Technologies

How to Catch Shiny Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet

You have about a one in 4,000 chance of stumbling on a shiny Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet, but there are a few ways to dramatically improve your odds.

There are few things sweeter in life than finding a shiny Pokemon — but nothing worth having comes easy. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, like its predecessors, feature shiny versions of the 400 critters featured in the games.But getting them takes time, work and luck. Thankfully though, there are a few ways to make fortune smile upon you in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

When Pokemon spawn in Scarlet and Violet, they have about a one in 4,000 chance of being shiny. Those odds are no good, but can be improved by three methods. 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 Prosciutto, 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’s five-star 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.

Combining 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

Trump Gives TikTok Another 75 Days to Strike a Sale

The president says he’s signing an executive order to push back enforcement of the ban again, pushing back the previous deadline of Saturday.

President Donald Trump is giving TikTok more time to sell its US operations, saying that «tremendous progress» has been made toward a deal and pushing off enforcement of a ban that was set to kick in Saturday.

In a Friday afternoon Truth Social post, Trump said that despite that progress, the deal still needs more work, so he’s signing an executive order giving TikTok 75 more days, taking the deadline out to June 19. The move prevents the wildly popular video app from potentially going dark in less than a day.

Trump went on to say that his administration will continue to work with China and credited the tariffs he enacted earlier this week, calling them «the most powerful economic tool» and «very important» to national security.

«We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark,'» Trump said in his post. «We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.»

Both TikTok and the Chinese government have long opposed a sale of the company’s US operations and it remains unclear as to if their positions have changed. TikTok didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment.

Read more: TikTok Backups: 6 Similar Apps for Your Daily Dose of Fun

China on Friday reacted to the tariffs Trump spoke of by matching them with its own on US goods, escalating the trade war between the two countries and sending stock markets around the world tumbling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged more than 2,200 points and the Nasdaq composite lost 5.8% in afternoon trading — its biggest drop in five years.

The TikTok ban delay wasn’t unexpected. Several potential bidders for TikTok’s US operations have made their interest known in just the past few days, and Trump has been meeting with administration officials this week to discuss possible deals and ownership structures.

According to recent reporting by The New York Times, one plan included private equity firm Blackstone and the tech company Oracle, while another involved a last-minute bid from Amazon.

Lawmakers in both political parties have long voiced concerns that TikTok could be a threat to national security and could be used by the Chinese government to spy on Americans or spread disinformation to further China’s agenda. TikTok continues to deny those accusations.

The law requiring the sale was passed by Congress last year with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by then-President Joe Biden. Free speech and other groups sued to overturn the law on First Amendment grounds, but it was upheld by the US Supreme Court in January.

So what’s next for TikTok? Here’s what you need to know.

What does the law do?

The law aims to force TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell to a buyer American officials are OK with and guarantee that ByteDance no longer has access to US user data or control over the TikTok algorithm.

TikTok was given nine months to comply, hence the original Jan. 19 sale deadline, at which point the government could require the removal of its app from US app stores and that other tech companies stop supporting the app and website.

TikTok shut down in the US the night of Jan. 18, citing the ban, but came back online the next morning after Trump made assurances that he would not immediately enforce it. Trump later formalized that promise by signing an executive order that directed the attorney general to not enforce the ban for 75 days, effectively moving the deadline to April 5.

The new executive order pushes the deadline back to June 19, which is Juneteenth, a federal holiday.

Read more: TikTok Loves to Give Financial Advice. But Don’t Believe Everything You Hear

What’s Trump’s take?

After originally calling for a ban during his first presidency, Trump said during the 2024 campaign that he wasn’t in favor of one and pledged to «save TikTok,» though he didn’t specify how he’d do that.

Trump told the press on Sunday that «there’s tremendous interest in TikTok.» He added that he would «like to see TikTok remain alive.» The president also said that «we have a lot of potential buyers» and that his administration is «dealing with China,» which has long opposed a sale.

On March 26, Trump said he would consider lowering tariffs on Chinese goods if that country’s government approved a sale of TikTok’s US operations. He also at that time reiterated his willingness to push the deadline back if needed.

