Void

This article is about the out of bounds region in Generation IV specifically. For "void" regions in Generation V and Generation VI, see the corresponding sections of out of bounds.

The void is the name of the out of bounds region in Generation IV games, named as such for its pitch black appearance, and general ease of navigation in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. The most important technical property of the void is that the map ID (which is a 2-byte integer that determines which city, town, route, or building the game thinks the player is in) is read from an invalid area of the MatrixLayout, potentially out of bounds for the RAM buffer. Notably, they may come from RAM regions, such as the Mapdata, that is changed by the act of entering a new map ID itself. By strategically rewriting those RAM regions, efficient voidroutes are found that allows the player to travel to any desired map ID. Travelling through voidroutes is known as void exploration, or voiding for short.

Once in the desired map ID, the player can either directly exploit its map scripts (for example in the Retire glitch), or save and reset to load the correct MatrixLayout for that map ID. All outdoor maps in Sinnoh share the same MatrixLayout, but the indoor maps all have their own MatrixLayouts. In an indoor MatrixLayout, the player can easily walk towards the "physical" indoor map, and for some maps, the player may be able to bypass the walls surrounding the walkable area from the outside. This is used, for example, to set up the Union Room wrong-warping glitch.

Another important aspect of the void is the player's coordinates in the MatrixLayout, which are internally represented by two 32-bit integers, but when saving the game, or storing a location to warp back later, the coordinates are saved as unsigned 16-bit integers. Normally those are the same, because valid coordinates are always inside the 0 ~ 65535 range. However, when exploring the void, the player can go to coordinates out of this range, and cause a "coordinate warp". For example, saving at (-2, -3) will cause the player to end up at (65534, 65533). This is commonly exploited by saving in a Fake Sinnoh (when the map ID corresponds to an outdoor map) to end up at the real place.

The void should not be confused with the abyss, which is a pitch black region created by tweaking. Although abysses are commonly used as an entry point into the void, they are not themselves out of bounds (and their glitchy properties only come from sections of the map not being properly loaded).

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