Hello, everyone! Time for my periodic check-in (read: stopping by once every few years). I hope all your hunts have been fruitful and will continue to be so.
I've picked up a fair amount of Shinies in my absence. Only three stand out as noteworthy, and only one would be accepted by SHC's classic rules:
<A random, unnamed Shiny Rotom at Mt. Coronet in PLA>
In the modern era, where Shiny rates are (or can be made) absolutely silly, this one stands out as being rare. The zone has only 2-3 natural spawn points for the Pokémon and refreshing them is tedious. I don't own a Switch, so the image below is an emulator screenshot.
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<Skichip, a chained Shiny Trapinch on Route 228 in Pearl>
PokéRadar Shinies are normally not worth mentioning, but anyone who's hunted Trapinch knows it's an exception — Route 228 is under a constant sandstorm that heavily impacts visibility, making this hunt a real test of focus. My chain broke not long after, leaving me with a single Shiny Trapinch. I didn't mind, but it would've been fun to give spares to friends.
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<Caradell, a random Shiny Swellow in the first room of Mistralton Cave in Black>
Alarm bells are probably going off in your head at this claim. The answer is simple — I was emulating a randomised copy of Black.
I caught Caradell at Lvl 31, so, were the ROM not randomised, he would've instead been a Boldore or Axew. I
could determine which one of those two he was and fix the species with PKHeX, but something made me decide not to: many, many years ago, I had a dream where I encountered a gigantic Shiny Swellow on a mountainside rocky path. Now, at least a decade later, I ran into that exact Shiny in a cave. Even if it's naughty to leave the species alone, the coincidence was too good to ruin. I adjusted his encounter information and moveset to be normal, kept the Mistralton Cave "hatch" location as a keepsake, then transferred him to my Black cartridge.
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Wait, what's this? There's a fourth Shiny? I kept the best for last, ladies and gentlemen.
Old members may remember a very greedy hunt I embarked on in 2012. I wanted a specific nature, as many perfect (not necessarily 31) IVs as possible, and, for a particular reason I will explain after the picture, to get the Shiny in either Gen III or IV. Masuda Method does not exist in Gen III, so the best combination to hit all my goals was to breed in HeartGold/SoulSilver, which is exactly what I did. But there was a catch:
Masuda Method is mutually exclusive with the Everstone in Gen IV, so the Shiny odds were still the full 1/8192!
And so an on-and-off (very much mostly off) hunt began; yesterday, 11 years of real time and around 600 hours of in-game time later, it finally ended. By my time measurements, I went through approximately
11077 eggs. I got the Shiny, the Everstone worked, and the two inherited IVs not controlled by my Power item were ones I wanted (missed out on 31 Speed but got 0 Defense and 31 Special Defense). Crazy!
Here's the nearly-flawless success:
<Kinza, the Lonely Shiny Nincada>
Continuing from before, here's the reason I chose Gen III/IV: these two gens have a glitch that gives Shedinja the Ninjask moves Nincada learns on the level it evolves. You can do this with every Ninjask move, but the relevant ones are Swords Dance (evolving at Lvl 25) and Baton Pass (evolving at Lvl 45). Sadly, Game Freak did not grandfather these moves into Shedinja's movepool in Gen V and beyond, so they trip hack checks; I won't be able to transfer my to-be Swords-Dance Shedinja to Gen VI unless I either inject it into a save (what I will do) or erase the offending move before sending it up (obviously not doing that, especially since I like keeping copies of my Pokémon in older gens).
Hopefully I didn't hog too much space with this post; I shrank the resolution of the images as much as I could while keeping them readable.
Thanks for reading and see you around!
