Chances are that if you’re into Pokémon, you’re familiar with shiny Pokémon. In Pokémon Sword and Shield, there are several ways to get your hands on one of these elusive beauties.
What is a shiny Pokémon?
A shiny Pokémon is a Pokémon of a certain species that has a different color scheme than others of that species. For example, a shiny Charizard will be black instead of orange, along with other slight differences to its eyes and wings. They are extremely rare, appearing at a base rate of 1 in 4,096.
Shiny Pokémon offer no competitive advantage and are exactly the same as their non-shiny counterparts apart from their appearance. The main reason to get them is that you like how they look, or because you simply want to flex on your opponents in PvP (which is always worth it).
How to get shinies in Sword and Shield
There are two main methods of (legally) obtaining shinies: in the wild and through breeding. There are also several ways to increase your odds of finding them.
The Shiny Charm
Getting the Shiny Charm will increase your odds of finding a shiny from 1 in 4,096 to roughly 1 in 1,365. You can get the Shiny Charm from a man in the hotel in Circhester City after you complete the Pokédex.
The Masuda Method
The Masuda Method is the easiest way to get shiny competitive Pokémon. This is done by breeding two Pokémon from games with different languages. For example, if you are playing the game in English and you have a Japanese Ditto, you can have your English Pokémon breed with the Japanese Ditto to drastically increase your odds of breeding a shiny.
This method is the reason why foreign Dittos with perfect IVs are so valuable. You can give the Ditto a Destiny Knot and have it share its stats with its offspring on top of significantly increasing your odds of hatching a shiny. With the Masuda Method and the Shiny Charm, your odds of hatching a shiny will increase to 1 in 512.
Shiny hunting in the wild
Pokémon Sword and Shield introduced a new method of shiny hunting. Every time you knock out or catch a certain species of Pokémon, it counts towards your “Pokémon battled”. Battling the same species over and over increases your odds of finding a shiny for it. Here are the odds with the Shiny Charm.
- 50 battled: 1 in 1024
- 100 battled: 1 in 819.2
- 200 battled: 1 in 682.67
- 300 battled: 1 in 585.14
- 500 battled: 1 in 512
Once you have battled 500, you can stop knocking them out and run because the odds stop increasing.
Square shinies and star shinies
In Pokémon Sword and Shield, there are two different animations for shinies. One animation shows little stars, while the other shows squares. 15 out of 16 shiny Pokémon will have the star animation when being hatched. Per Serebii, due to a bug, shiny Pokémon found in the wild will currently have a 4,095 in 4,096 chance of having the square animation.
Who is your favorite shiny Pokémon and why?
