Pokémon Legends Z-A shiny hunting: Odds, shiny charm, and best methods

It just wouldn’t be a Pokémon game without shiny hunting, the tedious task where people spend hours on end looking for rare color variants of their favourite Pokémon. It’s a noble pastime for sure, but Pokémon Legends: Z-A has some of the weirdest shiny mechanics of any main series Pokémon game to date, aside from the guaranteed shiny Mareep quest, of course.

We’ll tell you everything you need to know about this game’s shiny odds, how to get the shiny charm, the quirks and unique mechanics of shiny Pokémon in this game, and how you can exploit all of them to get shinies as quickly as possible.

If you need to know where to find whatever Pokémon you’re looking to hunt, check out our full list of every Wild Zone Pokémon in Legends ZA.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A shiny odds

The base shiny odds in Legends: Z-A are the same as every Pokémon game since X & Y, 1 in 4096. The difference comes in when you add the Shiny Charm, which has been buffed since Scarlet & Violet, now offering a 1 in 1024 chance of spawning a shiny instead of 1 in 1365 from previous games.

There is also something unique that this game does, which is that it saves up to 10 shinies on the game map and prevents them from despawning. If one spawns out in Lumiose City or in the Wild Zones, it will stick around indefinitely, even if you go somewhere else, or the day/night cycle transition happens. The only way to lose shinies is to KO them, scare them off, or switch off the game.

Perhaps most importantly though, in this game the visual sparkle and audio chime are back, meaning it’s harder to miss shinies than before.

How to get the shiny charm – Legends ZA

The shiny charm is obtained by reaching Level 50 of Mabel’s Research. This is done by completing the many tasks in the research menu to earn points. You’ll get quite a lot just by playing the game normally, but you’ll no doubt have to grind to fill your Pokédex and catch lots of different Pokémon to push it all the way to get the shiny charm.

Shiny hunting methods – Legends ZA

So far, there are two main methods the community has found, though one requires a bit of external hardware, so we’ll cover the regular one first.

Fast travel method

There are two ways to refresh the spawns of the Pokémon in the world: either change the time of day or fast travel. If you repeatedly fast-travel to the same Wild Zone entrance, new Pokémon will keep spawning in range. If you do this repeatedly, it will quickly cycle through many spawns, and since shinies don’t despawn in this game, if you do it over and over, check every 10 or 20 times, you’ll eventually get a shiny spawn.

Turbo method

If you have a controller with a turbo, then you can do this method. The idea is to set your turbo to repeatedly spam the B button and stand right up against the entrance of a Wild Zone, then leave your console for a while, like overnight. The turbo will automatically skip through the day/night transitions as Pokémon spawn, and every time that happens, all but the shiny spawns will be reset.

Being just outside of the Wild Zone means you won’t get attacked or scare any Pokémon away, which means that when you come back to your console, you could have a bunch of shinies that spawned over time.

Shiny locked Pokémon – Legends ZA

Of course, there are always certain Pokémon in these games that can never be shiny no matter what. Here is a full list of those:

• The three starter Pokémon
• Kanto starter gift from Mabel
• Kalos starter gifts from side quests
• The gift Absol from the main story
• All Pokémon received from in-game trades via NPCs
• All Pokémon you fight as part of the main story
• All Rogue Mega Pokémon
• All Legendary Pokémon
• Eternal Flower Floette

Anything else is not shiny locked, including Alphas, Fossil Pokémon and any starters you encounter in the wild.

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