Free Shiny Pokémon: Scarlet and Violet glitch allows players to duplicate wild Pokémon

As if there weren’t enough bugs and glitches being found by accident in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, fans have already broken the game to a point where they can duplicate any Pokémon they want—even Shiny Pokémon if they happen to be on the menu. 

Various testing has been done by the community over the days since Gen IX launched to see if a duplication method was obtainable like it has been in basically every Pokémon game on the Nintendo Switch. But this new exploit takes advantage of Scarlet and Violet’s unique spawning system as a way to trick the game into despawning Pokémon in a specific way. 

As pointed out by YouTuber Austin John Plays, this method only works for larger towns in Paldea like Artazon that you do not need to load into like Mesagozea. Trying this at locations such as a Team Star Base or Pokémon Center will not work the same way. 

Once you encounter a Pokémon you want, you can save the game and turn off the auto-save feature to ensure it won’t change while you work to manipulate the game itself. This is common practice for Shiny hunting, which this duplication glitch will likely be used for the most. 

After you catch the Pokémon you want, quickly walk straight to the closest town. Make sure you path this out ahead of time because if you take too long or travel too far, you might end up forcing another spawn rotation and the Pokémon or Shiny you wanted could be gone—forcing you to reset to the save point to try again. 

Once you make it to the town, which you can easily tell because the name will display as the area changes, save the game, quit to the Nintendo Switch Home screen, and restart your game. Launching back in using this method should reset the wild Pokémon spawns surrounding the town using a duplicate pool to the one you had before quitting—including the Pokémon you caught—in the same spots.

Austin theorizes that this works because the game doesn’t view entering open-world towns as a reset point for spawns. Rather, changing an area potentially suspends nearby wild Pokémon until the player reaches a certain distance away before clearing that data, thus allowing for this exploit. 

This isn’t as groundbreaking as a PC manipulations glitch that would allow players to duplicate any Pokémon they want. But if you want to catch some Shiny Pokémon and share them with your friends, this is a great way to do that for Pokémon who spawn close to a town. 

This is a glitch working for the day one patch version of Scarlet and Violet, and knowing the developers, something like this will be the first thing patched out once they release something newer than version 1.0.1.