Shiny hunting methods

[Mab]

There have been a bunch of methods for catching shinies, like the Poke Radar, the chaining mechanics in Alola, and catch combos in LGPE. Do you have a favourite? And what would be your ideal shiny hunting method if you could come up with your own?

I'd love a system that treated them more like roaming Pokémon. You don't need to grind anything, instead - now that Pokémon showing in the overworld seems like it's here to stay - you occasionally see them just like LGPE, but in this case they run from the player and you need to chase them down. Sometimes you'll catch them, sometimes they leave the map fast enough - if they do, hunting them down becomes a mini quest as you can search adjacent maps, even maybe talk to NPCs who would have temporarily changed dialogue mentioning whether they saw the shiny and you could use that to build up clues about where it went. It might even take into account the particular Pokémon's natural habitat - if you're chasing a shiny Zubat away from a cave where it lives, it might be more likely to flee into another nearby cave.

Big time shiny hunters would probably hate it because it's not grindable but I would adore something like this.

 

[Sheep]

PokéRadar was a lot of fun in DPPt, even if it caused a lot of frustrations when I accidentally ran a little too far and the grass got cut from the screen, which in turn broke my combo lol.

Definitely wasn't a fan of catch combos in LGPE, it was too boring having to catch things, especially when they ended up fleeing. Especially Pokémon with naturally high flee and low catch rates (looking at you, Eevee.....)

 

[colours]

i guess im biased because SM was the first time i've ever really caught as many shinies as i have, but i really liked SOS shiny chaining. sure, i might not succeed all the time, but not only would i get a shiny if i am, but also guaranteed 4 perfect IVs, as well? that's fine by me tbh. at least the 4 perfect IVs thing i think is better than how past games did it (to my knowledge anyway. im unaware if past games did the perfect ivs thing).

i've tried masuda method for shiny hatching, but it's just incredibly boring and i don't really have the attention span that i used to have for that, anymore. i successfully hatched one thing (a shiny beldum, at a wrong nature at that, but hey), but after that, i haven't been able to hatch much else.

honestly, something like roaming shiny pokemon would be fun! like yeah, a part of me would hate that it's not... automatically catchable (for a lack of a better word) right when im in battle, but it'd feel more realistic from an in-universe perspective to actually hunt down a shiny pokemon to catch. if previous methods were more or less monotonous, then i think this method would add a bit of fun to it and there's nothing wrong with that.

 

[deathtwister]

Shiny swap breeding combined with masuda method in gen 7 games is nice as it gives you controls over IVs and nature . It can get a little frustrating sometimes though.

 

[Maserati777]

My favorite shiny hunting method is Dexnaving. I think water naving is the funnest. But also enjoy the other areas of it. I only did chaining once in lets go and after getting to the full chain, sitting and waiting for a shiny to pop up was really boring. Never did sos.

 

[VisionofMilotic]

Excluding the odd egg in Crystal with it's 15% chance to hatch a shiny baby pokemon, my all-time favorite shiny hunting method would have to be the dexnav from Oras. I like it because it is one of the simplest methods. All you had to do was tap the the circle pad into the pathway of a hidden ability pokemon in the overworld. It was a fixed rate like friend safari, so you might very quickly encounter a shiny.

You could also catch as many different hidden pokemon as you wanted until your shiny appeared, even if they were different species from what you were hunting it would not end any chain formed. Since the dexnav would produce Pokemon that were not in the regional dex, had great ivs, their hidden abilities and egg moves you could load up on a whole box full of rare pokemon while waiting for your shiny.

This method also told you almost everything about the pokemon before you walked up to it for the battle, what the species would be, the level, the number of perfect IVs, which ability it had, what moves it knew, if it was holding an item or not and what item that was. So I was always well-prepared for the battle that would ensue.

While it was pretty easy to form a chain, if you broke it then that wasn't a big deal either because again the odds are set, though I forget what the number was exactly, something like 1/512 or 1/200, and having a long chain didn't increase that number. Chaining just gave you more encounters and made them happen faster, giving you more opportunities for it to be the shiny pokemon. It also made the pokemon stronger because long chains do raise the levels and IVs of a Pokemon.

So Dexnaving is In find a relatively stress-free way to hunt shines compared to the pokeradar that I think is good for beginners. I got my shiny Vulpix (now a Ninetales) with drought thanks to the dexnav, and my shiny jolly ponyta with 3+ IVs this way.

My second favorite method is chain fishing, which of course yields a shiny Feebas for my signature pokemon Milotic :)

 

[the Alolan naturalist]

The ultra wormhole was pretty fun, and also surprisingly fast (with a shiny charm tbf)