Walk into Fuchsia City and you’ll find a plain house next to the Pokémon Center. Sail to Two Island and there’s another plain house next to its Pokémon Center. Both have a single NPC standing behind a counter, both interrupt your Pokémon’s moveset, and both use almost identical dialogue boxes. It’s easy to wander into the wrong one and either erase a move you wanted to keep or get turned away for not having the right item.
They’re not the same NPC, and they don’t do remotely the same job. The Move Deleter in Fuchsia City erases a move permanently, for free. The Move Relearner on Two Island brings a forgotten move back — for a price that trips up more players than you’d expect, because it isn’t the item most Pokémon veterans assume.
Quick Start: Which One Do You Actually Need?
- Want to forget a move, especially an HM like Cut or Fly? Go to Fuchsia City — Move Deleter, free.
- Want a move back that your Pokémon already knows how to learn? Go to Two Island — Move Relearner, costs mushrooms, not Heart Scales.
- Don’t have 2 TinyMushroom or 1 Big Mushroom yet? Farm wild Paras in Mt. Moon before making the trip — see the farming section below.
- Deleted an HM and want it back? Read the fail-safe section first — the Move Relearner usually can’t help.
Verified against Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen (Generation III, Game Boy Advance). These NPCs and their payment items are unchanged since release — there’s no patch cycle to track here.
Move Deleter vs. Move Relearner, Side by Side
| NPC | Location | Cost | What It Does | Use It When… |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Move Deleter | Fuchsia City, house beside the Pokémon Center | Free | Permanently erases any one move, including HMs | You need to drop a move — especially an HM — to free up a slot |
| Move Relearner (“Move Maniac”) | Two Island, house near the Joyful Game Corner | 2 TinyMushroom or 1 Big Mushroom | Re-teaches one forgotten move from the Pokémon’s own level-up learnset | A move got overwritten by leveling up and you want it back |
The table looks symmetrical because the game wants it to — same house style, same one-NPC-one-counter layout, opposite Pokémon Center. It’s the same structural trick FireRed uses for other paired Kanto services; the Amulet Coin’s own NPC-and-building setup follows the same “identical box, different job” pattern. Once you know to look for it, it stops being confusing.
The Move Deleter: Fuchsia City’s Free Eraser
The Move Deleter sits in the house directly next to the Fuchsia City Pokémon Center — reachable once you’ve woken Snorlax on Route 12 with the Poké Flute and worked your way into the city.[1][2] Talk to him, pick a Pokémon, pick a move, and it’s gone. No payment, no cooldown, no confirmation screen tricks.
The one rule he enforces: he won’t let a Pokémon forget its only move.[1] Beyond that, everything is fair game — including HM moves, which is the actual reason most players end up here. Cut, Fly, Strength, Surf, Whirlpool, and the rest of the HM list will not get bumped off a moveset by a new level-up move the way ordinary moves do. If you want an HM gone, this NPC is the only route (short of a Day Care leveling quirk on Route 5 that occasionally clears an HM as a side effect, which isn’t something you can reliably plan around).[6]
That permanence is the trade-off. He’s fast and free specifically because there’s no undo button built into his service — the undo, if there is one, lives on Two Island, and only sometimes.
The Move Relearner: Two Island’s Mushroom-Powered Memory
Sail to Two Island, head to the purple-roofed house near the Joyful Game Corner, and you’ll meet the Move Relearner — the game calls him the “Move Maniac” in his own dialogue.[2][4] He doesn’t erase anything. He teaches back one move the Pokémon has already learned how to perform at some point in its current evolution — a move that got pushed out of the four-move limit by something newer.[2]
Here’s the part that catches people out. If you’ve played any Pokémon game from Emerald onward, you probably remember paying him with a Heart Scale. In FireRed and LeafGreen specifically, he doesn’t want Heart Scales at all — he charges 2 TinyMushroom, or 1 Big Mushroom, per move.[2][4][5] Heart Scales exist in these games too (they’re a hidden, recurring find at the Tanoby Ruins on Seven Island), but they’re not this NPC’s currency here — they’re just an item with a Fling power of 30 and no relearner use in this generation.[3] The mushroom-based payment was FireRed and LeafGreen’s original system; Heart Scales became the standard starting with Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and stuck for every game after, which is exactly why the memory of “pay with a Heart Scale” is so widespread and so wrong for this specific pair of games.
The other limit worth knowing: he can only teach moves the Pokémon could learn naturally through leveling, at its current level or earlier.[1][2] He can’t hand out a move it was never going to learn on its own, and in this generation he can’t restore true egg moves either — that feature didn’t arrive until Generation VI.[2] If a Mime Jr. evolved into Mr. Mime before it hit the level where it naturally learns Mimic, the Move Relearner is the fix — worth knowing before you evolve early, and covered in more depth in our Mime Jr. evolution guide.
Deciding whether an old move is even worth restoring usually comes down to type coverage — is that forgotten Water- or Ground-type move actually going to hit something your current lineup struggles with? The type-effectiveness fundamentals are consistent enough across the series that our Pokémon type chart reference is a fast sanity check before you spend mushrooms on a move you won’t use.
Why They Look Like the Same Guy (And Why That’s Deliberate)
Nintendo didn’t accidentally make these two NPCs feel like twins. Both live in a single-room house, both stand alone behind a counter with minimal scenery, both open with a short “do you want my help” prompt, and both are positioned next to — not inside — a Pokémon Center, so they read as “official Pokémon League-adjacent service” rather than a random trainer’s house. It’s the same visual shorthand FireRed uses across its Kanto rebuild for any NPC offering a mechanical service rather than a story beat: same shape, different content, so the player’s eye recognizes “this is a service building” on sight without needing new visual language every time.
