PKForge puts a Pokémon save editor and a cross-game bank on a phone

A save editor built on PKHeX and aimed at handheld screens

PKForge describes itself as a Pokémon save editor and bank for Android, with support for dual-screen handhelds, and it is tuned for devices like the AYN Thor. The README frames it as a cross-generation Bank for Android.

The technical base matters. PKForge is built on PKHeX.Core with the Auto Legality Mod built in, which means the format parsing and the legality rules come from established upstream projects rather than being reimplemented here. The consequence for a user is specific: the app can legalise a Pokémon fully offline, on device, because the algorithm that decides what a legal Pokémon looks like ships inside the application.

That matters for the target device. A dual-screen handheld like the AYN Thor has two screens, and the README describes a layout where the second screen shows the Pokémon inspector, game art, Pokédex entries or the Poképark journal. On a single-screen phone the app is still fully playable with a gamepad or by touch.

The stack is C# with .NET MAUI, and the repository layout shows a normal Visual Studio solution with a PKForge.sln, a src directory, a tests directory, an external directory and a .gitmodules file, so the PKHeX dependency is vendored as a submodule rather than taken from a package feed. There is also a docs directory, and the manual lives in a wiki rather than in the repository.

One line in the README deserves repeating for anyone who finds the app by search. PKForge is not affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak, or The Pokémon Company, and the project carries a caution that pkforgeapp.com is not an official site and is not run by the maintainer, with an instruction not to download anything from it and to use only releases from the repository.

Editing is separated from legality, and the app shows both

The editing feature list is long, and the specific fields it names tell you what a serious save editor touches.

You can open any save from a linked emulator or from a single file, take control of your team and your boxes, and edit stats, IVs, EVs, moves, nature, ability, held item, Met and Origin information, Tera type, Hyper Training, shininess, friendship and Pokérus, with a live legality check as you go.

The live legality check is the feature that separates this from a hex editor with a nice interface. It runs while you edit rather than after, so the illegal state is visible before it is written. And the one-tap legalize path uses the Auto Legality Mod that is built into the app, so the correction happens on the device with no network round trip.

That pairing is the design of the whole project. An editor that can only make things illegal is a curiosity; an editor that can make things legal again, offline, on a handheld, is a tool. The HaX mode lifts the legality limits for people who want them, and the Hardcore mode goes the other way, turning data editing off for challenge runs and RetroAchievements players while leaving moving Pokémon possible.

Both modes are named in the feature list, and their existence is worth noting in an evaluation because they describe two different audiences for the same codebase. A competitive or completionist player wants the checks off; a challenge runner wants them on and enforced.

The rest of the editing surface is the ordinary work of a save editor: the bag editor handles any pouch, any item and any quantity with presets and one-tap refills, and the trainer card can have its name, IDs, money and gender changed, with trainer profiles and records managed separately.

The bank and the living dex are the parts that are genuinely new

Two features in the list are not standard save editor functionality, and they are the reason to look at this app rather than a general-purpose editor.

The first is the Bank, described as being like Pokémon Home, where a whole collection is stored in a cross-game bank with as many themed boxes as needed, organised with the gamepad, keeping living dexes, and able to pull anything back out into any save. The Home comparison is doing real work, because Home is a closed, console-only service, and this is an open implementation on Android.

The second is the Living Dex tracker, which follows all 1025 Pokémon across every generation including shiny variants, and the Living Dex Autopilot, which builds a living dex from the Pokémon you already own across all your games and the Bank. The Autopilot description contains the detail that makes it safe to read: it moves Pokémon and never copies them, evolves trade evolutions on the way, and writes nothing until you confirm.

That is a well-designed constraint. Building a living dex by hand across nine games is the kind of chore that stops people doing it at all, and an autopilot that only ever moves existing creatures and asks before writing is doing the tedious work without creating duplicates.

The transfer mechanism is the other half of the Bank story. You can grab a Pokémon from one save and drop it into another, across generations, from Gen 1 to Gen 9 and back, with a preview that shows every change and the legality verdict before anything is written. The preview is what makes the cross-generation move practical, since a Gen 1 creature becoming a Gen 9 one involves a lot of decisions that are worth reviewing.

Every write is validated and preceded by a restore point

The save safety feature list is short and specific, and it is the part an adopter should read twice.

Every write is validated, then preceded by a restore point. Only the Pokémon you touched may change, and risky saves open read-only. The 20 most recent restore points are kept.

