The Pokémon series offers a rewarding experience for completionists, particularly those driven by the goal of catching every Pokémon and filling out the entire Pokédex. For dedicated fans, this means embarking on a comprehensive journey to collect not just every Pokémon, but every variation, including shiny versions—rare, alternate-color forms. This challenge becomes even more intense when extending it beyond the standard collection goal.
Content creator 40 Cakes has taken on an ambitious variant of this challenge in Pokémon Emerald, known as Professor Oak’s Living Shiny Dex. Since January 1, 2023, 40 Cakes has deployed a bot to continuously search for shiny Pokémon.
The objective is to capture every possible shiny Pokémon before each gym badge is earned, meaning that the collection must include every evolutionary stage of each shiny Pokémon. This approach significantly ramps up the difficulty, as the bot must not only find shiny versions of Pokémon but also ensure that both the base Pokémon and its evolutions are acquired.
Despite utilizing a bot, the challenge remains formidable. The process has been so arduous that, after almost 20 months of continuous operation, 40 Cakes is only now ready to tackle the first gym. The bot has managed to locate hundreds of shiny Pokémon, but progress has been slow due to the extreme rarity of some shinies.
A prime example of this difficulty is Seedot, a weak Grass-type Pokémon found on Route 102 with a 1% encounter rate. Given the shiny odds of 1 in 8192, finding a shiny Seedot is an exceptionally rare event, with a chance of 1 in 819,200. 40 Cakes needed two shiny Seedots to proceed, which led to an exhaustive wait of over a year and thousands of encounters before the second one appeared.
The challenge doesn’t end with just finding two shiny Seedots. To complete the collection, a third shiny Seedot will eventually be necessary for its final evolution, Shiftry. This will require dealing with equally daunting odds, as both Seedot and its evolved forms have low encounter rates. The task is ongoing and expected to take even more time. For those interested in following the progress, the entire journey is being streamed on 40 Cakes’ YouTube channel, where fans can watch as the challenge unfolds.
