IMPORTANT:

The bot is running in Australia, so this market will close at 00:00 on 1 January 2024 AEST (UTC+11).

In the Pokémon video game franchise, players can encounter wild Pokémon by moving their charater into tall grass. In several Pokémon games, each wild Pokémon encounter has a 1/8192 (0.012% or 2⁻¹³) chance of the Pokémon having an alternate color scheme. These are called "shiny" Pokémon. Shiny Pokémon are no different from similar Pokémon of ordinary colors; there is no strategic advantage to catching shiny Pokémon.

Internet user 40 Cakes wrote a bot in Python to find and catch at least one shiny individual of each Pokémon species obtainable in Pokémon Emerald Version. After a shiny individual has been caught for all obtainable species in a given area, the bot will then advance to the next part of the game. This bot has been running continually since 1 January 2023

As of creating this question on 9 October 2023 UTC, the bot has encountered a total of 1,705,000 individual Pokémon, 192 of which have been shiny, for an average shiny encounter rate of 1/8879.

The bot is currently searching for a 2nd shiny Seedot (in order to have a shiny Seedot and its evolved form, Nuzleaf). In Route 102, Seedots make up 1% of all encounters, on average, thus the chances of finding a shiny Seedot for on given encounter are about 1/819,200 or roughly one in a million.

(With about 7.4 million copies of Pokémon Emerald ever sold, it is expected that nine players in the world encountered a shiny Seedot as their very first encounter in Route 102.)

Relevant links:

FAQ page

Explanation video

40 Cakes Youtube channel (w/ link to the livestream)