special case for weights under 1 lb, where the code writes a 0 in front of the point, and in Kanto only Gastly and Haunter (stored as 2, so 0.2 lb) ever need it. Japanese Pokemon Green stores tenths of a kilogram instead, 60 for Pikachu and 4600 for Snorlax, and the American pounds are those metric weights converted and rounded, which is why 249 of the 251 Game Boy weights are whole pounds. Crystal keeps the pounds and stores the height right next to them, dw 104, 130 for Pikachu, meaning 1 ft 04 in and 13.0 lb.

Then Ruby and Sapphire flipped it around. The Emerald disassembly stores Groudon as .weight = 9500, tenths of a kilogram, and the English Pokedex converts on the fly, multiplying by 100,000, dividing by 4,536 (0.4536 kg to the pound) and rounding to a tenth, which prints 2094.4 lbs. So from Gen 3 on, the metric number is the real one and the pounds are math. Weigh-In shows both: the Game Boy's own pounds for #1 to #251, pounds converted from PokeAPI's metric weights for #252 to #649, and PokeAPI's kilograms for everybody. Those two do not always line up. Wartortle is heavier than Gorebyss in pounds (50.0 against 49.8) but lighter in kilograms (22.5 against 22.6), and 31 pairs flip like that, which is exactly why near-ties sit out.

Where Do the Sprites Come From?

Every Pokemon is drawn in the style of the game it debuted in: Kanto in its Red and Blue sprite, coloured with the Super Game Boy palette the Red and Blue cartridge gives it, Johto in its Gold sprite with Gold's colours, Hoenn from Emerald, Sinnoh from Platinum and Unova from Black and White. Every sprite is stretched to fill its pan, so a tiny Joltik is drawn as big as a Wailord, and that is on purpose. The picture will not tell you the weight, you have to know it!

Your homework: find the heaviest Pokemon you would still be willing to carry home. (Mine is a 13.0 lb Pikachu, and honestly that is already a lot of cheek.) If you want the other half of the Pokedex numbers, Size Up does the same thing for height, and if you have an idea for the next Pokemon data game, tell me about it!