Why am I able to infect same Pokemon with pokerus and no dot on the status screen?

Question

So I was killing unowns for stat exp in Pokemon crystal VC on my 3ds with my gengar and it got infected with pokerus. The next day pokerus was gone and there was no dot on my status screen. Luckily I had infected all my Pokemon and stored some in the pc.

I remember reading on bulbapedia that a Pokemon who has been infected with pokerus will no longer be able to become infected again and will have a small dot on the status screen. My gengar did not have this "dot".

I tried to see if I could find an image online of this pokerus dot in someone elses g/s/c game but it doesnt seem like anyones actually posted what this pokerus dot looks like.

Now that my gengar didn't have this dot, I wondered if he would still have the double stat exp bonus. (bulbapedia states that this should have been the case after pokerus went away)

Then I got an idea. Bulbapedia states: Once a Pokémon's immune system has fought off the virus, they cannot spread it further, nor can it be spread to them by other Pokémon. In Generations II and III, a dot will appear on the Pokémon's status screen to indicate that they have had the virus previously.

If this is true then I shouldn't be able to infect my gengar, so I tried doing exactly that. I went to the pc and withrew a pidgey that I had infected with pokerus and used it to infect my gengar, and it became infected, how is this possible?

After that I tried waiting until midnight to check if pokerus would be gone again and hoped that maybe this time the pokerus dot would show up on my gengar's status screen.

It did not.

I tried infecting gengar a third time but I just kept getting the same result. No dot.

So my question here is:

Why did gengar not get this dot on the status screen?

Why am I able to infect the same Pokemon over and over?

And lastly, if someone has a video or image of this pokerus dot, then please share it with me, I would love to know what it looks like (has to be in gen 2 of course)

Comments

Is this happening only to your one Gengar, or does the virus completely disappear when your other Pokemon get cured?

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@sumwun It's the same for every pokemon. Very strange.

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According to Bulbapedia https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9rus , the cured icon is a 2x2 black dot that appears near the HP bar on the stats screen. There are pictures toward the bottom of the article. I expect it is very easy to miss. Are you sure it isn't there on Gengar or any others?

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Are you making sure that you save each time?

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Yeah, I've saved every time.

 I cant show you guys if the dot is there yet, as I accidentally infected my team for the 4th time, but I'll make sure to show a pic of my gengars status screen when pokerus goes away again at midnight.

I have also tried infecting my team on a different copy of crystal, by trading an infected mon over to see if I'm gonna get a different result. I'll make sure to give an update on that too.

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https://imgur.com/a/UJPZxON

imgur link to images of gengar with pokerus and after being cured. The sentret is the one I infected on my other copy of crystal.

There doesn't seem to be a dot anywhere on their status screens.

I was also able to infect gengar for the 5th time and sentret the second time.

Answer 1

Turns out the answer was already on Bulbapedia.

The Pokérus is stored in a Pokémon's data structure as a single byte. In hexadecimal, this can be represented as a two-digit number XY. The upper 4 bits of the byte, X, represent the specific strain of the Pokérus the Pokémon has contracted. The lower 4 bits, Y, represent the number of days remaining before the infected Pokémon is cured of the virus.

If Y is 0 and X is nonzero, then the Pokémon is "cured" of the Pokérus. If both X and Y are 0, then the Pokémon has never been affected by the Pokérus.

X values of 0 are not legitimate, since upon being "cured" the Pokémon would appear to have never had the Pokérus at all.

Also here's the dot from gen 2.

source

Comments

thank you, but I still don't understand why I'm able to infect the same pokemon over and over again. I also don't see this dot anywhere on my status screen :(

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How does the last sentence in the quote not answer your question? Or do you want to know how X = 0 causes the weird behavior?

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A re-worded version of this answer might read: You're able to re-infect the Pokemon because the game cannot differentiate a Pokemon with "cured" Pokerus of type X=0 from a Pokemon that has never had Pokerus before. This same Pokerus with X=0 is being spread between your Pokemon.
Knowing this, it makes sense that the black dot would not appear.

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So the dot doesn't show up because of a glitch/coding oversight?

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I can't see why the system would be designed in such a way, so you could label it a coding oversight. But an error of this kind should be fairly obvious to a developer, so it may be intentional.