Trump also has floated the idea of the US taking a 50% stake in the company as part of a joint venture, but hasn’t given specifics as to how that would work.

TikTok CEO Shou Chew was one of several high-profile tech executives to attend Trump’s inauguration in January, just hours before Trump would sign the order granting the 75-day extension.

Previous to that, during a press conference in December, Trump pointed to the role TikTok played during the election, crediting it with helping him pick up the votes of young people.

«TikTok had an impact, and so we’re taking a look at it,» Trump said. «I have a little bit of a warm spot in my heart. I’ll be honest.»

Technologies

Marvel Rivals Season 2: Here Are Emma Frost’s Abilities

Emma Frost is joining the Rivals roster in season 2 as a vanguard with a set of abilities that change depending on her form.

Marvel Rivals players are getting invited to the shores of Krakoa for the start of season 2 on April 11. The game dropped the first trailer for the new season, giving us our first official look at the new heroes, and a developer vision video dropped major news about the future of hero releases.

The trailer features Emma Frost, wearing slightly more clothes than usual, inviting people from across Rivals’ various timelines to the mutant nation of Krakoa, where everyone gets dressed up for a fancy gala — even Wolverine puts on a white tux. The event, however, is unceremoniously interrupted when Ultron shows up preaching extermination.

Emma Frost abilities revealed

Emma Frost joins the roster as a vanguard who can project a shield forward, give herself damage reduction by going into her diamond form and also choke-slam people while insulting them. We got a glimpse at her abilities in her hero trailer and a streamer event on Friday confirmed her full kit.

In Frost’s default form, her primary fire is a beam with damage that ramps up over time and her alternate fire projects a barrier forward. In her normal form, Frost has a Psychic Spear ability that pulls an enemy’s sentience into a crystal form, damaging them by attacking and shattering the crystal.

However, all of these abilities change when Frost transforms into her diamond form, which gives her damage reduction and makes her unstoppable. In diamond form, her primary fire turns into a punch and her alt fire kicks enemies back, dealing extra damage if they hit a wall. Diamond-form Frost can no longer attack people’s sentience but she can lunge forward to grab enemies and slam them into the ground.

Her Psyonic Seduction ultimate has different effects. It damages and stuns enemies in range and locks them out of activating ultimate abilities. Additionally, enemies who are caught in the blast for long enough will be psychically compelled to move toward Frost, making it easier for her to grab them, kick them, slam them, etc. Rivals devs have seen the players’ thirst and seem to be leaning heavily into it.

Ultron is coming in the season 2.5 update, which should be in late May.

Team-up changes and other season 2 balance adjustments

Some team-ups are changing in season 2, including three new team-up abilities that were previewed in the newest developer vision video.

Emma Frost allows Magneto and Psylocke to create illusions of themselves.
Doctor Strange teams up with Scarlet Witch allowing her to use small portals to seemingly increase her damage output via a rapid-shooting alternate fire.
Cap finally teams up with Bucky, allowing the Winter Soldier to leap to allies.

A few existing team-ups are getting adjustments, with Psylocke, Winter Soldier and Doctor Strange being removed from older team-ups in favor of new ones, and Namor is moving from working with Luna’s anchor to Hulk’s to empower his squids with gamma energy. Two team-ups are being removed entirely: Magneto can no longer team up with Scarlet Witch, and Thor is no longer anchoring Cap and Storm.

Rivals announced the full list of season 2 balance changes, including buffs to Peni, Mister Fantastic and Moon Knight, with Strange losing some damage for more survivability (via his new anchor buff) and Rocket getting several adjustments, while Loki and Adam Warlock receive nerfs to their Regeneration Domain and Soul Bond abilities.

Future seasons will be shorter, which means more new heroes

One of the most surprising moments in the developer video was the announcement that, beginning with season 3, seasons will be two months long instead of roughly three. There has been a lot of discussion online about whether Rivals’ pace of new heroes (about eight per year based on three-month seasons) was sustainable. Well, apparently the Rivals devs took that personally and are cranking up that pace to a new hero every month, meaning 12 new heroes per year.

