Your mom believes in you, so she sends you money.
Career Card gives you a trainer salary that arrives on the in-game clock. You start as a DEPENDENT on MOM's allowance. Earn badges, fill the POKeDEX and meet enough wild POKeMON, and real Kanto figures take over your sponsorship: PROF. OAK, BILL, the CELADON GAME CORNER, SILPH CO., and finally the POKeMON LEAGUE.
A CAREER entry in the START menu shows the ladder, what you have earned, when your next payday lands, and exactly where you stand against your next promotion.
Unreached rungs stay masked, but the next one up shows how many of its three requirements you have already cleared. Select it to see your standing against each one.
CAREER LADDER RANK 4
+------------------+ +------------------+
|1 DEPENDENT Y100| |??? |
|2 FIELD AIDE Y150| | |
|3 RESEARCHER Y200| |YOU / NEEDED |
|4 ??? 0/3| |BADGES 3/4 |
|5 ??? | |OWNED 28/35 |
|6 ??? | |WILD WON 95/120 |
+------------------+ +------------------+
Only the next rung shows a hint, and it names no sponsor, title or stipend. A gate you have switched off in the options reads OFF rather than counting toward the promotion.
WILD WON counts wild POKeMON you defeated or caught. Running away does not count, and neither does blacking out: the gate is there to reward engaging with wild POKeMON, not walking into grass and fleeing.
Nothing in a POKeMON save records how many wild battles you have fought, so a mod installed at 40 hours cannot know what you already did and starts the wild gate at zero.
CREDIT PAST, off by default, grants an estimate for that. It counts the species in your POKeDEX as one wild battle each, which is deliberately conservative: 200 battles across 27 species reads as 27, because a POKeDEX records a species once however many times you met it.
WILD WON 28/25
(27 CREDITED)
The card always names the credited portion, because it is the one number on that screen the mod did not watch happen. The estimate is measured once, the first time the mod sees your save, so it can never fold in play that was already being counted properly. Switching the option back off removes the credit and leaves exactly the battles the mod saw you win.
| Rank | Title | Sponsor | Stipend |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DEPENDENT | MOM | 100 |
| 2 | FIELD AIDE | PROF. OAK | 150 |
| 3 | RESEARCHER | BILL | 200 |
| 4 | HEADLINER | GAME CORNER | 300 |
| 5 | CONTRACTOR | SILPH CO. | 400 |
| 6 | ACE TRAINER | PKMN LEAGUE | 500 |
Rank 4 is missable. The GAME CORNER is a TEAM ROCKET front, and if you raid the hideout beneath it before you qualify, they never sign you - the rung reads CLOSED on your card from then on, and BILL keeps paying you.
If they had already signed you, the collapse is felt. Your pay stops and MOM carries you at 100 through LAVENDER, FUCHSIA and SAFFRON until SILPH CO. picks you up.
MOM is the floor of the whole ladder, not a rung you graduate past. Lose a sponsor and you land on her, never on nothing.
Roughly 18,000 across a full playthrough. It matters when you cannot afford POKe BALLS early and fades to flavour by SILPH CO., which is the point. Every number is adjustable in the mod options, including the payday length and an overall pay rate from 50% to 200%.
The clock measures time played, not time the game is left open. Pay accrues per step and each step credits at most 30 seconds, so an hour parked with the game running earns half a minute of wages.
PAYDAY MINS ranges from 1 to 120, not just the 20-minute default the ~18,000 target above assumes - setting it to 1 pays out roughly 40x faster than documented. Shortening the cycle mid-run does not lose banked time: whatever has already accrued toward the old, longer cycle carries over and pays out in a lump against the new, shorter one as soon as it matures.
| Option | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ALLOWANCE | on | master switch |
| PAYDAY MINS | 20 | minutes of play per payday |
| PAY RATE | 100% | scales every stipend |
| PAYDAY POPUP | on | show the payday message |
| NEED BADGES | on | require the badge gate for promotion |
| NEED DEX | on | require the POKeDEX gate |
| NEED WILD WINS | on | require the wild battle gate |
| CREDIT PAST | off | credit play from before you installed the mod |
Requires no special permissions and changes no battle mechanics, so it does not move the link fingerprint. It reads the badge and species lists from the live game data rather than assuming 8 and 151, so it stays correct alongside mods that add species or change the badge set.
With Gen 1 Modern UI installed, CAREER is not on the root START menu. That mod deliberately collects entries added by other mods under a single MOD MENUS entry, so CAREER lives at:
START -> MOD MENUS -> CAREER
Highlight CAREER there and press SELECT to pin it onto the root START menu, or turn off "START MOD MENUS" in Modern UI's own options to keep every mod entry on a flat list. Career Card registers its row at the default hook priority on purpose and will not fight for placement: whichever UI mod is loaded gets to decide where the row is shown.
MIT. See LICENSE.
Career Card ships no ROM-derived content. It reads the badge and species lists from whatever the engine has loaded and contains no Nintendo assets, text or data of any kind. You supply your own ROM to Gen1Recomp; this mod neither includes one nor helps you obtain one.
By Dileppy. Built with human effort and the help of AI.