Technologies

Shiny Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet: How to Find and Catch Them

You can collect a sweet team of shiny Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet — if you have the patience for it.

Nothing worth having in life comes easy. If you want a shiny Pokemon, you’re going to have to work for it! Thankfully, it’s actually easier to catch shiny Pokemon in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet than in previous games — but «easier» doesn’t mean «easy.»

When Pokemon spawn in Scarlet and Violet, they have about a 1 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 strategy 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 your friend

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 1 in 4,000 to just over 1 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.

You’re going to have to Tera Raid

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 likelihood 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.

Pokemon outbreaks + sandwiches = shiny success

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 Tried This $40 Smartwatch: It Was Meh, but Not a Complete Waste of Time

The WITHit Giga does the basics for a lot less, but at the expense of accuracy and attention to detail.

I wasn’t expecting much when I first strapped the WITHit Giga Smartwatch onto my wrist, and at least it delivered on that. This $40 smartwatch does the basics: shows notifications, counts your steps, tracks your heart rate (sort of) and lets you take calls from your wrist. But the execution of all these features is where it all starts to fall apart, and I found myself getting exactly what I paid for.

After spending a week testing it, I came away with this: If you just want a basic smartwatch that works with both Android and iPhone, tells the time, tracks your steps and surfaces notifications, this will get the job done, just don’t expect accuracy. But if you can stretch your budget even a little, something like the $75 Amazfit Bip 6 offers more accurate tracking, a more refined design and more reliable performance.

Design and UI: big, bulky, and basic

The WITHit Giga is about as no-frills as smartwatches come. It looks like an Apple Watch Ultra impersonator: metallic frame around a rectangular screen, rounded edges and even Apple Watch-like icons inside. But that’s where the similarities end.

If your wrist is on the smaller side like mine (I have a 6-inch wrist), brace yourself because this is going to look huge. The Giga’s 48.5mm case is overpowering, and there’s no smaller size option. On my wrist, it felt bulky and out of place, and the thick, textured silicone bands definitely didn’t help matters.

The 2.04-inch AMOLED display is decent with a 386×448 resolution, but the screen brightness isn’t adaptive. You’ll need to manually adjust it, which means it’s almost too bright at night and borderline unreadable in direct sunlight unless you increase the brightness manually.

This watch runs its own proprietary system, syncs to the WITHit app and works with both Android and iOS. You’ll get notifications, basic fitness tracking, an always-on display (which in my testing drained the battery fast) and a speaker/mic combo for answering calls.

The UI is straightforward but lacks polish. Swiping right opens your favorites and the side button lets you quickly launch a workout. Animations feel slow and longer text scrolls in awkwardly to fit the screen.

Battery life: Not bad but there’s a catch

Battery life is one of the few things that holds up well here. I got about three days of use with the raise-to-wake option, and roughly a day and a half with the always on display enabled. That’s not bad for the price, and it’s actually better than even some flagship smartwatches.

But the manual comes with a big red flag: «Avoid fast chargers» and don’t overcharge. That’s not something you want to see in 2025, especially because at this point in my smartwatch charger collection I don’t know which one is fast, and which one is not, and the vague warning makes me think it’s going to explode if I make the wrong choice. Charging from an empty battery to full takes about two hours with the included magnetic charger. But once I left it charging overnight and I approached it with terror the next morning thinking I’d broken the «don’t overcharge» rule. Luckily, I came out unscathed.

Health and fitness tracking: lower your expectations

Workout tracking and wellness is where the cracks really show. Yes, the Giga technically tracks heart rate, blood oxygen (SpO2), sleep, stress and menstrual cycles. But the accuracy is questionable at best.

During workouts, heart rate measurements were consistently off when compared to a chest strap and even other wrist-based trackers. The post workout HR average was close enough, but the metrics during the workout were noticeably off. For example, as I was sitting on my Pilates reformer (completely sedentary) starting a workout on the watch, the screen already read «100bpm», while the chest strap and Apple Watch had me at 65 bpm. This made me skeptical of even the resting heart rate readings.

Sleep tracking only works between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., meaning night shift workers or anyone with an irregular schedule (like this late-night writer) is out of luck.

Sleep stats are also confusing; instead of clear sleep stages or hours of sleep, you get odd comparisons like «fewer than 26% of people in your age group go to sleep this late.» Not exactly sure what I should do with this information.

Menstrual tracking is purely manual, based on averages, with no biological marker detection like temperature tracking. You can’t even log a period directly from the watch and have to do it from the app.

Other smartwatch features

Calls: As long as your phone is within range, you can answer and make phone calls from the watch with its speaker and mic, but clarity is an issue.
Texting: You can see texts from messaging apps, but you can’t reply or even send a prewritten response (when paired to an iPhone).
Voice Assistant: Technically available, but is basically just a shortcut to activate your own phone’s assistant. You tap, and Siri or Google Assistant opens on your phone, not the watch. Not helpful.
Quick settings: Save your recently used apps in quick settings, which actually made flipping between features like workouts and music controls more convenient — this is a win.