This feels borderline ludicrous compared with other hero shooters that average about three new heroes per year, or even MOBAs like League of Legends, which has averaged about four new champions per year in the past five years. Rivals benefits from having an overflowing stable of Marvel characters to pull from rather than inventing their own hero concepts, and compared with Overwatch, the developers seem less worried about mechanical overlap in their heroes, as seen with many support ultimates. Still, a new hero every month feels unheard of for a hero shooter.

New Krakoa map and competitive changes

Season 2 is adding two new maps, including a Krakoa-themed domination map at the season’s start. Yggsgard: Royal Palace (domination) and Tokyo 2099: Shin-Shibuya (convergence) will rotate out of the map pool for ranked modes, though they’ll still be available in quick play and custom games.

The threshold for competitive picks and bans, which currently only happen in diamond-ranked lobbies, will be lowered to gold 3. Players in Eternity or One Above All ranks will only be able to duo queue, instead of queuing with larger groups — a measure that’s likely intended to keep high-level teams from stomping lobbies.

Speaking of ranks, season 2 will drop everyone by 9 divisions, which is equal to 3 ranks. That means players in Eternity will drop to diamond, and any players at platinum 3 or below will start their climb from bronze 3 again. (AGAIN… AGAIN.)

Rivals developers also announced that individual player performance will be weighted higher when determining competitive progress after a match, meaning if your stats outperform your team’s, you’ll earn more for winning and drop less for losing. This change can help elevate smurfs and other high-skill players in lower-ranked lobbies by getting them into their appropriate ranks faster. However, it can also lead to players stat-farming, instead of playing in a way that is most effective for winning games. Overall, given that Rivals doesn’t use any sort of competitive placement matches, this should be a net positive for the game.

Other announcements

Rivals is adding new skin recolors to certain hero skins and (finally) giving players the option to gift costumes to their friends so they can surprise someone for their birthday, which you definitely did not forget about.

Missions are changing a bit, with the addition of weekly missions and a redistribution of where battle-pass-progressing chrono tokens are earned. The devs framed this as creating a «smoother expectation» of how to earn chrono tokens, but the surface-level description sounds like they’re just making it harder to earn battle pass progress over the season by tucking away more progress under missions with shorter time limits.

The developer vision update also gave us our first look at the competitive distribution, showing how many Rivals players are in each tier as of season 1.5.

The Hellfire Gala trailer says season 2 will start on April 11 UTC. While it doesn’t give a specific start time, expect the between-seasons maintenance to finish sometime in the middle of the night in the US.

For more on Marvel Rivals, check out which heroes and roles you should play and how to get free skins.

Technologies

Review: McDonald’s Minecraft Meals Are Out, With Toys and Nether Flame Sauce

Commentary: I tried the Minecraft-themed McNuggets sauce. It might just be the hottest sauce Mickey D’s has ever offered.

The children yearn for the mines. It’s no April Fools’ Day joke: Kids at my local McDonald’s were streaming out the door on Tuesday with the new Minecraft-themed Happy Meal boxes when I drove up to try the new offering. It’s all a promotion for A Minecraft Movie, which opens Friday, April 4, and it draws inspiration from the popular video game available across platforms including Xbox, Nintendo Switch and mobile phones. So, of course, I had to try everything they offered and report back. And I think my tongue is still burning days later. That Nether Flame Sauce is no joke.

Read more: McDonald’s Launches Minecraft Happy Meals, Plus a ‘Nether’ Hot Sauce for Nuggets

Happy Meals: 12 toys, digital game, Creeper box

You know what a Happy Meal is. It’s a boxed kids meal with a toy, where the kid can choose between a hamburger, cheeseburger, or 4-piece or 6-piece chicken McNuggets. Fries, apples and a drink also come with it.

