[Pokémon] ~>{*Shiny Hunters Club}<~

We had a big discussion about this a while back, but I don't think I ever really understood it for sure, haha. There was a member here who did tons of great research on it, so I pulled up some posts from his explanations on the topic, and this one seems like the most direct response to what you're wondering about:

alolan vulpix said:

Arceus Whisper said:

@ Phantomwolf SRing on Emerald doesn't work =/
My Hunts:
Viridian Forest - 1300 REs
Dialga - 1300 SRs
Combee - 258 HBs

I decide to try to get a shiny female combee on HG by headbutting those special trees north of cerulean city. They have 65% Combee and 35% Slakoth. I'm using a male clefairy with cute charm to get more female combees.

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DON'T DO IT! Cute charm makes it so that cute charm is nuked on shinies! The mechanics of the game between cute charm and shinies are sort of incompatible, so with a cute charmer for females, you'll never(? if not rarely) find a female shiny. You can still find shinies, and females, but not female shinies. ;P

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alolan vulpix seems to be the most authoritative source on the subject, but there was a pretty big debate about it, and I don't think we ever really figured out exactly what was going on. (I didn't, at least! "lol") Based on this post, though, you might be better off dropping the Cute Charmer from your team and trying for Burmy under the regular odds of getting a male, but I'm hesitant to recommend that too strongly because I don't really know for sure, and I don't want to make you hunt with the really low male odds if Cute Charm doesn't actually reduce the chances of getting a male shiny. Here's the rest of the discussion in case you're interested in learning more about it - maybe you'll understand more of what they were saying than I could, haha! :laugh:

alolan vulpix said:

I don't remember much about it, but I read somewhere that because of the RNG, the odds of cute charm coincide somewhere with the odds of a shiny, and thus cute charm is pretty much reversed. I do believe it was something official I read it from, but you know. Sorry for the horrible explanation xD

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alolan vulpix said:

Now we've had this discussion now but I think this is pretty much proof - in Gen IV, cute charm causes the shiny odds to accidentally change. This could be as low as 1/32 (!!!) BUT more likely you get much lower odds than usual...

Spoiler:

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alolan vulpix said:

The cute charm thing is legit but it would be ridiculously hard, as you have to find a game with a rare SID, and to even find your SID you need a random shiny/4 chained shinies. And, no, 4th gen only D:

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The video from that middle post has since been removed, but I remember looking into it at the time and having absolutely no idea what was going on, "lol." Later on, an SHC member who had no clue what he was doing looked around for some more information on it, and while he didn't seem to understand the mathematical frameworks behind it, it looks like he gathered some conclusions from reading various simplifications that other people had written to try to explain the implications of whatever's going on behind the scenes. Here's what he came away from all that with:

G-Money said:

This is really interesting. I hadn't heard anything about this before you posted this, so I looked it up and read some threads where other people debated it. It's always fun to read new stuff about shiny chances - thanks for posting about it, Arceus!

It appears that Cute Charm might have an effect on shininess, but only if your lead Pokemon has it. It's sort of like how having your lead have Synchronize can influence the nature of the Pokemon you find, but a wild Pokemon having Synchronize won't do anything to influence the already-set natures of your party's Pokemon.

Then again, the stuff I read on Cute Charm was mostly from this thread which is in the context of RNGing, so Cute Charm might work differently there than it does in normal settings. This post seems to say that if your hidden ID has a certain connection to your Trainer ID, then Cute Charm would improve your chances. But since we have absolutely no idea what our hidden IDs are, this shouldn't be relevant. The only possible implication is that if our two IDs don't have a certain relation, then finding shinies would be harder, but if our IDs do have the necessary relation, then finding shinies would be easier. Again, I think this has to do with having the lead Pokemon in your party have Cute Charm, but it doesn't sound like wild Pokemon with Cute Charm would have their probabilities changed.

So it seems like:

1) having a Cute Charm Pokemon as your lead may affect shiny chances in 4th gen, and
2) it will either raise or lower your chances of finding a shiny based upon some difference between your Trainer ID and your hidden ID. Therefore,
3) because we don't know what our hidden IDs are, much less how they relate to our Trainer IDs, this doesn't really change things. However, having a Cute Charm Pokemon might increase some of the risk of shiny hunting, as you might have a higher chance of finding shinies and you might have a much lower chance of finding shinies.

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(OMG that was me!!! "lol" I don't remember this at all, so I was really surprised when I went through the posts from this discussion and found that I was the one who wrote this, hahahahahahaha!!!)

But to get back to your original question, it looks I ended up not finding anything to suggest that Cute Charm would prevent you from getting shinies of certain genders, although it could potentially change the odds - for better or for worse.

