{"id":86447,"date":"2025-10-18T14:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T14:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/86447\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T14:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T14:09:07","slug":"pokemon-legends-z-a-makes-a-big-welcome-change-for-shiny-hunters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/86447\/","title":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon Legends: Z-A makes a big, welcome change for shiny hunters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pok\u00e9mon Legends: Z-A hadn\u2019t been out even a few hours before the tweets started rolling in: Shiny pok\u00e9mon don\u2019t despawn<\/a>. You can walk away from a shiny, and it\u2019ll still be there when you come back.<\/p>\n

To shiny collectors, this is big news. In other Pok\u00e9mon games, like Scarlet and Violet, pok\u00e9mon despawn after you get a certain distance away from them or trigger a loading screen. I\u2019ve missed out on my fair share of shiny pok\u00e9mon this way, my heart sinking as I spotted them right before they disappeared forever.<\/p>\n

You can still miss out on shiny pok\u00e9mon in Z-A, but we\u2019ll get to that in a bit.<\/p>\n

I first discovered the new spawning mechanics myself. I heard the sparkly sound effect that signals a shiny, spotted an oddly colored Swirlix on top of a roof, and realized I had no way to get up to that roof without walking very far away. Not knowing any better, I figured I was just out of luck. (This Swirlix had a one in 4,096 chance of being shiny, so I guess I had some luck.)<\/p>\n

I did try to get up to the roof, but night was about to change to day \u2014 which triggers a mini cutscene that I was sure would despawn the Swirlix \u2014 and I was in a hurry. I tried to take a shortcut through the adjacent Battle Zone. It was full of trainers ready to challenge me on sight, though, and I ended up in a battle immediately. I hadn\u2019t forfeited one of these battles before, so I tried that, thinking maybe I\u2019d get out of the battle and up a ladder in time to catch the shiny Swirlix\u2026 and ended up magically transported to a faraway Pok\u00e9mon Center. If the night-to-day change wasn\u2019t enough to despawn the Swirlix, I thought, surely that would do it.<\/p>\n

A bit later, I was on some rooftops heading to an objective when I heard the shiny sound effect again. I realized it was the same Swirlix, an Alpha, still there and still shiny. I immediately messaged my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore, who reviewed Z-A for The Verge<\/a>, half in disbelief. I thought at first it was only because the Swirlix was an Alpha, since certain Alphas always spawn in the same locations. But after launch, players and other websites<\/a> quickly reported that persistent shiny spawns apply to all shinies.<\/p>\n

There are some exceptions, though. Charles and I were chatting about this new spawning mechanic, and he sent me a clip of a shiny Patrat he\u2019d encountered \u2014 and which he\u2019d barely spotted before it ran away from his character and disappeared into the ether. Patrat is one of a handful of very skittish pok\u00e9mon that will flee when you get too close, and the process of fleeing does despawn the pok\u00e9mon in question, even if it\u2019s shiny.<\/p>\n

That also applies to any shiny pok\u00e9mon you\u2019ve defeated in battle but failed to catch, which isn\u2019t great news for pok\u00e9mon with lower catch rates. For those, you\u2019ll have to rely on saving \u2014 and you can\u2019t disable autosave in Z-A, unlike in other recent Pok\u00e9mon games. That sounds bad, but I\u2019ve found that the autosave doesn\u2019t trigger too frequently as long as you don\u2019t fast-travel to a new location or catch a pok\u00e9mon. It should still be possible to save right before battling a shiny and reload that save if you knock it out.<\/p>\n

Fleeing pok\u00e9mon aside, the new shiny spawning mechanics are great for a game so heavy on roundabout, vertical, on-foot exploration. The shinies have to stay in one place because reaching a pok\u00e9mon in order to catch it isn\u2019t always as simple as walking over to it. Sometimes you have to run around looking for a ladder, or get past a lot of other people who want to fight you, or run away from a wild pok\u00e9mon that\u2019s about to knock you out. It\u2019s a relief knowing that most shiny pok\u00e9mon will be waiting for you to reach them on your own terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon Legends: Z-A hadn\u2019t been out even a few hours before the tweets started rolling in: Shiny pok\u00e9mon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8133,156,3447,111,139,69,9509,1560,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-86447","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-analysis","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-gaming","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-pokemon","15":"tag-report","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}