Mash Catch — a Gen1Recomp mod

Disclaimer: This project was 100% created by AI, under my super-vision.

Every playground had the rumor: mash A (or B, or both!) while the Pokéball wobbles and it's more likely to catch. It was never true. Now it is.

And because no two playgrounds agreed on the ritual — some held Down and hammered B, some pressed and held Up+A as the ball opened, some tapped along with the wobbles — the technique is yours to pick, or to build.

A mod for gen1recomp (the Gen 1 Recompilation Project). Works with official gen1recomp builds as-is on every platform — no patched game needed.

How it works

When you throw a ball at a wild Pokémon, the game rolls the exact vanilla catch formula the instant the ball leaves your hand — same odds, same math, untouched. That roll lands in one of three buckets:

1. Caught. The ball was going to catch it anyway. Plays out normally; your mashing changed nothing (but it felt great).
2. Clean bounce-off. The ball pops open with zero wobbles. The mon was never really in the ball — nothing can save this one.
3. The near-miss. The ball grips, wobbles 1–3 times, and vanilla says it breaks free. This is where the mod lives. Instead of the ball popping open after the last wobble, the mod pauses at exactly that moment and rolls one extra "redemption" chance based on how hard you mashed. Win it, and the break-free becomes: screen flash, one more wobble... click. "But the mashing held it shut!"

Lose the redemption roll and the ball pops open exactly like vanilla — same message, same turn spent, and the wild mon takes its move as usual.

Techniques — pick your ritual

Every playground had its own version of the legend, so the TECHNIQUE setting lets you pick the one you grew up with:

TECHNIQUE	what your hands do
MASH A+B (default)	Hammer A and/or B. Alternating between them scores a little extra — the "secret technique".
HOLD DOWN+MASH B	Keep Down held the whole time; only B presses made while it's held count.
HOLD UP+A	Press and hold Up+A and don't let go. Scored by how much of the window you kept both held.
TAP A ON BEAT	Tap A in time with the wobbles — the tink you hear as each wobble starts is the cue. Spamming between beats costs you.
HOLD B+ROCK L/R	Keep B held and rock the d-pad Left–Right; only direction changes count.
CUSTOM	Build your own from the CUSTOM rows below.

Fairness note: every technique fills the same 0–1 meter feeding the same redemption table. No preset is stronger — they're different rituals, not different odds. Pick by heart, not by math.

Custom techniques

Set TECHNIQUE to CUSTOM and the four CUSTOM rows take over:

• CUSTOM HOLD 1 / 2 — up to two buttons that must be held.
• CUSTOM TAP — the button(s) you press: A, B, A+B, or L/R.
• CUSTOM STYLE — MASH (hammer them), ALTERNATE (only changes count), HOLD (no tapping, just keep the hold buttons down), or ON BEAT (time taps to the wobbles).

A button can't both gate and score — if it's in a HOLD slot it drops out of TAP. A tapping style with no tap buttons becomes a HOLD, and a custom with no buttons at all falls back to MASH A+B.

How the technique is measured

• The window opens the moment you throw and closes after the last wobble — so "throw and immediately start" is correct form, just like when you were nine.
• Mash-style scoring: only press-downs count (holding scores nothing unless the technique is a hold), and full marks ≈ 5 presses per second sustained across the whole window. Half that fast, half a meter — and half the redemption chance.
• Turbo cap: anything past 8 presses in a second is ignored, so turbo controllers and autoclickers earn nothing over honest thumbs.
• Hold-style scoring: the meter is simply the fraction of the window you kept every hold button down. Grip it like you mean it.
• On-beat scoring: each wobble is one beat; the first tap within three-quarters of a second of the tink hits it. The meter is beats hit minus a small penalty per off-beat press — timing, not volume.

The redemption roll

Your chance to flip a near-miss is simply:

chance = (cap for how many times it wobbled) × (your mash meter, 0–1)

The caps come from the MASH STRENGTH setting — closer throws redeem better:

wobbles before it broke free	SUBTLE	CLASSIC	PLAYGROUND (default)
3 (the heartbreaker)	10%	20%	50%
2	5%	10%	18%
1	2%	4%	8%
0 (bounce-off)	—	—	—

So on default settings, a three-wobble break-free with the meter maxed is a coin flip. Don't mash at all and the chance is exactly 0% — no roll is even made, and your game is bit-for-bit identical to vanilla.

The settings, one by one

option	default	what it actually does
MASH BONUS	ON	Master switch. OFF = the mod is completely inert and every throw is pure vanilla.
TECHNIQUE	MASH A+B	Picks your ritual (table above). Changing it mid-battle is fine — each throw locks in the technique as the ball leaves your hand.
MASH STRENGTH	PLAYGROUND	Picks the cap column in the table above. SUBTLE for "I want to believe it's helping", CLASSIC for a fair boost, PLAYGROUND for the legend as the playground told it.
MASH METER	OFF	Draws a small yellow bar in the corner while the window is open, filling as you work the technique. OFF preserves the mystery; ON shows you exactly what the redemption roll will use.
CUSTOM HOLD 1/2, TAP, STYLE	—	The CUSTOM preset's parts; ignored unless TECHNIQUE is CUSTOM.

The fine print

• Safari Zone, trainer "blocked the ball" throws, ghosts, and the Master Ball (which never fails) are all untouched.
• Mashing can never hurt a throw — it only ever upgrades a wobbled-then-failed one.
• The mod keeps count of every catch the legend redeemed, in its own save data.

Install

Grab mash-catch-<version>.zip from Releases, then drop it onto the game window (or import it from the mod manager). Never unzip it into the game folder.