The Curious Case of 'Pokemon Go' Missing Shiny Pokemon

Fans are wondering if Pokemon Go accidentally pulled a Shiny Pokemon from the game for a two month period.

Back in October, Pokemon Go added the Shiny version of Krabby to the game to promote a monthly shuffle of Field Research tasks. Shiny Pokemon are alternate-colored Pokemon that are extremely rare and many players have dedicated hundreds of hours hunting for even one Shiny Pokemon. The Shiny Krabby (which has a gold shell) was one of many Shiny Pokemon added to the game in recent months, but it seemingly disappeared from the wild sometime in November.

As Shiny Pokemon are hard to find to begin with (the generally accepted chances to find a Shiny Pokemon is 1/450), it took a while for players to notice that Shiny Krabby might no longer be found in the wild. Rumors and questions started to emerge about the Shiny Krabby, and things finally came to a head earlier this week when someone posted a thread about the Shiny Krabby on TheSilphRoad subreddit, one of the leading resources for Pokemon Go analysis. Players poured in to give their feedback, with many claiming that they hadn't seen a Shiny Krabby either in person or reported on a community thread between November 1 and the present day. The only proof to the contrary was a single Twitter post made in early December with no other context.

So - did Shiny Krabby actually disappear from the game? It's a bit hard to say, as players started to find Shiny Krabby in the wild once again beginning on January 3rd. There's a few distinct possibilities as to what happened. Either the rumor of Shiny Krabby's disappearance got more people looking out for reports of a Shiny Krabby, or Niantic saw the thread and quietly re-instituted the missing Pokemon on January 3rd. Niantic is notoriously tight-lipped about these sorts of things, so it's likely that we'll never know the truth. Regardless, players have confirmed that Shiny Krabby is back/can still be found, so go off and find that golden crab!

If you want to talk about Pokemon Go, Pokemon, or tabletop games, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @CHofferCBus!