Game Freak releases another major update for Pokemon scarlet And Violet at the end of the month, and while some attention is paid to the infamous games Performance problems, the solution the studio has chosen will fundamentally change certain aspects of open-world role-playing. In particular, the team is trying to reduce the number of Pokemon they put on screen at once, which means fewer spawns at once. This has major implications for Shiny Hunt.
According to the Sticky Notes, this change is intended to reduce game crashes, especially in densely populated areas. As a result, “there may be a reduction in Pokémon and people appearing in certain cities or in the wild.” How many Pokémon will appear in specific areas isn’t known at this point, and it probably won’t become clear how much this change will affect things until the patch releases at the end of February. But for people trying to catch Shiny Pokemon (rare creatures with a different color palette), this could be a big change. Shiny Pokemon are found at a standard rate of one in 4096 encounters, at that rate can be increased By using sandwiches and obtaining the Shiny Charm after completing the Pokédex, fewer spawning Pokémon mean fewer chances of finding these rarities nearby Scarlet fever And Violet‘s open world.
The update itself isn’t out yet, but if you’re a person who likes their current shiny odds and don’t mind the game crashing a bit more, you can bypass this by bypassing the update entirely. From your Switch’s home screen, go to the Settings menu and scroll all the way down to the System menu. Below is an option for Auto-Update Software. If you have this option set to On, your Switch will automatically download an update when it becomes available. In most cases, this is a good thing as you will have less waiting time to start your game since the update will already be installed when you next turn on the console. However, if you’re trying to avoid an update like this, disabling it allows you to manually update games and apps on a case-by-case basis instead of always being up to date with your patches.
If you are someone who stumbled across this page after Scarlet fever And Violet update went live and the update downloaded in error not knowing how it might affect something like Shiny Hunting, unfortunately there’s not much you can do at this point. If you played the game and created a new save, the save is now locked to the latest patch. If you own a physical copy of the game, uninstalling it from your system and deleting patch data will allow you to play an older version of the game as long as you don’t download the update again, but your save game will not be compatible with it.
As you can imagine, there are some downsides here too. If you refuse to download the patch, you will be prevented from using the game’s online features such as co-op, trading, and battles. So whether it’s worth skipping the patch to make shiny hunting easier is really just a matter of prioritizing what’s most important to you. The update doesn’t have a firm release date yet, the patch notes just say it’s scheduled for late February. If you’re still not sure what you want to do, maybe turn off automatic updates now so you don’t regret it later.
