While we're faithfully making our way through Pokemon X and Y as we build up our Pokedex, trying desperately to "catch 'em all" as we go, we'll be the first to admit our Pokedex isn't exactly bursting at the seams. With hundreds of 'mon left to discover, and Pokemon that seem unusually skilled at breaking out of our Pokeballs, we get the impression we're going to be busy for a while yet - and we're not even looking for the shinies.
Shiny Pokemon are rare, variant forms of Pokemon that come in a different colour to the norm. Whether it's a red Gyrados (normally blue) and blue Corsola (normally pink), or a Rapidash with different colour flames, the chances of coming across a shiny Pokemon in the wild are ridiculously slim, with an estimated 1/8,192 chance of catching them - which means a lot of strolling through long grass, or fishing in between rocks. But now, a resourceful player has decided to take some of the grind out of monster hunting by building his own 'shiny finder' - which is as ingenious as it is complex.
Yep, they took their 3DS to pieces
The player, who goes by the online alias of dekuNukem, reportedly had the idea after they grew tired of manually fishing for water Pokémon. Explaining their device on a Youtube video, they write: "Why spend stressful hours trying to fish for just a single shiny when you can sit back and watch it do exactly that, at full speed, without fail, and alert you when it's done?"
The device uses a microcontroller, a kind of small, rudimentary computer, soldered to the motherboard of the 3DS, and reportedly runs its program on less than 300 lines of code. When the 3DS is hooked up to the shiny finder it believes that someone is still pushing buttons and playing it as normal.
When an ordinary battle encounter happens on Pokemon X and Y, the bottom screen of the 3DS blacks out for 11,383 milliseconds. When it is a rarer shiny encounter, however, the blackout time lasts slightly longer at 12,623 milliseconds.
When the gadget measures an ordinary encounter, it automatically flees from the fight and begins the process all over again. If it observes one of these longer blackout times, it stops and sounds a buzzer to let the player know that it has found a rare creature, which the user can then set about capturing.
As mentioned above, Shiny Pokémon are exceptionally difficult to stumble across in the wild - so this saves a lot of time and effort. The latest instalments to the Pokémon series also added a new game mechanic which means that players who use a fishing rod in the same spot increase their chance of hooking an elusive shiny every time they fish, making this an even more useful tool.
While we don't see many people risking taking their 3DS to pieces to fast forward their Pokemon catching, the ever resourceful DekuNukem has shared an in-depth explanation of his creation in a Youtube video he posted online, and has shared the code on Dropbox for other fans with electronic know-how to create their own. If you fancy seeing the device in action, check out the footage below:
