Editing Field map encounter mechanics (section)

== Exploiting the encounter system ==

“Time” as mentioned above is intended to be made proportional to total distance traveled. On field maps, Cloud has two forms of movement: walking and running. If the developers wanted to make it so you got battles after traveling about the same distance no matter if you were walking or running, they had two options for how to modify how the encounter system works while walking:

# Multiply the distance between each battle check by (walk speed / run speed)
# Multiply the danger value increment per battle check by (walk speed / run speed)

If the developers chose the first option, then walking would truly behave like slow running, but this would probably have been harder to implement. The developers chose the second option, which is one of two reasons why encounters can be manipulated.

The second reason is because the random number generator used to determine when battles occur is, to put it lightly, not very good. It consists of a hardcoded shuffled list of numbers which is provided below, and random numbers are pulled by indexing into this list and incrementing the index for the next random number.