How to Get Square Shiny Pokémon in Sword and Shield

Zack Palm
November 21, 2019
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Pokémon Sword and Shield arrive with an array of discoveries for you to go through and learn about on your journey. One of these new discovers is a brand new shiny variant to the game series. It will be incredibly challenging to capture, even for the most dedicated Pokémon collector.

There’s a 1 in 4,096 chance of a Shiny Pokémon spawning in on trainer. Those choices are meager, so most players have found ways to power through the system and increase their odds.

Pokémon collectors have two methods of acquiring a Shiny Pokémon. They can choose to go through numerous attempts of breeding Pokémon until they get it, following a distinct technique called the Masuda Method Egg Breeding. The alternative is to chain Pokémon in the wild, fighting a single type over and over again until you force a Shiny to arrive.

In Pokémon Sword and Shield, you have new odds to capture the fabled square Shiny. Your chances of getting a square Shiny when one spawn is 1/16 of those 1 in 4,096 chance, which is 1 in 65,536. That’s an incredibly low chance to make it happen, despite a handful of players already showing off their square Shinies on Twitter.

Here’s a tweet from one of the data miners who took a closer look at the valuable data files of the game.

Shiny Pokémon rarity has been split! Same 1:4096 odds to obtain a shiny, but there are two types of shiny. 15/16 show stars, 1/16 show squares. Square rarity is 1 in 65536!

Basically, if your Trainer ID cleanly matches the PID (xor), it will be squares rather than stars. pic.twitter.com/Lerr23LtB7

— Kurt (@Kaphotics) November 20, 2019

So, from what players can tell, the best method to go about capturing these square Shiny Pokémon is to follow through with the chaining method. The basic concept behind the chaining method is players are continually fighting the same species of Pokémon over without fighting others. Doing so increases their chances of a Shiny to show up.

Data miner Kurt also learned that by doing so, the chances flip, where a regular Shiny turns into 1/16, and the square Shiny turns into 15/16. There’s no evidence, as of this writing, if breeding works for square Shiny Pokémon, but we’re still learning about this new one. The community needs to take some time to process everything they have and come back with more methods and techniques.