Throw a ball at another trainer's Pokémon and take it. Pokemon Snag adds the Snag Ball to Gen1ReComp++: a real, reusable ball that works in trainer battles, so any Pokémon an opponent sends out is a Pokémon you can walk away with.
On Pokémon Gold you work your way into a black-market network — a first ball handed over in Cherrygrove, a fence who buys what you steal, and brokers who name a target and let you go and find it.
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| It starts with one ball and a target. | It goes about as well as she expected. |
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| A fence on Route 36 buys what you steal. | Contracts let you pick the kind of mark. |
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| He is very proud of that Yanma. | Not any more, he isn't. |
Development Preview: Pokemon Snag is in active development. Bug reports and feature ideas are welcome in GitHub Issues — please include the version number from your load log and which other mods were enabled.
Looking for exact merchant locations, payout math or quest triggers? Open the FAQ and spoiler guide — every detailed answer is collapsed so you only reveal what you want.
Johto gets its own story rather than a port of Kanto's. The mod splits on generation at load, and the Kanto quest never runs on Gold.
Snag Balls are not sold anywhere on Gold. Every ball you own comes from the questline, starting with the single one the Cherrygrove sailor hands you.
A sailor gives you exactly one SNAG BALL and points you at a girl with something unusual on her team. That one ball is guaranteed to catch her shiny Meowth — the only time the mod bends its own rules. Snag it, find him again before you leave town, and he hands over five more and tells you where to sell what you take.
A fence near Sudowoodo buys Pokémon you have snagged, and only those. He quotes a price and asks you to confirm before anything leaves your party, and he pays before it does.
He is also your safety net. Turn up with no Snag Balls of any kind and nothing he wants to buy, and he hands you one free rather than let you waste his time — so you cannot permanently run out. He is not generous about it.
A broker at the Magnet Train Station offers you a lead and lets you choose the type: PSYCHIC, NORMAL or BUG. Pick one and a trainer carrying that Pokémon turns up in the Goldenrod Underground. Somewhere in the city an ordinary passer-by is talking about having seen something strange — they have no idea what you are, and they are telling you where to look.
This is the first real job: no free ball, no guaranteed catch. Knock the target out and you have not failed — the mark comes back so you can try again. Snag it and the contract is done.
The second contract asks a different question — not which Pokémon, but what kind of person is carrying it:
- PERFORMER — the easier party, at the Dance Theater
- MYSTIC — a three-strong Ghost party, over by the Burned Tower
- COLLECTOR — rarer, stronger, out by the west gate
A neutral resident gossips about something odd they have seen, which points you at the mark. Only the advertised target completes the job, but the rest of their team is fair game.
Finish it and go back, and the contact hands you a HEIST BALL — twice as reliable as a plain Snag Ball. It is not sold anywhere and no fence will trade for one.
Contract targets are bounties: the mark you were sent for fences for at least 3 Snag Balls rather than the going rate for casual theft, and finishing a contract pays a flat 5 on top. The rest of a mark's team is fair game, but only the advertised target carries the bounty.
Once they have paid you, both contacts start buying — the Goldenrod broker directly, and the Ecruteak contact in a colder voice and at a higher level. Same rules either way: your last Pokémon is never sellable, and the payment always lands before the Pokémon leaves.
No sale pays less than 2 Snag Balls — giving up a Pokémon is permanent, and one ball back could not even repeat the throw that caught it. On top of that floor come bonuses for high level, hard-to-catch species and VIP victims, capped at 5. A quest mark never pays less than 3. Exact thresholds are in the FAQ behind a spoiler fold.
This applies on both games — Red and Gold share one valuation.
- Download
snag_quest-<version>.zipfrom the latest release. - In the launcher: MODS → Import mod .zip. On iOS, delete any older downloaded copy of the zip from Files first.
- Fully quit and relaunch.
Requires gen1recomp 0.1.38 or newer for Red, Blue and Yellow, and 0.1.78 or newer for Gold — that is the release Gen 2 support arrived in. Nothing else is mandatory.
Updating: once installed, the launcher checks this repo for new releases. The mod's entry shows "vX.Y.Z available" → tap → Update → fully quit and relaunch. No manual re-download.
After installing an update, fully quit and relaunch the game. The load log prints the running version so you can confirm what's live.
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Pokéball Colors — optional. On Red, Blue and Yellow it paints the Snag Ball's throw in Team Rocket black and red; this mod hands it those colours at startup, so there is nothing to set up.
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Too Many Balls — optional, and worth having on Gold. Gold's Ball pocket is small and this mod adds two more ids to it, so Pokemon Snag asks Too Many Balls for two slots of extra headroom when it is installed. Without it nothing breaks — the pocket is simply tighter, and if a reward will not fit, whoever owes it keeps that half until you have made room.
