How to Catch Shiny Pokemon with and without Pokeradar (works in Platinum, Diamond, and Pearl)

The shiny pokemon is a pokemon that differs from a normal pokemon in only a couple of minor details: it has a red star on the upper right hand side of its sprite on the summary screen, it may slightly differ in color, and when it emerges from its Poke Ball during battle there is a short glitteriness about it that make it look like it’s “shining”, hence its name (which is unofficial, by the way).

The shiny Pokemon have absolutely no advantage whatsoever

over their normal brethren, they don’t have special powers and they can’t boost your stats in any way, which makes them all the more appealing to hardcore Pokemon collectors. Well, that and the fact that your odds of getting one randomly in the wild are

1 in 8192. It used to be that there were no ways of improving your odds if you wanted one and you just had to play…a lot. Now, ever since Diamond, there have been 4 different methods discovered that will help you if you want to acquire one of these especially rare specimens–the details are below.

How to actually get a shiny Pokemon (no cheating required)

I’m going to show you four different methods of doing this, with and without using Pokeradar. None of these require you to cheat or hack anything, happily 🙂 . However, it’s a lot easier to just embed a video that shows precisely how to do it than it is to write it all out, plus it’ll be much easier for you to understand if you can actually see someone doing it for real, so that’s what I’ve done:

Additional Resources and Further Reading

If you haven’t gotten the Ultimate Pokemon Handbook then I highly recommend you do so, it’s got 480 separate entries with facts and figures for every Pokemon ever. Also, if you haven’t gotten the latest version for Nintendo DS, you really ought to pick it up: Pokemon Platinum.

For a very detailed (it’s 7 pages) article on how to catch the shiny Pokemon, check out this article at gamesradar.com