A newly discovered exploit in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet allows players to continuously catch the same Shiny Pokemon over and over again.
As shared on YouTube by Austin John Plays, the bug only works near an area that doesn’t have a loading screen when you enter it, such as an open city.
If you discover a shiny Pokemon (or any other Pokemon you want to duplicate outside of this time), you’ll need to catch it and then head to town.
Once you reach the city and its name appears on the screen, you will need to save the game and turn it off.
Pokemon Scarlet & Violet Review | VGC
When the game reloads, the Shiny Pokémon you’ve already caught will still be in your storage, but when you return to the field there will be another one.
Then you can also grab it, go back to town and save again to repeat the process.
Austin John theorizes that this is because the game only updates which wild Pokemon are nearby when you leave a city, and that saving the game before leaving the city keeps the previously caught Pokemon in the his memory
When the game reloads, it pulls from its last known list of active wild Pokemon, including the one that was just caught. The entire process can be seen here:
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An exploit like this will likely be fixed in a future patch, because if enough players do it and start trading their shiny duplicates online, it could ruin the scarcity of what is supposed to be an extremely rare variant.
In VGC’s Pokemon Scarlet and Violet review, we said the games were the most feature-rich Pokemon titles in years, but suffered from technical issues.
“The huge expansion and changes to the single-player campaign are great, the world size and the joy of exploring are the best in the series, and the new Pokemon and battle mechanics introduced sing,” we write.
“However, it’s impossible to think of what the game would feel better on if it was on more powerful hardware or just run acceptably on Switch.”