A New Type of Shiny Pokémon Has Been Discovered in Pokémon Sword and Shield

There’s a new type of Shiny type Pokémon trainers can catch in Pokémon Sword and Shield, and it’s incredibly difficult to capture.

For Pokémon collectors out there, you now have a brand new type of Shiny to search for in Sword and Shield. This new variety of Shiny Pokémon features square glitters instead of the traditional stars that bounce around the creature.

Reddit user Gmendezm captured the image above, and they share the details of this Shiny type Pokémon in a Reddit thread.

Players have two methods of acquiring Shiny Pokémon in the game. They can fight the same Pokémon over and over again, chaining the encounters to increases the chances of Shiny Pokémon, or they can use the Masuda Method Egg Breeding. Both of those take time and are exhausting, but for Pokémon collectors, it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Of the two methods, trainers will need to use the chaining encounters technique to have the Square glitters to occur. Traditional Shiny Pokémon have a 1 in 4,096 chance of appearing naturally without any altered methods. Gmendezm notes it’s a 1 in 65,536 chance of a Pokémon with those distinct features to appear, so it’s very rare, and even by Shiny standards, it’s… well, still quite rare.

But if players are actively hunting for the Shiny version of that Pokémon using chains, they have a higher chance of it happening. So the chaining method is forcing the Shiny to occur bringing about the square glitters animation.

Data miner Kurt took a closer look into the back end information of how this occurs and provided more details in a chain of tweets about the subject.

If the encounter is required to be shiny by the game, it will force the PID to the zero-xor state if it is not already shiny. If this is a correct understanding, then you would have to get a force-shiny proc (n:4096) while already being shiny (1:4096) to not need a forced PID.

— Kurt (@Kaphotics) November 20, 2019

The details behind this variety of Shiny are still brand new, and data miners and Shiny collectors are still learning about it. There could be additional twists they learn in the future about how this occurs, and if it could happen during breeding. At this time, the community is still learning details.