During the first Community Day event in January, a dramatic increase in the number of Shiny Pikachu spawns was observed in the wild. Thanks to the timely work of our researchers during the three-hour window, the Silph Research group was able to come very close to determining the boosted rate at which these elusive creatures appeared.

Findings

Within the 3 hours of the event, 2,159 Pikachu sightings were reported, out of which 95 were shiny. This resulted in a rate of approximately:

1 in 22.7

Within a 95% confidence interval, the range is between:

1 in 19 to 1 in 28.3

Practical Implications

Remember, every unique wild Pikachu encounter has the same probability of unearthing a shiny Pikachu. Your odds on the next encounter are not affected by your previous Pikachu encounters.

But we can still put this encounter rate into a practical example by illustrating how likely or unlikely it is to encounter a large number of Pikachu without encountering a shiny!

For these examples, we’ll use the hypothetically ‘rarest’ 1 in 28.3 chance in order to view the most conservative (worst case) scenario. In this example, the table below shows the chances that you would catch at least 1 shiny:

# of Pikachu % chance to get a shiny 28 63.5% 50 83.5% 100 97.3% 125 99%

As you can see, it takes well over 28 Pikachu to get close to guaranteeing a shiny and a shiny Pikachu will never be completely guaranteed regardless of the number you catch.

Note

Due to the (relatively) smaller data set collected during the three-hour window, further testing for potentially influential variables (such as weather-boosts) were not feasible to conduct. However, no variables that were collected were observed to have any obvious effect on shiny rate.

Parting Words

Whether the next Community Day will also hold such a pleasant shiny surprise has yet to be seen, but keep your eyes peeled, travelers. If so, we’d expect to observe a similar rate of shiny encounters. We hope this information helps inform your efforts in that case!

Until then, travel safe!