A New Personal Best — 36 Shinies

I'm a shiny hunter. If you've browsed Rukinations even a little bit then you've probably deduced that through one of like seven different ways. I've RNG Manip hunted, I've full-odds wild encounter hunted, I've Masuda Method hunted, I think I've honestly done every shiny hunt you can do except for the stupid PokéRadar.

Good God do I hate the PokéRadar.

If you don't know what Shiny Pokémon are and haven't learned from a different page on Rukinations somehow, here's a quick crash course: Shiny Pokémon, or "shinies" for sake of my keyboard, are (allegedly) super-rare alternate forms of Pokémon that have a different color scheme and a special sparkle when they enter the field. That's it. Beyond meta logic, there's no mechanical difference between the two. Some are released as gifts to celebrate special events, but most of the time you need to hunt these yourself. Most of them are pretty. Some are... not, but they're still quite rare.

Did you notice that word "allegedly"? They are still mathematically rare, but they've certainly become less rare over time. At first, Pokémon had a 1/8192 chance of being shiny, but now the odds are 1/4096. And that's before you add methods or optimizations that either further increase the odds or maximize the number of attempts per minute. I'm not here to debate whether or not that's "good," that's a debate for a different day. The point is that they have gotten easier over the past few generations (especially over the past few games).

Occasionally, when I happen to find myself finding a large number of shiny Pokémon in one day, I try to push the limit and see how many shinies I can catch in one day. The previous record of mine was twenty Pokémon thanks to an event in Scarlet & Violet that further increased the odds for certain Pokémon on top of the already pretty good odds.

Yesterday, on the 29^th of December, I accidentally almost beat that record. I was trying to get a handful of shinies in Legends: Z-A and, when I tried to find a shiny Mudkip... well, you'll see how many Pokémon I found before the third and final Mudkip. Claunchers love me.

Naturally, if I was already almost there, I figured I may as well keep going.

The only Pokémon on that list that isn't what I caught is the Alolan Persian. I evolved that as soon as I caught it before I ended up trying to beat my own record.

I don't expect to try to beat that record any time soon. I could have done a lot more if I explicitly planned around trying to beat this record, but shiny hunting so many Pokémon in one day is extremely tiresome (not to mention the resources needed in-game to hunt in Legends: Z-A) and I still had some tasks to complete in the rest of the game. As of writing, I just finished the DLC Post-Game a few hours ago and still need to grind getting one Pokémon in particular for my Ranked team this season (you'll hear about that headache soon. If you want a sneak peak, check out my list of favorite games in 2025.)

I guess if I had to brainstorm ways to improve that number, I could have actually planned the day around it instead of starting mid-afternoon (the previous record in Scarlet & Violet was planned around an entire day) or run more than one game at the same time (Z-A is also notoriously easy to optimize). To be honest, though, I'm not sure if I even want to. I'm proud of my collection, and my shiny collection is bigger than most people's that I talk to normally, but going through so many at once can ruin the fun and burn you out for a good while. I think it's more fun to randomly end up pushing yourself to beat your record.

If you want a good laugh, though, I actually mathematically could have added another two Pokémon to this list. A Kleavor spawned one cycle after midnight so it wasn't the same day anymore, and another Scyther spawned nearby but I didn't see it from where I was standing in-game. It's fine, though. I'm happy to have a new record of 36 right before the year ends.

Maybe I'll reach 38 by the end of 2026.