Are the starters in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Shiny locked?

Shiny Pokémon are a staple in the Pokémon series. Outside of the main story, hunting for Shinies has become a passion project for many fans, despite no aspects of a Pokémon changing outside of their coloration.

These special Pokémon return in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, though they remain incredibly rare encounters that most players won’t find unless they’re specifically looking for them.

Various methods exist for obtaining Shiny Pokémon such as creating certain types of sandwiches through the new Picnic mechanic and standard random encounters. But with a base rate of one Shiny per 4,096 Pokémon, they will almost always be difficult to find without using some additional tricks.

One of the longest-standing ways to obtain a Shiny Pokémon is through soft-resetting, which involves saving before a static, guaranteed encounter—like a Legendary Pokémon—and restarting the system over and over until that Pokémon is Shiny. This is one of the only ways to obtain some of the rarest Pokémon across the series in their alternate colors outside of special distributions.

But recent entries in the Pokémon series have more frequently implemented “Shiny locks,” or a piece of code in the game that makes it so some static encounters with Pokémon are fully unable to be Shiny, regardless of how much the player soft resets. This greatly limits the access that players have to certain Shiny Pokémon, even some as simple as starter Pokémon.

Are the starters in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Shiny locked?

Following the recent trend of Shiny-locking many important encounters in the Pokémon series, the starters of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are indeed Shiny-locked when choosing them at the beginning of the game. This means that there is no chance that Sprigatito, Fuecoco, and Quaxly can appear in their Shiny forms at this point.

But these three Pokémon can be Shiny when obtained through hatching Eggs, which can be done via the Pokémon Picnic feature. Players must place a female of any of these species with a compatible male species—or a Ditto—for an Egg to appear beside the picnic table in the basket. Up to 10 Eggs can be held in the basket at a time before it becomes full and it is not guaranteed that any of them contain a Shiny Pokémon.

Players can increase the chance that a Shiny emerges from the Egg by implementing what fans refer to as the “Masuda Method,” a tactic affectionately named after the series’ producer, Junichi Masuda. This requires both parent Pokémon to be from different parts of the world, complete with different original trainers (OTs), thus slightly increasing the chance that an Egg produces a Shiny.

Outside of breeding, there is currently no other way to obtain the Shiny versions of the Paldea starters or their evolutions, though players are still testing.