Those four sentences describe a defensive design. Validation before writing means a malformed edit is caught rather than committed. A restore point before each write means a bad edit is recoverable. Restricting the change to the Pokémon you touched means the operation is narrow rather than rewriting the whole save, which reduces the blast radius of a mistake. Opening risky saves read-only removes the option of an accidental destructive edit. And keeping 20 restore points is a deliberate balance, enough history for a chain of mistakes without unbounded disk use on a phone.

The read-only mode also extends to ROM hacks the project does not recognise, which open with a warning. Known hacks are supported with their own data, including Pokémon Unbound, Radical Red, GS Chronicles, Luminescent Platinum and Pokémon Compass, and the project says explicitly that unknown hacks open read-only with a warning. That is a sensible default for a tool that writes binary files, because an unsupported save layout is exactly the case where a write would corrupt something.

The offline-first design is what makes the restore points viable. If writes went to a server, the rollback story would be a different and harder problem. Keeping everything local means the restore point is a local file, and the validation is a local check.

The other offline assets follow the same logic. The full Mystery Gift database is bundled and works offline, so you can browse Wonder Cards from old distributions and inject them into a save. The Pokémon Home style bank is likewise local.

A Nintendo-adjacent feature set, and what that means for the reader

The feature list includes a lot that has no counterpart in a conventional application, and it is worth being explicit about what that implies.

There is the egg factory and the Day Care and Nursery tools, which generate eggs and hatch Pokémon, including one egg of every species. There is the Mystery Gift browser and injector. There are RNG tools to inspect PID, IVs and nature, and to reroll a nature while keeping shininess. There are world and event tools, including clock repair for Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald, roaming legendaries, re-arming one-time encounters, Entralink and Dream World, Apricorn Box and Pokéwalker, honey trees, event flags, and key item events such as the Eon Ticket or the GS Ball. There are per-game editors for Grand Underground, Poké Beans and Fashion, and game-specific data for a list of ROM hacks.

And then there is the Poképark, described as a living world where up to 24 of your Pokémon live by their tempers, friendships and rivalries, act out scenes together and have rare events, where you can feed them, play with them and take photos, alongside a Nuzlocke report that tracks first encounters and dupes per route and an encounter browser showing every way to catch a species in each game.

The Poképark and the Nuzlocke report are the features that make this an application rather than a utility. A save editor is a repair tool, and a repair tool is used when something is broken. A save editor that also has a place where your collection lives and plays is used every day, and the release notes hint at that direction, with 3.1.0 described as a brand new look and 3.1.1 as the new Poképark.

None of that is affiliated with the rights holders, and the README is explicit about the disclaimer. Whether a given use of a save editor is permitted by the games' terms is a question about those terms rather than about this repository, and the tool does not answer it for the person using it.

Where the project stands, and what the licence question turns on

The maintenance facts are current. The repository is not archived, the last push was on 2026-10-18, and the recent releases are v3.1.1 on 2026-10-16, v3.1.0 on 2026-10-04 and v3.0.3 on 2026-09-27. A 3.1 release with a redesign in the same month, followed by a point release, is the pattern of an active mobile project rather than a dormant one.

The licensing needs a direct look rather than a guess. The licence field on the repository carries a custom classification that GitHub cannot map to a standard identifier, and the badge in the README reads GPLv3, with the LICENSE file at the root of the repository. So the expectation set by the badge is GNU GPL version 3, and the terms to read are the ones in that file. Nobody should take the badge or the field as a substitute for reading it, and this is a note about the mechanics of the repository rather than legal advice.

The wider question is the one the project itself flags. A tool that edits save files for games sold by a third party operates on data the user may or may not have the right to modify, and the README is careful to say the project is not affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak or The Pokémon Company. The app is distributed as an APK from the repository's releases, and the caution about pkforgeapp.com exists because an unofficial site was serving something under the project's name.

For the practical evaluation, the wiki is the document. The README says every screen, every emulator and every feature is explained with screenshots in the PKForge wiki, which is the right place to answer the questions the feature list raises, such as which emulator builds are supported and what the linking flow looks like. There is also a Discord server linked from the header, and the repository carries a tests directory and a tools directory, so the project is set up for contributors rather than being a single developer binary.

Editorial conclusion

PKForge suits an Android player with several Pokémon games and a growing collection who wants one place to edit, legalise, organise and track, and who is willing to work from restore points rather than trusting a single write. It is the wrong tool for a player who does not own the save format or the games, and it is the wrong tool for anyone who expects the app to keep working across a new game release without a matching update. Before you adopt it, read the wiki entry for your game and emulator, set up the restore point habit the project insists on, and check the licence file in the repository root yourself, because the licence field on the repository carries a custom classification while the badge in the README reads GPLv3.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. README
3. Releases
4. sofianeelhor/PKForge on GitHub