Quite a few SHC members have gotten shinies of their desired gender through using Cute Charm, including Dark Steelix's Snorunt, ShadowChaos's Snorunt, and ShadowChaos's Eevee. It's also not guaranteed to give you the opposite gender of your lead Pokémon, since ShadowChaos also ended up getting a male Snorunt despite using the same Cute Charm lead. These all were from chaining, though, so it's possible that alolan vulpix's hypothesis (OMG he would be be so pumped to hear that we named a hypothesis after him!!!) could still hold in general, but chaining alters the Cute Charm mechanics in some way that allows for shinies of the preferred gender in certain cases. I really don't know.

One of the most successful shiny hunters ever also contributed some interesting insight regarding Cute Charm mechanics in the sixth generation, so I'd take a look at what he had to say as well:

Maserati777 said:

It makes Pokémon of the opposite gender to the Pokémon with it appear more in wild encounters, in the case of Combee sometimes I'd have 5 female Combee's appear in a row. Without it you usually only get 1 female Combee for every 6 or 7 males. It's definitely good for starters or Eevee's which don't have equal gender encounter ratios.


Of course I believe 1 shiny is set randomly as soon as you walk into a friend safari so if the shiny is the male, with cute charm you may be forcing the shiny to not appear. It's not going to change the shiny to female. Of course if the shiny is female then you're cutting out 5 or 6 male encounters.


In a Friend Safari with 1 gender only Pokémon like Volbeat it would make them appear less. Not 100%, maybe like 75% less.

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As for your other question, I've never heard about that before. I can't imagine why it would, though.

The most commonly-mentioned variables in RNG generation that I've seen have been time, steps taken, and something related to your last save. In Emerald and post-battery-death R/S, time since you turned on the game is the only factor, but I'm pretty sure that all the other games use a complicated function that includes a whole bunch of things, so changing (or failing to change) any one thing shouldn't have a big effect on RNG stuff.

I've read recommendations to save after every 25-35 SRs in FR/LG when going after stationary Pokémon like legendaries/Eevee since real time isn't a factor, giving you a limited pool of potential Pokémon when you SR since all of the variables are statically based off of the conditions of your last save. Walking a couple of steps and resaving solves the issue and there's no problem at all with encountering on routes and stuff, so it seems to me like all the focus on FR/LG resaving was due to the unique propensity of those two games to draw RNG results exclusively from data that doesn't change while your character stands still. This seems to imply to me that all other games have real time as one of the variables used in RNG decisions, especially since the person who warned me about the resaving issue in FR/LG hunted (really successfully, too!) for lots of stationary legendaries in D/P/Pt/HG/SS and never did the resaving thing for those games.

This makes me think that GenIV and onward use things like time of day (probably down to fractions of seconds) in their RNG draws, so whether closing the DS has any effect or not really shouldn't matter because the RNG is getting reset dozens of times per second anyway.

To use a totally wrong and misleading way of talking about this (but it's how I think about it because I don't really have any idea what's actually going on, "lol"), imagine that a random number is picked and if that number is 8192, you get a shiny! The number picked for your last Pokémon was 5, and now you're going for your next SR. If you don't close the DS, the only thing changing for your next encounter is time, which changes your number by, for example, 1. So your next SR is going to yield a Pokémon with "6" instead of 5 as the number to determine whether it'll be shiny. But if closing the DS has an effect, that means two things change (let's say closing the DS increases the next number by an additional 2), and so your next SR will produce a Pokémon with 8 instead of the 6 you would've gotten if you hadn't closed the DS. Your only real goal in RNG shuffling is to get a number that's different than 5, and both the DS-closing and non-DS-closing possibilities will achieve this with equal success. You don't know whether there's a shiny on 6 and you don't know whether there's a shiny on 8, so both outcomes are equally desirable. The only thing you know is that 5 doesn't have a shiny associated with it, so as long as you shuffle the RNG enough to give you any number other than 5 (more precisely, you want it to give you 5 with the same probability as any other number, but since there are so many possibilities between 1 and 8192, any shuffling to eliminate a potential bias of repeating the same 5 essentially gets you back to randomness), you should be good!

That whole logic is totally flawed and that's not how it works at all ("lol"), but I try to think about it that way because it helps me understand the outcomes better. In FR/LG, that additional change of closing the DS would be crucial because without it, you'd just keep seeing the "5" Pokémon over and over again, but in GenIV and up, the time variable is already constantly reshuffling the Pokémon you'll see, so any additional variation you introduce to the RNG isn't really helpful or noticeable because you're already going to be seeing unique Pokémon all the time that each have an equal chance of being shiny.

tl;dr I have no idea whether closing the DS resets the RNG or not, but I don't think it really matters since you already have a perfectly shuffled RNG and resetting it again won't improve (or hurt) your odds, since they're already pretty much perfectly random. :)