Pokémon Legends: Z-A makes a big, welcome change for shiny hunters

Pokémon Legends: Z-A hadn’t been out even a few hours before the tweets started rolling in: Shiny pokémon don’t despawn. You can walk away from a shiny, and it’ll still be there when you come back.

To shiny collectors, this is big news. In other Pokémon games, like Scarlet and Violet, pokémon despawn after you get a certain distance away from them or trigger a loading screen. I’ve missed out on my fair share of shiny pokémon this way, my heart sinking as I spotted them right before they disappeared forever.

You can still miss out on shiny pokémon in Z-A, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

I first discovered the new spawning mechanics myself. I heard the sparkly sound effect that signals a shiny, spotted an oddly colored Swirlix on top of a roof, and realized I had no way to get up to that roof without walking very far away. Not knowing any better, I figured I was just out of luck. (This Swirlix had a one in 4,096 chance of being shiny, so I guess I had some luck.)

I did try to get up to the roof, but night was about to change to day — which triggers a mini cutscene that I was sure would despawn the Swirlix — and I was in a hurry. I tried to take a shortcut through the adjacent Battle Zone. It was full of trainers ready to challenge me on sight, though, and I ended up in a battle immediately. I hadn’t forfeited one of these battles before, so I tried that, thinking maybe I’d get out of the battle and up a ladder in time to catch the shiny Swirlix… and ended up magically transported to a faraway Pokémon Center. If the night-to-day change wasn’t enough to despawn the Swirlix, I thought, surely that would do it.

A bit later, I was on some rooftops heading to an objective when I heard the shiny sound effect again. I realized it was the same Swirlix, an Alpha, still there and still shiny. I immediately messaged my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore, who reviewed Z-A for The Verge, half in disbelief. I thought at first it was only because the Swirlix was an Alpha, since certain Alphas always spawn in the same locations. But after launch, players and other websites quickly reported that persistent shiny spawns apply to all shinies.

There are some exceptions, though. Charles and I were chatting about this new spawning mechanic, and he sent me a clip of a shiny Patrat he’d encountered — and which he’d barely spotted before it ran away from his character and disappeared into the ether. Patrat is one of a handful of very skittish pokémon that will flee when you get too close, and the process of fleeing does despawn the pokémon in question, even if it’s shiny.

That also applies to any shiny pokémon you’ve defeated in battle but failed to catch, which isn’t great news for pokémon with lower catch rates. For those, you’ll have to rely on saving — and you can’t disable autosave in Z-A, unlike in other recent Pokémon games. That sounds bad, but I’ve found that the autosave doesn’t trigger too frequently as long as you don’t fast-travel to a new location or catch a pokémon. It should still be possible to save right before battling a shiny and reload that save if you knock it out.

Fleeing pokémon aside, the new shiny spawning mechanics are great for a game so heavy on roundabout, vertical, on-foot exploration. The shinies have to stay in one place because reaching a pokémon in order to catch it isn’t always as simple as walking over to it. Sometimes you have to run around looking for a ladder, or get past a lot of other people who want to fight you, or run away from a wild pokémon that’s about to knock you out. It’s a relief knowing that most shiny pokémon will be waiting for you to reach them on your own terms.