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Sleep Clause

Competitive sleep rules for fair battles.

What is Sleep Clause?

Sleep Clause is a competitive battling rule that prevents excessive sleep tactics. You cannot put a second Pokémon to sleep if one is already asleep on your team.

This prevents spamming sleep-inducing moves and keeps battles competitive and fair.

How It Works

During a ranked battle with Sleep Clause enabled:

  1. First sleep: Put a Pokémon to sleep normally
  2. Second sleep attempt: Move is automatically cancelled
  3. No penalty: the turn isn’t spent. You can choose another move.

Example

Turn 1: Your Hypno uses Hypnosis → Opponent's Pikachu falls asleep ✓
Turn 2: Your Hypno uses Hypnosis → Move cancelled (Pikachu already asleep) ✗
Turn 2: Your Hypno uses Psychic → Deals damage normally ✓

Sleep-Inducing Moves

The following moves are affected by Sleep Clause:

  • Spore - 100% accuracy, Grass-type
  • Hypnosis - 60% accuracy, Psychic-type
  • Lovely Kiss - 75% accuracy, Fairy-type
  • Grass Whistle - 55% accuracy, Grass-type
  • Sing - 55% accuracy, Normal-type
  • Sleep Powder - 75% accuracy, Grass-type
  • Dark Void - 50% accuracy (in singles), Dark-type
  • Relic Song - Sleep effect, Normal-type

Configuration

Sleep Clause is enabled by default for all ranked formats. Server owners can disable it per format in the season preset (season_presets/*.yml):

# season_presets/default.yml
singles:
  sleepClause: true   # Enable (default)
  # ...

doubles:
  sleepClause: false  # Disable
  # ...

Competitive Rationale

Sleep Clause exists for several reasons:

1. Prevents Sleep Spam

Without Sleep Clause, players could put multiple Pokémon to sleep, making battles unfun and one-sided.

2. Maintains Skill Expression

Skill should matter more than spamming sleep moves. Sleep Clause rewards strategic play.

3. Industry Standard

Major competitive Pokémon communities (Smogon, official tournaments) use Sleep Clause or similar rules.

Team-Building Restriction

CobbleRanked also includes a team-building restriction:

Teams can only have one sleep-inducing move total across all Pokémon.

This is separate from battle-time Sleep Clause and limits sleep move spam during team selection.

Technical Details

For server owners and developers interested in the implementation:

  • Native Showdown rule: Sleep Clause is enforced by applying Showdown’s Sleep Clause Mod rule to the battle format on start (CobblemonBattleAdapter). This is the real, official behavior, not a reimplementation.
  • Localization: ShowdownClauseMessageMixin localizes the clause’s activation/hint messages into the player’s language (otherwise they’d see Showdown’s raw English protocol strings).
  • Team-time options (TeamValidator.kt): smogonSleepClause bans all sleep-inducing moves entirely; limitSleepMoves allows only one sleep move per team.

The old MoveInstructionMixin-based approach was removed. It cancelled the wrong instruction (the sleep is applied by StatusInstruction, not MoveInstruction), so it had no real effect. The native Showdown rule replaced it.

See the plugin source code for full implementation details.

Related: Battle Formats | Blacklist Configuration | FAQ