Pokémon players have broken Scarlet and Violet’s Item Printer to guarantee rare drops

The last week has been illuminating for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet players, with a portion of the community finally finding a way to break The Indigo Disk’s Item Printer to ensure incredible drops every single time you use it. 

The Item Printer is a new mechanic introduced in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s second wave of DLC that allows players to feed a machine different materials dropped by Pokémon while playing. Once you put in enough material, the machine will activate and spit out a handful of items—ranging from Tera Shards and Exp. Candy to rare Poké Balls you can’t get anywhere else. 

Up until now, the machine has been entirely operated on RNG based on what upgrade level your Item Printer is. But a few players have now found a way to manipulate its randomness using the Nintendo Switch’s system clock. 

The Item Printer sets an RNG seed every time you boot up the game and activate the machine, according to multiple dataminers. Using this knowledge, you can game the system to give you the rarest items possible every single time—if you get the right timing down. 

“The idea is that the game uses the system time as the initial RNG seed for the Item Printer. Adjusting the clock lets us pick our rewards!” dataminer Anubis said. “This method only requires a retail Switch. You must be precise to the second, which is very humanly feasible. Same time = Same rewards.”

To use this method, you must get to the “I want to print something!” menu and minimize your game to access the System Settings. Once you go into the clock and set your date and time to the exact one listed by other players for your desired RNG, you need to be ready to act because the time begins as soon as you click the “Ok” button. According to Anubis, the goal is to “ensure that once you click ‘I want to print,’ the game fades to black on the target second.”

Once you nail the timing, you can hunt for RNG seeds that will give you every item you want—though there could still be some variation depending on your timing. Multiple seeds have already been tested and documented for getting multiples of important items such as Ability Patches, Master Balls, and other rare Poké Balls. 

As of April 11, dataminer Kaphotics and the community working to test this manip to its fullest have compiled the “ItemPrinterDeGacha.” This tool allows you to check for item times found by other players and see the timing needed to get those drops, bonuses, and more. So, if you want to grind some rare items, this is the best tool for the job.