Dataminers find that Pokemon Gen 4 has increased encounter rates on certain holidays, decreased on tragic anniversaries
Late last month, Nintendo was hit with another leak, which included the source code for Pokemon Gen 4. Fans have been parsing through the files since then and have been making discoveries such as a scrapped event with Cyrus. There’s been another interesting find recently relating to Pokemon spawn rates.
Interestingly, encounter rates go up by 5 percent on holidays such as Independence Day and St. Patrick’s Day. The full list is as follows (as shared by shinyhunter_map):
The encounter rates also decrease by 10 percent on tragic anniversaries like 9/11 and the day of the Hiroshima bombings:
Although not in the list above, spawn rates are apparently lowered on Christmas and New Year’s Day as well. You’re five percent less likely to encounter a Pokemon during those holidays.
Speedrunner, dataminer, and hacker, Orcastraw told Polygon that the games may work in this fashion due to the Poketch. The in-game device follows the real-world calendar in various ways such as by having days where snow transforms into in-game diamonds. Orcastraw also mentioned that the Valor Lakefront “has a small, rare amount of days it’ll rain, determined each year, and there’s just an amount of clock based secrets hidden around that it makes sense they’d do something like this.”
As another little tidbit, eggs will hatch 10 percent quicker on January 12. That’s Pokemon developer Junichi Masuda’s birthday.
