Z-A’s Shiny Changes Let You Hunt While AFK

Pokémon Legends: Z-A launched yesterday, and within a few hours, players had cracked the code on Shiny hunting. This time around, these rare, alternate-colored monsters don’t despawn after they show up in the overworld, and that means they won’t disappear until you either knock them out or capture them. That is, in and of itself, a huge change that takes a lot of the risk out of Shiny hunting, so if you stumble upon one in the wild, you can breathe a little easier than in past games. But because the players who spend hours searching for these guys are the hardest-working people in Kalos, they’ve already found an incredibly efficient way to use this new system to their advantage. They’re finding Shinies without even touching their controllers.

In Wild Zone 3, there’s a building that, when you walk through its entrance, takes you to its roof. In both of these areas, the exit will be behind your character when the loading screen ends. So if you rig up your left stick to push backward with a hair tie or rubber band, your character will walk back and forth between the entrance and the roof without you having to touch your controller at all. When you go through the entrance, new Pokémon will spawn, but Shinies will remain. You can leave the game running for hours and return to several Shinies awaiting capture.

In one day, players have already been posting clips of themselves using this exploit to get several Shiny Pokémon in just a few hours. Some even have several copies of Legends: Z-A going with this setup at once.

✨Yeh shiny hunting in #PokemonLegendZA is by far the easiest and most forgiving game ever made.✨

Here’s a clip of me getting 4 different shiny Pokémon all in the same area 😌

(They never despawn) (ever) #ShinyPokemon https://t.co/LJCW7KOif1 pic.twitter.com/EIet3hAxLx

— Ella Menta (@EllaMentaVT) October 16, 2025

I’m posting this video cause I’m not seeing the big shiny hunting content creators post about this. This is me getting shiny alpha Litleo all afk. It doesn’t despond until you try to catch it. I got all the shiny mons in wild zone 3 in 2 hours afk https://t.co/lkRgYAKCYe pic.twitter.com/wt5xgEm86w

— ItachiVGC (@ItachiVgc) October 16, 2025

This is what shiny hunting looks like in 2025 pic.twitter.com/LhqwLyQQ2R

— Professor Rex🇨🇦 🔜 KALOS (@RexProfessor) October 17, 2025

I expect this to bother people who felt the despawn changes were cheapening the Shiny hunting experience, because now we know you can rack up Shinies without doing anything at all. I do expect this is a quick way to make your Joy-Cons start drifting, though. So tie up your analog sticks at your own risk.