For this promotion, even the Happy Meal box is Minecraft-themed. Personally, I think the Happy Meal boxes are much cuter than the themed boxes that come with the adult Minecraft Movie Meal. My Happy Meal box looked the familiar green Minecraft monsters called Creepers, but this Creeper has kind of a furry look, like it was a cousin of Sesame Street’s green Muppet Oscar the Grouch

But it’s the toy, sorry — «figurine», that will have kids making multiple trips to their local McD’s. There are 12 different toys. Mine was marked «#1, grass block and llama.» When you open the box the toy comes in, you might think the llama was left behind, because the toy itself is a closed green grass block. But you can open the block and inside is a little llama figurine, permanently attached to one side of the block.

The box my toy came in shows the other options you might get. There are six different block-and-creature toys, like the one I got, and six slightly bigger figurines that don’t come inside a block. And the walls of the block are kind of like puzzle pieces. You can take the block apart and lay its walls flat and connect them. So if you get more toys, you can make a little playmat of them all, and even attach the six slightly bigger figures, because their bases fit the «puzzle.»

The little toy box in each Happy Meal also comes with a scannable code on one side to unlock a digital game where players can complete a quest in the Minecraft Movie world. I tried it, and it’s actually more fun than a free mini-game from a fast food eatery has any right to be. Good job, Ronald.

Minecraft Movie Meal: McD-themed toys, in-game bonus item, Gold Block box

McDonald’s also was smart enough to know that adults like collectibles too, and that they might have bigger appetites. So the fast food chain is also offering a Minecraft Movie Meal — kind of like a bigger Happy Meal. Choose a Big Mac or 10-piece Chicken McNuggets, with fries and a drink.

The boxes for these meals are like larger Happy Meal boxes. But instead of being Creeper-themed, the one I got was designed to look like a Minecraft gold block. While I prefer the Creeper, it’s smart that the adult meal and kid meal boxes are themed differently.

And then, the toy. The grownup meal toy was a big letdown compared to the Happy Meal toy options. While the Happy Meal toys were actual Minecraft characters, the ones in the adult meals are McDonald’s mascots created with that blocky, Minecraft look. The figurines have a bit of a twist — with the toys including a Grimace Egg and Zombie Hamburglar. Mine was called Birdie Wings, and is based on Birdie the Early Bird, a mascot McDonald’s introduced in 1980 to promote its then-new breakfast items.

Each figure, including my Birdie Wings, comes with a shiny card with that figure’s image. You scan the QR code on the card to unlock a matching item in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition.

Nether Flame Sauce is hot, hot, hot

Maybe the most fun part of the McDonald’s-Minecraft promotion is a new chicken McNugget dipping sauce called the Nether Flame Sauce. It’s named for the Minecraft underworld, and I think it’s the hottest sauce McDonald’s has ever used. You don’t have to buy the Minecraft Movie Meal or Happy Meal to get the sauce. If you want to try it with fries or something else, you can order the Nether Flame Sauce with any purchase.

I’m a fan of hot sauces of all sorts. While Nether Flame Sauce isn’t one of the hottest hot sauces I’ve ever tried, it’s definitely the hottest McDonald’s dipping sauce I’ve ever tried, and I practically made a career out of reporting on the Rick and Morty Szechuan sauce.

There’s a definite kick to this sauce, which looks like Thai red chili sauce but is less sweet and more spicy. The ingredient list on the sauce packet says it includes chili peppers, cayenne peppers, vinegar, sugar, garlic, apricot concentrate and more. I had an extra sauce packet, and my husband devoured it with leftover French fries.

Final Minecraft-McDonald’s thoughts

Although I have no idea if the upcoming A Minecraft Movie is any good, I feel comfortable grading this McD-Minecraft promotion with a big fat «A.»

I’m not reviewing the non-Nether sauce foods in the meals. It’s McDonald’s. You know what it tastes like.

The boxes are cute. There’s a meal for kids and one for adults. The toys are creative and fun, though in my mind the tiny Happy Meal toys are far more fun to collect than the McDonald’s mascot ones that come in the adult meal.

And best of all, the Nether Flame sauce is a fun, spice-filled change of pace for those of us who don’t mind a fiery dipping option.🔥