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A Pokemon player has become the first documented person to successfully hunt down a unique shiny Eevee that should never have existed, in a method that forces them to throw their lucky find away.
Shiny Pokemon are coveted as some of the rarest possible finds in the Pokemon series. Depending on what game you play, stumbling across one can mean beating 1/8192 odds, all for a little guy with an alternate color palette that sparkles when you send it out into battle. There's a huge community of shiny hunters out there dedicated to finding these rarities for their own collections, but that's usually the point – being able to keep them. In shiny hunter MistyMysteria's case, however, they knew that the exceedingly elusive target they were after would vanish into the night soon after its discovery.
In the Nintendo Switch games Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, the partner Pikachu or Eevee that sits on your shoulder throughout your journey is 'shiny locked,' meaning that no matter how many times you restart your save file, you won't find a sparkly one. However, for whatever reason, this isn't the case in the free demo version for the games.
This was first proven when a player known as JonSuperKnife played the demo at a Best Buy kiosk almost six years ago, and discovered that the Eevee they'd been given sparkled when sent into battle, even though its color palette was the exact same as normal. Based on the fact that it was changed in the full release, it was clearly never supposed to be possible for it to be shiny, but it seemingly slipped through the cracks in the demo.
Until now, JonSuperKnife's footage was the only known video evidence of the 'invisible' shiny. And, considering that even if you play the demo on your own Switch you can't transfer the data to the full version of the game, you can understand why it wasn't a hunt that most would be willing to sit down and try. However, after watching a recent video from YouTuber Testostyronne, who pointed out that the hunt is possible, MistyMysteria was up to the task, and shockingly, managed to find the mythical Eevee in just one day of hunting, after 180 resets. For reference, Let's Go's base shiny odds are 1/4096, so if the demo's are the same, this find appeared way under odds.
Just in case this wasn't rare enough, MistyMysteria's shiny Eevee was also female, and female Eevee in themselves only have a 12.5% chance of appearing. Factoring that into those base odds, and as Testostyronne has since pointed out, this would bump the odds to 1/32,768. On top of that though, in the demo, it's random whether you get given a Pikachu or Eevee in the first place, so technically speaking, this specific find actually had a 1/65,536 chance of materializing. It's an absurd amount of luck, and all for a Pokemon that can't be held onto for any longer than the duration of the demo.
Needless to say, this is huge, but MistyMysteria wasn't the first to attempt the hunt. Testostyronne had been looking for either a demo Pikachu or Eevee before being beaten to it, but is now trying to be the first to find shiny partner Pikachu, which has seemingly never been discovered. Whether they manage to get as lucky as MistyMysteria is another matter, though, as the fact that they were able to defy such astronomical odds so quickly is genuinely mind-blowing.
If you love Pokemon, be sure to check out our ranking of the best Pokemon games.
