Does turning off my console reset my shiny hunt?

Question

Greetings All,

I started my hunt for a shiny dratini in Pokemon crystal and so far have spent 3 hours of hunting. My question is that is it safe to turn off the emulator or would it it reset my soft reset count by doing so and I will have to start the hunt again from the first encounter?

thanks.

Answer 1

That's not how shiny hunting works. In Crystal, there is a 1/8192 chance for a Pokemon to be shiny. This does not mean that once you hit the 8192 encounter mark, you are guaranteed to get a shiny. You can get it at encounter 1, encounter 5000, encounter 8192, encounter 10000, or whatever encounter imaginable. Each soft reset, your Dratini has the same 1/8192 chance of being shiny. This also applies to future games where the shiny odds are 1/4096 instead of 1/8192.

Furthermore, soft resetting is not a chain. You can close the game any time. In most games, like all Switch titles, you have to close the game to soft reset.

Tldr: closing your emu is perfectly fine.

Answer 2

Any shiny method that involves "chaining" will reset your chain if the game is closed; loading a save where you had a chain will not retain that chain in any of the games where shiny chaining is possible. otherwise people would simply soft reset to before they broke their chain and chain infinitely.
However, on an emulator, things work somewhat differently. because almost all emulators utilise save states, you bypass the normal method of saving and loading; by loading a save where you have a high chain, you return to the exact state the game was at when you saved; this retains the chain.

However, there is a difference in shiny hunting between simple doing the same thing over and over hoping to find a shiny and actually "chaining:" the difference being that in a chain the game actively keeps track of how many Pokemon you have encountered and actively increases your odds of encountering a shiny each time the chain grows larger; soft resetting is not a chain. its more like flipping a coin over and over until it gets heads (although with much less favourable odds). To my knowledge there is no method of shiny hunting in crystal that utilises chaining so you really dont need to worry about this at all.