Why are abilities stored in these index numbers?

Question

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Is this just how the game organizes abilities in the code? Why would the game organize it in such a semi-random order? Stench is 001, while Overgrow, Blaze, and Torrent don't pop up for 65 abilities?

Comments

The programmers most likely programmed the abilities into the games in that order. When they were done adding all the abilities, they decided it wasn't worth their time to rearrange them.

Answer 1

Yes, those are ID numbers used in Pokemon's game files. Here is a blog post from the author of Veekun that goes into some depth about this. (Mind harsh language and some programming + computer science theory.)

ID numbers aren't required to do anything except identify entries of data. For this reason, developers don't need to spend time maintaining a special order for the data, unless there is an efficiency problem or humans will be reading the list frequently. In this case, the order of the ID numbers likely matches the order each ability was added.