Its Ball Case tidies away its own balls, which is the quickest way to stop scrolling past a dozen of them. Your Snag Balls stay in the pocket rather than going into the case — each mod's balls stay with that mod — so the ones you actually throw mid-battle are still where you left them.
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Ribbons — supported. Reads the snag marker on stolen Pokémon and awards a ribbon.
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It sits quietly beside other mods on Gold. Everyone this mod adds in Johto — the sailor, the fence, the brokers, the marks — is its own character placed at runtime, not a vanilla NPC rewritten. So it does not compete with another mod for the same townsfolk, and nothing it adds can be silently overwritten by one.
Kanto has its own separate questline, and it is still here — nothing about it changed when Gold arrived.
A Team Rocket recruiter at the end of Nugget Bridge brings you into the business. Beat him, then hear him out: he sets you up with your first Snag Ball and a target, a Picnicker with a very special Meowth. The snag is guaranteed, and so is a surprise about that Meowth. Say no and the offer stays open — come back any time.
From there, four fences around Kanto quietly buy snagged Pokémon, paying 2–5 Snag Balls depending on the mon's level, rarity and who you stole it from. VIP targets — a certain rival, gym leaders, the Elite Four — fetch top price. They are not one organisation: two are Rocket, two are independents who simply like what falls off the back of a truck, and they each have their own opinion of you.
Red, Blue and Yellow are all supported. Where an NPC's internal name differs between versions, both names are registered. Every NPC this mod takes over was checked against the engine's Red and Yellow symbol tables: the Nugget Bridge recruiter, the Pewter fence and the Vermilion fence are identical across versions; the Celadon fence genuinely differs, so that one ships both names.
Unlike the Gold questline, the Kanto one works by taking over specific vanilla characters. If another mod claims the same character, only one of them wins and the other's dialogue silently never runs — that is how the engine resolves the conflict, not a bug in either mod. If a fence only ever gives their ordinary line, try disabling other NPC-editing mods to see which one is winning. (Team Rocket Returns was tested alongside this mod and does not conflict.)
quest_system by FAFF0x —
optional, and Kanto only. With it, the questline appears in the journal with
an objective, progress and map markers. Without it the quest plays
identically — it runs on its own save flags — you simply get no journal
entry. Grab quest_system_v<version>.zip from that repo's file list; it is
committed there rather than released, so the launcher's auto-update will not
cover it.
Shiny Pokémon —
optional, and only relevant here: Gold renders shiny Pokémon itself, so
nothing extra is needed there. In Kanto the division of labour matters —
this mod supplies the data, that mod supplies the picture. The quest
Meowth's shiny DVs are set here and are engine-native (Stats.isShiny), so
it is genuinely shiny whether or not that mod is installed. Every visual —
the ◆ marker beside the name, the sparkle on send-out — is drawn entirely by
Shiny Pokémon. Turning it off leaves the Meowth just as shiny, only
undecorated. Its marker and its recolour are separate options, so a Meowth
showing the ◆ but the wrong colour means SHINY COLORS is switched off.
Open MODS → POKEMON SNAG → OPTIONS (F10 mod manager). The Gold questline has no settings, and the battle always continues after a snag there.
| Option | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| CONTINUE BATTLE AFTER SNAG | ON | Trainer battles continue after a successful snag instead of ending |
| GET NEW SNAG BALLS | BOTH | Where Snag Balls come from after the quest: BOTH, MART (₽10,000 each) or FENCES |
| [DEV] REPLAY INTRO QUEST | OFF | Dev/testing toggle — lets you redo Introduction to Thievery |
If you're building on this, DEVELOPMENT.md documents the
engine internals this mod touches and the reasoning behind them — the
trainer-battle ball gate, the faint-pipeline handoff, and the
mon.snagged / mon.snagFrom / mon.snagLevel fields other mods can read.
Pokemon Snag exposes a snag.vip hook for mods that add important custom
trainers. The hook receives the built-in VIP verdict plus encounter context
and may return true to mark that trainer as VIP for fence valuation. The
verdict is stamped onto the stolen Pokémon as mon.snagVip, so the bonus
stays stable later even if the other mod is disabled.
mod.hooks:wrap("snag.vip", function(next_, vip, ctx)
vip = next_(vip, ctx)
if ctx.npc and ctx.npc.def and ctx.npc.def.name == "MY_CUSTOM_BOSS" then
return true
end
return vip
end)ctx includes game, world, npc, mapId, trainerClass, classIndex,
trainerName, memberIndex, trainerEvent, and sight.
Built for gen1recomp. By Mister Miracle (@mistermiracle3036).
The Nugget Bridge opening was trikus's idea, suggested in the gen1recomp Discord: instead of inventing a character to hand out the quest, use the Team Rocket grunt who already asks whether you want to join — and let saying yes actually mean something. Vanilla asks the question and then ignores your answer, so the hook was already there. It replaced an earlier opening built around the Viridian City girl.
Licensed under MIT. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.