Should you buy it?

The WITHit Giga does the bare minimum you’d expect from a smartwatch, but at the expense of accuracy and attention to detail. For $40, it’s a functional notification mirror with step tracking, call support and a splash of health features (if you’re looking for a general overview at best).

But if you can stretch your budget, something like the $80 Amazfit Bip 6 offers far better value, accurate health tracking, cleaner UI and better battery life.

Bottom line: If you keep your expectations low, and you’re just dipping your toes in the smartwatch waters for the first time, this might suffice. Otherwise, it’s worth paying more for something that feels less like a toy and more like a tool.

Technologies

Xbox Game Pass Adds Grounded 2 and Others This Month

Game Pass subscribers will also be able to play the new 90s-inspired horror game Abiotic Factor.

The award-winning, quirky survival game Grounded is like the game version of the classic ’80s comedy film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. And Xbox Game Pass subscribers can get early access to that game’s sequel, Grounded 2, on July 29.

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, a CNET Editors’ Choice award pick, offers hundreds of games you can play on your Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One and PC or mobile device for $20 a month. A subscription gives you access to a large library of games, with new ones, including Doom: The Dark Ages, added monthly, plus other benefits such as online multiplayer and deals on non-Game Pass titles.

Here are the games Microsoft is bringing to Game Pass soon. You can also check out other games the company added to the service recently, like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass and Game Pass Standard subscribers can play now.

Serve the public, protect the innocent and uphold the law as the cyborg RoboCop. You’ll investigate crimes in Old Detroit before using your cyborg strength, cybernetic implants and arsenal of weapons to eradicate gangs from the area. This game is a whole new RoboCop story based on the film series, and Peter Weller, the original RoboCop himself, returns to voice the titular character.

My Friendly Neighborhood

Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers can play now.

Something’s going on with everyone’s favorite Saturday morning puppet show, and it’s up to you to figure out what in this survival horror game. You’ll solve puzzles and use tools and improvised weapons to fend off your multicolored foes. So if you have anything against Barney or Big Bird, you can take out your feelings on them with this game.

Back to the Dawn

Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers can play now.

This game is like if the series Prison Break took place in the Zootopia universe. You’ll play as either a fox named Thomas or a black panther named Bob as they try to navigate the prison system and escape with their lives. With multiple escape routes and over 100 quests you can complete, you can replay this game numerous times and have a different experience each time.

Abiotic Factor

Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers can play on July 22.

Science meets violence in this 1990s-inspired sci-fi survival game. You and up to five other players can choose your areas of expertise, build your scientist and explore a massive, top-secret underground complex filled with artifacts and supernatural horrors that could tear you limb from limb. And remember, safety, security and secrecy are of the utmost importance… usually.

Wheel World

Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers can play on July 23.

If you want to take a nice, relaxing bike ride, this game is for you. Previously known as Ghost Bike, this game puts you behind the handlebars of one of the last ghost bikes around. These bikes can traverse between the lands of the living and the dead. You can explore these lands at your leisure while you race other riders and upgrade your ride with treasures you find along the way.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers

Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers can play on July 24.

This souls-like RPG is set during the final days of the Ming Dynasty. You play as an amnesiac pirate warrior named Wuchang on a quest to uncover the truth behind a world full of chaos. You’ll fight monstrous creatures in forgotten temples and overgrown ruins, unlock new weapons and master devastating techniques in order to bring peace to yourself and others.

Grounded 2 (game preview)

Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers can play on July 29.

You’ve been shrunk to the size of an ant — again — and you’ll have to survive the dangerous, miniature world. You’ll fight spiders and wasps, craft weapons and homes and even ride on your own insect friends to get around. You’ll unravel new mysteries along the way, but be careful. Something else is out there, and it hasn’t forgotten about you.

Farming Simulator 25

Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass and Game Pass Standard subscribers can play on Aug. 1.

Farming isn’t always as simple as games like Stardew Valley might make it out to be, but it can still be very rewarding. If you want a taste of what goes into building and maintaining your own farm, give Farming Simulator 25 a try. You’ll grow diverse crops, raise different animals and with the weather-changing, ground-deforming atmosphere, you’ll face all kinds of challenges along the way.

Games leaving Game Pass on July 31

While Microsoft is adding those games to Game Pass soon, it’s also removing three other games on July 31. So you still have some time to finish your campaign or complete any side quests before you have to buy these games separately.

Gigantic: Rampage Edition
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Turnip Boy Robs a Bank

For more on Xbox, discover other games available on Game Pass now, read our hands-on review of the gaming service and learn which Game Pass plan is right for you. You can also check out what to know about upcoming Xbox game price hikes.