The Johto Festival saw the introduction of three new shiny forms: Sunkern , Natu , and Pineco .

Always eager to discover more about shiny rates, our Researchers laced up their sneakers and hit the streets to document the event. When the dust settled at the event’s conclusion, over 20,000+ encounters had been amassed. An analysis of the event period’s shiny encounters revealed something that may have implications for how shiny rates work for all Pokemon!

Findings

After 10,000+ Sunkern encounters and 7,800+ Natu encounters, neither species was observed to differ significantly from the base shiny rate for wild Pokemon encounters (which the Silph Research Group’s Shiny Hunt Series established is typically in the neighborhood of 1 in 450-500).

Pineco , however, had a significantly higher shiny rate¹ during the Johto Festival. In stark contrast to its peers, Pineco’s average shiny rate was found to be:

1 in 65

with a 95% confidence interval of 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 (n=3,000).

Clearly, shiny Pineco was appearing much more frequently than the base wild encounter rate! Here’s a summary table with the numbers by encounter type:

Encounter Type Total Encounters Total Shiny Shiny Rate 95% Confidence Interval Wild 551 10 1 in 55 1 in (35–140) Research 2416 36 1 in 65 1 in (50–100) Raid 53 1 – Too little data Hatched 6 0 – Too little data Total 3026 47 1 in 65 1 in (50–100)

The Species-Dependent Shiny Rate Hypothesis

Exploring Pineco’s elevated shiny rate provides strong evidence for a hypothesis Silph Scientists have long toyed with:

Hypothesis: Each individual Pokémon species may have its own (single) species-specific shiny rate. The shiny rate remains unchanged across all possible encounter types, rather than each Pokémon species possessing multiple distinct shiny rates or having its rate affected by multipliers based on the encounter type (e.g. obtained in the wild, from a Raid, from a Field Research encounter, or hatched from an egg).

A similar phenomenon to Pineco was observed during The Silph Road’s Shiny Hunt Series when investigating Aerodactyl encounters during Adventure Week. The shiny rates for Aerodactyl from Raids and Field Research encounters were indistinguishable. The research group did not have access to enough wild encounter data at the time of publication to investigate the topic with any reasonable level of confidence. Now, while the Johto event did not provide the number of Raid encounters and hatches needed to show equality of all boosted shiny rates for a single species within a single event, it did provide the first concrete evidence of an event-boosted shiny rate being used for both Field Research and wild encounters.

Of course, each Pokémon having a set shiny rate does not preclude those currently static rates from changing in future updates. For example, the Pokémon Absol has never been encountered outside of Raids and Field Research encounters, but if this was to change in the future, Absol ‘s shiny rate could very well be adjusted to reflect this.

Parting Words

The shiny rate for Pineco during the Johto Festival provides some of the best evidence thus far that the shiny rate may be independent from encounter type – and that no encounter type multipliers exist. We eagerly await future opportunities for further investigation.

If this hypothesis proves correct, then it is in our travelers’ best interest, in both day-to-day shiny hunting and during events with boosted shiny rates, to hunt using methods that provide the most total encounters with their targeted Pokémon, instead of relying on a shortcut (and more expensive) method like Raiding.

Happy hunting, travelers. We’ll see you on the road!

– Scientist Titleist12 and Scientist WoodWose –

¹Based on a Pearson’s chi-squared test (p < 1 x 10-10)