Ever since Pokémon Legends: Z-A players found out the rare, alternate-colored monsters known as “shiny” Pokémon don’t despawn in this game, the shiny hunting meta has been rapidly evolving to take advantage of this new change. Some players devised ways early on to farm these rare spawns without touching their controller, and now that many players have reached the post-game, some have concocted a method to hunt not only shiny Pokémon, but also the large, powerful, aggressive Alpha Pokémon that are also rare spawns in the game’s world.
This method seems so busted, I wouldn’t be surprised if Game Freak patched it out in a future update, but for the moment, players have a really elaborate way of hunting up to six shiny Alpha Pokémon at a time if they’ve seen the credits (the real credits, not the fake ones). YouTuber Austin John Plays demonstrates the elaborate but effective strategy, which requires you to mess around with and essentially break the Alpha Pokemon in Wild Zone 20’s spawn area so you can trick the game into bringing out more monsters in the area than it’s supposed to. The full method requires you to aggro the Alphas in Wild Zone 20 until they’re near the edge of the fenced-off area. By leaving the zone while these Pokémon are near the edge of it, you’ll make their spawn area essentially reset to the position they were in when you left, meaning the game will trigger new Alpha spawns in the center of the zone. If you do this successfully enough times without dying, you can get several Alphas spawning in the zone, and because shiny Pokémon won’t despawn, you can enter, exit, or reset the area by resting on a bench until all six spawned Alphas are shiny.
The whole thing is pretty complicated and requires some precise positioning and saving, but it seems to work. Check out Austin John Plays’ tutorial below:
I’m always amazed by the commitment shiny hunters bring to breaking the game to find these guys. So far, I’ve stumbled upon two shinies during my playthrough without looking for them, which is more than I typically find in these games. Both the Legends games have made spotting shinies easier by adding a visual and audio indicator when one is in the overworld, so I’ve gotten two in both Z-A and Arceus without even trying.