Pokémon Scarlet and Violet picnic exploit makes it easier to hunt shiny Pokémon

I’ve never had the patience for hunting for shiny Pokémon, but luckily now I don’t have to.

Shiny Pokémon are super rare versions of Pokémon that appear with a different color scheme. Generally speaking, your odds of running into a shiny Pokémon are around 1 in 4,096. But now fans have discovered a Pokémon Scarlet and Violet exploit that makes it incredibly easy to catch one in under an hour, and it requires no special items.

I followed a tutorial created by the YouTuber PhillyBeatzU and it worked like a charm.

Following PhillyBeatzU’s directions, I first went to a Pokémon outbreak, an event where a bunch of the same Pokémon spawn in an area. (You can find one by opening your map and looking for the Pokémon that appear on the map with a glowing red symbol behind them.)

Once you get to an outbreak, you’ll need to fight at least 60 Pokémon. You can do this with normal battles, but Let’s Go is way quicker, so I’d recommend just sending out your strongest Pokémon and clearing out dozens of Pokémon with auto battles. Once you beat more than 60, your shiny spawn rate will boost up to 1 in 1,365, according to one shiny hunter’s math.

Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company, Nintendo via Polygon

Next, find a spot within the outbreak to set up a picnic, and then pack it back up. Each time you pack up your picnic, run around the outbreak area and check for a shiny; if you don’t see one, repeat. Basically, you are reseting the spawns for dozens of Pokémon at a time, refreshing your odds of getting one every single time. If you repeat this process enough times (setting up a picnic, packing it up, then looking around) you’ll likely find a shiny Pokémon.

There are some possible road bumps. Scarlet and Violet don’t play a special jingle when you run into shinies in the open world, making it harder to spot them. On top of this, many Pokémon are really small, and their shiny form might look relatively similar to the original form. (This is the case with Pokémon like Buizel and Gastly.) Additionally, if the outbreak happens in a place where you don’t have space to camp, like a sloped mountainside, you might be out of luck.

Still, it’s stupid easy. From start to finish, it took me under 30 minutes total. I didn’t have the Shiny Charm and I didn’t use a sandwich to boost my rates at all. I didn’t have to prepare. All I did was go to an outbreak of Larvesta, knocked out 60, and then set up and took down my picnic four times before finding a shiny one. I probably won’t get that lucky again, but it’s good confirmation that the technique works. Even 10 picnic respawns can cycle through roughly 100 Pokémon, so just keep at it!