Technologies

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet: Best Way to Catch Shiny Pokemon

Catching shiny Pokemon is easier than ever in Scarlet and Violet… but still pretty hard

For eager Pokemon trainers, there are few things sweeter in life than encountering a shiny Pokemon. As fans have come to expect, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet feature shiny versions of the 400 critters featured in the games.But, as always, getting them isn’t easy.When Pokemon spawn in Scarlet and Violet, they have about a one in 4,000 chance of being shiny.

Those odds are no good. Thankfully, there are a few ways to make fortune smile upon you.

Two of them are only available in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s postgame, but one aspect can be harnessed from very early on.If you’re wanting to hunt shiny Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet, here’s what you need to know.

Pokemon outbreaks are key

Here’s the basic method of shiny hunting in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet that you can do no matter how early in the game you are.

First, you need to look for Pokemon outbreaks. If you look on your overworld map, you’ll see icons of Pokemon scattered across Paldea. These denote an outbreak, where an area is swamped by the Pokemon in question. (Note that if you see a question mark on your map, it’s an outbreak of a Pokemon you’ve not encountered before.)

If you’re unsatisfied by the Pokemon on offer, you can rotate the selection by doing a dodgy move. Go into your Switch’s settings and change the date and time to be a day in the future. A new day brings new Pokemon outbreaks.

Say you’re after a Magneton, and you’ve found an outbreak in Glaseado Mountain. You now need to go about killing Magneton — lots of them. Press ZR to activate Let’s Go mode, at which point your lead Pokemon will come out of its ball, then seek and destroy. This is much more efficient than engaging Pokemon one by one in standard battles. Your odds of finding a shiny Pokemon go up once you kill 30 — and go up even more once you kill 60.

Make sure you keep a tally in your head, or your phone or computer. After you’ve downed 60 of a certain Pokemon, the odds of finding a shiny version of that Pokemon go from roughly one in 4,000 to just over one in 1,000.

Once you’ve killed 60, it’s shiny hunting time. Scope out the area for shinies. If there are none, setup a picnic and then pack the picnic up. Doing so resets the Pokemon in the area, giving you a new set of Pokemon in which a shiny may be lurking. Keep going until you find your prize.

It’s crucial to note that finding a shiny Pokemon often means closely inspecting it. There’s no shiny gleam around them in the open world, nor any sound or other stimuli that indicates their presence. It’s only once you initiate a battle with a shiny Pokemon that, during its opening battle animation, it’ll be shrouded in sparkles.

Shiny Elemental Boost	Sandwich Recipe
Shiny Normal Sandwich	1x Chorizo, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Fighting Sandwich	1x Pickle, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Fire Sandwich	1x Basil, 1xSweet Herba Mystica, 1x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Water Sandwich	1x Cucumber, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Poison Sandwich	1x Noodles 2x, Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Ground Sandwich	1x Ham, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Rock Sandwich	1x Jalapeno 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Psychic Sandwich	1x Onion, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Electric Sandwich	1x Yellow Bell Pepper, 1x Salty Herba Mystica, 1x Spicy Herba Mystica
Shiny Dark Sandwich	1x Smoked Filet, 1x Sweet Herba Mystica, 1x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Dragon Sandwich	1x Avocado, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Ice Sandwich	1x Klawf Stick, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Ghost Sandwich	1x Red Onion, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Steel Sandwich	1x Hamburger, 1x Salty Herba Mystica, 1x Sweet Herba Mystica
Shiny Fairy Sandwich	1x Tomato, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Bug Sandwich	1x Cherry Tomato, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Flying Sandwich	1x Proscuitto, 2x Salty Herba Mystica
Shiny Grass Sandwich	1x Lettuce, 1x Salty Herba Mystica, 1x Sour Herba Mystica

This method works, and can be done early in the game. But your odds of finding a shiny Pokemon can dramatically rise once you beat the main storyline.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Tera Raids

If you’ve played Pokemon Scarlet and Violet for any length of time, you’ve surely participated in a few Tera Raids. These are key to hunting shiny Pokemon.Once you complete the games’ three main quests, you’ll gain access to five-star Tera Raids. In these boss encounters, you’ll take on level 75 Pokemon made even more powerful by their terastalized state, harnessing the chaotic crystal energy that flows throughout Paldea.

To maximize your odds of finding a shiny Pokémon, you need to collect Herba Mystica sandwich ingredients. Once you have the right combination, you can make sandwiches that boost your chances of finding a shiny Pokemon by 300%. To collect Herba Mystica ingredients, you need to compete five-star Tera Raids.

