Topic: Pokémon Scarlet & Pokémon Violet

Did a few Surprise Trades for the hell of it just before heading to bed and not only did I get dex fillers like Beartic and Donphan, I also managed to get both a Jolly Quaxly breedject AND a Beast Ball Charmander BACK. TO. BACK.

I love you Fuecoco, but I think I know which Paldean starter I'm going to be Masuda hunting for first in SV (Quaquaval's shiny is absolutely muah).

I spent way too long catching all the paradox Pokemon in area 0. But now I have at least two of each, so that's nice.

Edit: found a shiny marill! My second shiny so far.

Not sure how widespread this knowledge is, but I've discovered this morning that you can somewhat "sequence break" and access the western portion of the map before ever going to the academy in Mesagoza.

The way to do this is to go to the cliffside west of Los Platos. There's a point where you'll see some (seemingly inaccessible) Pokemon a few metres away: Deerling, Riolu, Toxel. If they're close enough to the cliff edge, you can aim your Pokemon at them and initiate a battle. Upon ending the battle, you'll end up on their side of the cliff. And then you can continue around South-Western Paldea. I managed to loop around to Cortondo on foot - I'm sure you could get much further if you wanted to.

However it seems the developers have had enough foresight for this not to break the game. You are seemingly unable to trigger any events out of sequence by doing this. At the very least, you can't initiate gym battles.

Why would you do this? If you want to get certain Pokemon earlier I suppose. But you might as well just go to Mesagoza and get access to Miraidon/Koraidon to make life easier.

Neat little discovery though.

A friend told me Azumarill is great for tera raids, so I went ahead and trained my shiny Marill to be a raiding machine and… It’s true! They’re a lot more consistent when I use him, I love him already.

@Eel I had an Azumarill on my team and it was OP

Found a random shiny cufant! That’s now 3

Quick question in regards to outbreak shiny hunting: if you make it to 60, start doing the picnic resets and all of those shenanigans but then decide to quit out of the game and come back later, does the game remember your progress and allows you to keep going so long as you don't kill the entire outbreak? I was doing a Tatsugiri one earlier on that lasted nearly 2 hours without a whiff of a shiny and I'm wondering if I can just come back to it later on when I'm more motivated.

I think the outbreaks get dispersed at midnight or something

The solution is probably very simple and I somehow glossed over it... but how do you get eggs in this game? In other words, how is babby formed?

@mr_somewhere Have two breeding-compatible Pokemon in your party amd start a picnic. Then after awhile eggs will sometimes appear in your picnic basket which you can collect. Some types of sandwiches help this process.

@FishyS Oh, that's interesting. I was aware food helped but I didn't put the two together. That's interesting, hopefully less faffing around than before. Thanks for the response.

So I was doing some surprise/blind trades because it's an easy way to get any of the starter pokemon.... and I ended up being traded a level 100 shiny ditto... but with an advertised website as its nickname and there is no way to change the name of a traded Pokemon with a nickname. 😖

These are generated using external sources. So most people release them out of principle.

@FishyS It’s hacked, so I’d release it.

huh, weird. Are hacked pokemon really so common as to run across one in 10 random trades? 🤔 And why even throw them out to a random person in a blind surprise trade. Are bots somehow doing surprise trades? Seems very problematic if so.

Most of what I got from the other trades were level 1 starters ( mostly Fuecoco) and some freshly hatched from picnics Charizards. Plus a couple pokemon from the starter area..So the level 100 was a shock. I'll happily ditch it though.

@FishyS yes, they likely have bots programmed to distribute the hacked Pokémon. It doesn’t help that a lot people also get rid of them the lazy way: by simply trading them again immediately. So you end up with a web of them going around and around.

As you might guess from the fact they include urls as the name, or sometimes as the name of the trainer, these are literally just advertisement for their websites. It’s shady all around and a problem that has existed ever since online trading was introduced to the series.

One would image they would’ve at least tried to prevent people from using urls in names/nicknames by now, but I suppose the Pokémon company doesn’t really care that much.

Finally started the Ruin Quartet part of the postgame and jesus these guys are so damn cool. The lore, designs, typings, abilities; it's all just so damn interesting and, as someone who loves Pokemon history as much as I do, seeing them explained so vividly is a wonderful treat. Only caught Wo Chien as of now but you better believe I'm going for the rest of them (Chi Yu and Chien Pao especially, those two are perfection).

Also their battle theme is absolutely bizarre but oh my god is it fantastic.

Somehow I found another shiny cufant.

I appreciate the newfound shiny luck, but some diversity would be fun!

I have a lot of favourites from this gen: Greavard and Houndstone are delightfully morbid doggos (that still manage to be absolutely adorable somehow), Palafin is both a dolphin AND a superhero (WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT) and Lokix is the realisation of my most wanted unused type combo in a badass Kamen Rider locust just to name a few. However, one that has slowly sneaked it's way into becoming one of my all-time favourites has got to be.....Bombirdier.

Firstly.....just look at this smug a-hole. The personality alone is absolute perfection with the marks around it's eyes and wings combined with the very subtle yet immediately noticeable smirk fully signifying that this thing is not to be trifled with carelessly.

Secondly, it's such a brilliant subversion of what everyone thought a stork Pokemon would be. When you think of a stork, the obvious first thing that comes to mind is the serene image of them delivering babies in blankets. As a result, you'd think that a stork 'mon would be either Normal/Flying, Fairy/Flying or just pure Flying right? In what I would describe as Game Freak's brilliant way of taking obvious ideas and completely flipping them on their head, Bombirdier keeps the idea of carrying objects but instead of just delivering goods or services and having a kind disposition....it carries goddamn ROCKS and drops them on unsuspecting passerbys simply for the fun of it. The guy literally has one brain function and it is to cause as much annoyance as possible and I am ALL in favour for it.

Thirdly, tying back to that last point there, it's a brand new version of Dhelmise: a dual-type mon that gets STAB on another type entirely thanks to it's ability, with Rock being the case for Bombirdier rather than Steel with Dhelmise. And I absolutely adore this. Fits in with the Pokemon's behaviour, makes it immediately interesting and gives it a very desirable niche as a battler and gives it that extra bit of panache in order to make it stand out from the crowd of single stage bird Pokemon.

And lastly.....I have a bit of a personal experience with this one. Imagine on the first day you get to play SV you're just casually exploring the region until you come across a small seaside inlet. As you walk down the path to a cave, you notice something hovering above the small lake beside: a white bird unlike anything you've seen before. You try throwing your ball at it to no avail before giving up for the time-being and heading into the cave. After being absolutely decimated by a Level 40 Tera Hawlucha, you rush outside thinking you're safe.....when all of a sudden the bird who taunted you by being so far away surprises you from behind and proceeds to sweep the rest of your battered and bruised team. That was my introduction to this mon long before having to face it as a Titan and it's made Bombirdier always live rent-free in my head because of it. So in short: I really like this big dumb bird.

@Fizza
Hello. 😊
I have removed the block on you, so please reply me back.
Sorry if I blocked you because I thought you stop replying me after I tried to reply you on certain articles or thread but no feedback.

Btw, how was the game performance for Solo play after got patched ?