Rarest Square Shiny Pokemon now common in Sword/Shield due to 'quirk'

By Chris Burns/

There's a new rarest sort of Pokemon now, thanks to Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield. They're shiny – but they're a special kind of shiny. Instead of appearing with standard star shape sparkles when appearing as a Shiny Pokemon, these new sorts have square shaped sparkles. According to code retrieved from Pokemon Sword and Shield, there SHOULD be a 1/16 chance that a Shiny Pokemon would be a Square Sparkle Shiny Pokemon – but right now odds are a bit broken!

The Old Ways

If you're looking at the original Shiny Pokemon – the first Pokemon in the Pokemon universe that were Shiny, you had a 1/8192 chance of encounter. The last several generations of Pokemon game (in the main series, not Pokemon GO), you had a 1/4095 chance of encountering a Shiny Pokemon. These chances increased with Shiny Charms, chaining, (sorta like in Sun/Moon), the Masuda method (which raises odds to 6/4069), Friend Safari, Consecutive Fishing over level 20, and aiming for Hidden Pokemon with Search Level 200, and so forth.

The image above is from Pokemon GO user MrGoober! He's shown here how the two different sorts of Shiny Pokemon look right next to one another – neato! The image at the head of this article was captured by AceStarThe3rd – thanks Ace!

In Pokemon Sword and Shield, get Square!

Per the research of Serebii's crew and one Kurt from Kaphotics, we can see the chances of encountering a Shiny Pokemon begin with the same base chances for encountering a Shiny Pokemon in the wild: 1/4096.

But as you'll see above, there's a 15 and a 16 in there, type 2 and 1, and "GetSparkleType". If what Kaphotics suggests is true, Square Sparkle Shiny Pokemon odds are 1 in 65536! But wait, you might be saying, I've already encountered a Square Sparkle Shiny Pokemon!

Per the latest information from Serebii, the odds that are supposed to be 1/16 for Square Sparkle are currently flipped with those of the standard Star Sparkle for WILD Pokemon encounters. That'll likely change – but we can't be sure! Serebii calls this a "programming quirk" – which would suggest that The Pokemon Company may give it a fix – but we'll see!

"Due to a programming quirk, at time of writing..." an editor at Serebii wrote at some point in the last few days... "When you encounter a shiny Pokémon as a standard wild encounter, this is essentially inverted with a 4095/4096 chance of the Pokémon having the Squares sparkle and a 0.9375/4096 chance of it having the stars one when encountering a Shiny Pokémon."

A few tips

If you'd like to hunt the Shiny Pokemon and find the Shiny Pokemon in as "easy" a manner as possible, I suggest you take a peek at the video at the end of this paragraph. There you'll find a lovely guide by aDrive.

Raiding the Shiny

You'll also find some interesting Shiny-related information below. There you see, thanks to the work of SinisterOne252, that two things are true. One, you can reset a raid all you want, if it's not shiny, it won't be shiny. Two, you CAN save before a raid, then if it's Shiny (and you fail), you can go back and try again – with Shiny intact!

At this time it's not clear whether this changes the sort of Shiny animation that's shown on the Pokemon. Chances are, if it's stars, it'll always be stars, and squares stick to squares. But you give it a whirl and let us know, if you do so dare!

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