Shiny Pokémon hunting in Scarlet and Violet is easier thanks to a delicious exploit

Shiny Pokémon are some of the most sought-after creatures in the Pokémon franchise. The alternately-colored Pokémon don’t come with any sort of stat advantages, but their sheer rarity makes them the focus of large groups of players that hunt for Shinies and try to fill their Pokédex with them.

In many ways, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have made Shiny hunting more difficult than ever before, with the lack of Shiny sound cues or other visual effects in the games’ overworld. But while it can be easy to miss Shiny Pokémon in the new games, players have already found a method that actually makes the process of finding Shinies incredibly simple.

As first reported by Polygon and demonstrated by many Pokémon content creators, setting up and tearing down a picnic around an outbreak of Pokémon not only makes your odds of a Shiny better, it makes the entire process feel incredibly easy.

The first step to this method is knocking out some Pokémon. Generally, players have a one in 4,096 chance to see a Shiny Pokémon. But they can increase those odds for certain Pokémon by knocking out a bunch of those Pokémon. The most time-efficient number at the moment seems to be going for 60 knockouts of a particular Pokémon, which will better the Shiny odds to one in 1,365. Usually, that takes some time to get to, but the Let’s Go feature in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet practically encourages players to go for this method with how quickly your Pokémon can clear out waves of wild Pokémon.

Thanks to the Pokémon outbreaks that have returned for SV after their introduction in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, players can take out a large number of the same Pokémon quickly, and have more Pokémon continue to spawn into the world. That’s when players have begun picnicking.

Setting up a picnic and then exiting the picnic actually resets the spawns of all the Pokémon in the outbreak, meaning that there’s suddenly large amounts of the same Pokémon that you just increased your Shiny Pokémon odds for almost continually spawning. Players can tear down their picnic and run around the area for a few seconds to see if there are any Shinies. If there are not, enter and exit a picnic again to reset the spawn and look again.

It certainly doesn’t seem like a method that Game Freak was planning for when they created the picnicking system, and having such an easy and guaranteed method of finding Shiny Pokémon might even take some of the allure from them in the new games. On the other hand, maybe exploits like this will convince Game Freak and The Pokémon Company that a patch should come sooner rather than later for SV, possibly with some performance fixes included?