Unfortunately, Scarlet and Violet don’t exactly hand these out — I had to do about six of these high-level raids before I got my first Herba Mystica. Note that you can also receive Herba Mystica from six-star Tera Raids, which you unlock after beating all Paldea gym leaders for a second time and winning the Academy Ace Tournament, but your odds of getting them don’t seem higher. So it’s best to stick to the easier (but still hard) five-star Tera Raids.

To give yourself a good chance at succeeding in these five-star Tera Raids, you’ll want a crew of Pokemon around levels 80 to 90. Head to the Delibird Presents shops around Paldea and collect items designed to be held in battle. Especially helpful are the Choice Band and Choice Specs, which greatly enhance your attack and special attack, respectively, and the Metronome, which empowers a move if you do it several times in a row.

Once you’ve completed a few of these five-star Terra Raids, with luck you’ll collect some Herba Mystica. They come in several varieties — sweet, salty, spicy and so on. If you make a sandwich with the right combination of ingredients, you’ll boost your rate of encountering a shiny Pokemon by 300%. The catch is that each recipe correlates to an element of Pokemon. So for instance, I wanted to hunt for a shiny Magneton, which is an electric-type Pokemon. So I created a sandwich that boosts the likelyhood of finding a shiny electric Pokemon.

And to boost your odds of finding a shiny Pokemon even more, you can use the Shiny Charm item. But to get this, you have to first complete your Pokedex by catching all 400 Pokemon in Paldea. If you’ve caught all Scarlet and Violet’s Pokemon, speak to Jacq in your school’s biology lab to get the shiny Charm.

Outbreaks and sandwiches

Now it’s time to put it all together. Once you’ve found an outbreak and killed 60 of the same Pokemon, it’s time to shiny hunt in earnest. First, pause the game, go into options and disable autosave. Then, manually save your game. Finally, craft your sandwich using your precious Herba Mystica ingredients.

Sandwich buffs in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet only last 30 minutes. The reason you’re disabling autosave and then saving before making the sandwich is so that, if you don’t encounter a shiny Pokemon within 30 minutes, you can close your game and reboot it before you used your scarce Herba Mystica resources. If you fail, you can then reset it to after you’ve killed 60 Pokemon, meaning you won’t have to go through that laborious task again.

As you’ll see once you put your sandwich together, you’ll get a 3x buff for sparkle Pokemon of a certain type (see image above), depending on the recipe you used. Now it’s time to employ the same method above: Search the area for Pokemon, reboot the Pokemon in the area by setting up and closing down a picnic, wash, rinse and repeat until you find your shiny.

The hardest part is collecting Herba Mystica from the five-star Tera Raids. Once you’ve done that, you can usually find a shiny Pokemon around an hour if you follow this method. Good luck!

Technologies

I Got Up Close and Personal With Boston Dynamics’ New Atlas Robot

Before Atlas takes its first steps into the world of work later this year, I found myself face-to-face with CES 2026’s most talked-about robot on the show floor.

When I say that I went hands-on with the new Boston Dynamics Atlas robot, I mean that I actually held hands with it. This humanoid robot, which CNET just awarded the Best Robot of CES Award, is one of the most advanced in the world, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get up close and personal with it.

This product version of the robot, which is set to be shipped to Hyundai factories imminently to start working, has been the talk of CES this year. The specific Atlas robot I encountered was a static model that wasn’t turned on or fully operational. Our interactions were, therefore, sadly one-sided. Still, I ran my hands over its soft-touch plastic shell and gently prodded at its finger joints, wondering how it would feel if they gripped me back.

People tend to have varying feelings about humanoid robots — understandable given that they are built to some degree in our image, while also usually being stronger than us, with «brains» that we don’t fully understand. Atlas definitely evokes contradictory emotions for me — even more so when I stood face-to-face with it.

I’m in awe of the engineering, a little fearful of its capabilities, hesitant about what it could mean for the future of humanity and charmed by its design and styling. The periwinkle blue iteration of Atlas that I met on the show floor at CES 2026 almost bears more resemblance to a Dyson product than it does the industrial robots that defined Boston Dynamics’ early days, when it was best known for its work with DARPA.

«There’s a lot of really specific things about this robot that probably look a little weird,» said Zachary Jackowski, Boston Dynamics VP and general manager of Atlas. He pointed to the legs, which he described as «like nothing anyone else was doing.»

Atlas’ thighs are narrow set and in line with the torso, while the calves are wider set, attached to their upper counterparts with a circular joint. This robot is, in fact, all subtle curves and soft lines. There are no harsh edges or stark angles.