The confusion isn’t a design flaw — it’s a side effect of good, consistent UI language colliding with genuinely opposite functions. The fix isn’t spotting a visual difference (there mostly isn’t one); it’s remembering the geography split instead: Fuchsia deletes, Two Island restores.
The Fail-Safe: Can You Undo a Move You Deleted?
Sometimes. This is the mechanism most guides skip, and it matters more than either NPC’s location.
The Move Relearner only pulls from a Pokémon’s own level-up learnset.[2] If the move you deleted was something the Pokémon learns naturally by leveling — say, an early Tackle or Growl that got overwritten — walking it to Two Island with mushrooms in hand gets it back, no matter how long ago it was deleted.
If the move you deleted was an HM, the news is worse. HM moves are taught by using the HM item on the Pokémon; they are not part of that Pokémon’s natural level-up movepool for the overwhelming majority of species.[6] Since the Move Relearner can only reteach moves from that level-up list, deleting an HM through the Move Deleter is, in practice, final — the way back isn’t the Move Relearner, it’s finding another copy of that HM item and teaching it again. This is exactly why competitive players and anyone prepping a Pokémon for trade or transfer (HM moves block transfers through Pal Park and similar systems) treat the Move Deleter’s HM removal as a one-way door, not a “just try it and see” button.
Same logic applies to TM-taught moves that aren’t also level-up moves for that species: gone means gone until you find or buy another TM.
Farming Mushrooms Without Wasting a Trip
You don’t want to sail all the way to Two Island and discover you’re one mushroom short. TinyMushroom and Big Mushroom are both held items on wild Paras (and Parasect) inside Mt. Moon — specifically the section past the first ladder down from the Route 4 entrance, in the reverse-L-shaped passage.[4] Roughly half of wild Paras encountered there are holding a TinyMushroom; a Big Mushroom is rarer, around a 1-in-20 hold rate.[4]
Two practical approaches:
- Thief/Covet a move onto a low-level attacker and steal the held item without needing to catch or defeat every Paras — the fastest way to stack TinyMushrooms if you’re relearning several moves across your team.
- Just catch or knock out Paras normally and check for a held item afterward if you’re not in a hurry — slower, but you’ll likely be passing through Mt. Moon early anyway.
Either way, 2 TinyMushroom per move relearned is the baseline math — budget accordingly if you’re planning to restore moves on more than one Pokémon in the same trip.
Which One Should You Prioritize? It Depends on How You Play
| Player Type | Priority |
|---|---|
| New player | Visit the Move Deleter early if you’re carrying multiple HM slaves — freeing up moveset slots on your main team matters more than optimizing movesets this early. |
| Casual player | Skip the Move Relearner unless a specific move (like an early STAB move or a signature move lost to overwriting) is actually costing you fights. Not worth a special trip otherwise. |
| Hardcore / optimizer | Stock up on 10+ TinyMushroom during your first Mt. Moon pass via Thief, before you even reach Fuchsia — it saves a dedicated farming trip later when you’re deep into competitive movepool planning. |
| Completionist / Nuzlocke | Treat every HM deletion as permanent by default and plan HM slaves accordingly — don’t rely on the Move Relearner as a safety net, since it usually can’t restore an HM. |
FAQ
Can the Move Deleter remove a Hidden Machine move?
Yes — it’s actually his main use case. HM moves don’t get overwritten by leveling up the way normal moves do, so the Move Deleter is the only reliable, repeatable way to clear one. Just know it’s permanent for most species, since HM moves usually aren’t in the level-up learnset the Move Relearner draws from.
Why do some guides say the Move Relearner wants a Heart Scale?
Because in every Pokémon game since Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, Heart Scales are exactly what he charges — it’s the mechanic most players actually remember. FireRed and LeafGreen predate that standard and use TinyMushroom/Big Mushroom instead, which is an easy detail to lose if you learned the series starting anywhere after Gen III.
Is it worth farming extra mushrooms early, or should I wait until I need them?
Farm early if you’re going to be relearning moves on more than one Pokémon — Mt. Moon’s Paras encounters thin out in relevance once you’ve cleared the route, and there’s no other reliable early-game mushroom source. If you only expect to need one or two moves back, it’s fine to grab mushrooms opportunistically on your way through.
Can the Move Relearner teach a move my Pokémon has never learned before?
No. He only restores moves the Pokémon already qualifies to know through its own level-up learnset at or below its current level. He’s a memory service, not a tutor — for moves outside that list, you’re looking at TMs or, in later generations, dedicated move tutors instead.
Does deleting a move immediately open a slot for a TM or a new level-up move?
Yes. The Move Deleter leaves a genuinely empty slot the instant he finishes, not a placeholder — the next TM you use, or the next move your Pokémon would normally learn by leveling up, fills that gap right away without asking you to overwrite anything else. That’s the actual reason to visit him proactively before a big TM haul, rather than waiting until your Pokémon already knows four moves and the game forces the choice on you mid-level-up.
Sources
- Bulbapedia — Move Deleter
- Bulbapedia — Move Reminder
- Bulbapedia — Heart Scale
- Game8 — Move Relearner Location and How to Relearn Moves (Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen)
- TheGamer — Where Are The Move Relearner And Deleter In Pokemon FireRed & LeafGreen?
- GameRant — Move Deleter Location in Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.