During a year when CES has been flooded with humanoid robots, Atlas definitely does stand out due to its design. It appears both less classically human and less industrial than some of its peers, while also lacking the often intimidating, featureless faces they tend to exhibit. Instead, it has two low-set cameras resembling eyes placed where you’d usually expect a mouth to be. Its face is a perfect flat circle, defined by an LED halo that gives it a somewhat Pixar lamp effect.

I asked Jackowski why Boston Dynamics decided to skew so relatively unhuman with this version of its humanoid. «Well, it’s not a human,» he said. «It projects the wrong first impression about a robot to have it pretend to be something that it’s not.»

Particularly in the early days of humanoids, he added, robots won’t have anything like human-like intelligence. People should look at it and see it for what it is — a tool for performing tasks safely and efficiently.

In fact, most of the design decisions were made to keep Atlas as simple, scalable and safe as possible, Jackowski said. I remark that there’s some irony in thinking of a humanoid robot as simple, given the complexity of the technology and development process to bring Atlas to life.

The key to making it simple, Jackowski said, is having a strong enough grasp of the technology to «accomplish the complex thing of building a humanoid robot,» but then being able to take it apart and understand that you can use fewer computers and actuators in it while achieving the same results.

And it’s essential to Boston Dynamics that Atlas is perceived as simple. After all, it’s a general-purpose humanoid, which might eventually be sent far and wide to fulfil all manner of roles. Jackowski calls it the «ultimate generalist.»

Simplicity aside, there are aspects of Atlas that Jackowski believes set it apart from other humanoids at the show. «The repairability of this robot is crazy good,» he said. «The runtime is crazy good. The strength is unlike anything.»

From working in Hyundai’s manufacturing plants, Atlas’s job trajectory is to eventually graduate to many of the same industrial environments where Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot works, before moving to bussing tables in the service industry and eventually into the home. The robot will evolve between now and then, Jackowski said. However, this could be an early glimpse of the type of humanoid that will eventually be our housemate.

That’s some way away, though, which is probably for the best. As I gaze up at Atlas, which I’d guess is around the same height as my husband, my feeling is that, however impressive Atlas is, I’m still not ready for it to move in.

Technologies

This Star Wars Dartboard Has a Secret That Will Stop You From Using the Force to Win

This cool dartboard has cameras to track your score and keep you honest

Right in the middle of the high-tech show floor at CES 2026 sits a pub called the Bull and Barrel with some of the coolest dartboards I’ve seen. Target Darts was showcasing its collaboration with both Star Wars and Xbox. Darts may not be for everyone, but I love «shooting some arrows» in my basement with the family. I also love anything Star Wars themed, so these tick a lot of boxes.

The basic Star Wars set comes with a branded board and wall protector that resembles the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon and costs $200. The board is of very high quality, with a tight-knit sisal fiber face, and the protector is thick enough to keep stray shots out of your drywall. The graphics are cool too, with nods to the original Falcon and even have the gold dice hanging above.

The big tech twist to this board, though, is the Omni light ring around the outside. It uses four cameras to track your dart’s position, then sends that info to an app that keeps score. The scoreboard is crisp and clear and uses the voice of legendary darts announcer John McDonald to narrate your game. It’s pretty great to hear his voice announce my terrible scores.

The Omni also allows you to connect with other players worldwide via shared scoreboards. I love the idea of my dad having a board at his house or playing a match with me at my house. It adds a feeling of community to home darts that you don’t normally get outside a pub or bar.

The Omni is a much more expensive proposition than the Star Wars set, coming in at $650, but if you’re serious about the game and a Star Wars fan, it looks to be a great investment.

Technologies

TikTok and FIFA Team Up for World Cup 2026 Coverage

A new team-up aims to make this summer’s tournament more accessible for fans.

If you hadn’t already planned on swiping on TikTok videos of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a new partnership between the social media platform and tournament organizer FIFA could motivate you to start stretching out your thumbs.

As the soccer tournament nears — it will take place from June 11 to July 19 and span 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico and the US — TikTok will become FIFA’s first «preferred platform.» According to a FIFA statement on Thursday, this entails TikTok providing more coverage of the World Cup, including original content and even livestreaming of some portions of matches.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

You can use the FIFA World Cup 2026 hub on TikTok to find content, match tickets and viewing information, as well as participation incentives such as custom stickers and filters.

In the US, World Cup games will air live across Fox and FS1. If you don’t have cable, you can get a live TV streaming service, such as YouTube TV, which includes those channels. Additionally, every match will stream live on Fox One and the Fox Sports app.

«FIFA’s goal is to share the exhilaration of the FIFA World Cup 2026 with as many fans as possible,» FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafström said.