by Doc – Owner, Founder, Used to Be Against Genning But Now Is Cool With It So Long As You’re Not Trading it to Others
First things first…
DO NOT PAY FOR GENERATED POKEMON ONLINE.
DO NOT LET YOUR GENERATED POKEMON LEAVE YOUR SAVE FILE.
(If you’re going to pay, pay for the generator service, not the generated Pokemon!)
- DO NOT PAY FOR GENERATED POKEMON ONLINE.
- DO NOT LET YOUR GENERATED POKEMON LEAVE YOUR SAVE FILE.
- Understanding HOME’s Legality System
- Where to Generate Pokemon, For Free, Online (Actual Generators)
- Looking Ahead to Pokemon Champions
Pokemon Champions is coming soon, and we’re told we can place our Pokemon from HOME into Champions. This is a massive boon to the competitive Pokemon community (who are the biggest genners out there) but there’s not any easily-understandable information on how to gen Pokemon without modding your Switch. Here’s how to do it as of September 2025, though the facts in this article will likely be accurate for a long time.
The overall philosophy of Pokémon HOME’s legality checker seems to be that if it could conceivably be legitimately obtained in that game, it’ll pass the hack check and be allowed into HOME and thus into other games. There’s exceptions to it, it’s not a perfect legality checker, but that’s the idea. And if it’s legal in HOME, it’s legal in other games (besides the obvious Pokedex limitations).
Understanding HOME’s Legality System
When a Pokemon touches HOME for the first time be it through transfer to HOME or by coming through Pokemon Go, it gets assigned a HOME Tracker. Think of it as a permanent digital fingerprint that follows that individual Pokemon across games. When you first put your Pokemon into HOME, it gets the tracker, and no matter what changes you make to the Pokemon and what games you put it in, the tracker stays the same. That’s how HOME knows it’s the same Pokemon, and how it determines where that Pokemon actually came from. This is the biggest thing that separates HOME’s legality checking from tools like PKHeX. You can get assigned a HOME ID through HOME, but if you give your own Pokemon one through PKHeX, it’ll just get flagged as a fake because HOME never assigned that ID to that Pokemon.
(Side note: Pokemon transferred directly to the Let’s Go games through Go do not have a HOME ID because they came in through the Pal Park service, and only receive one when placed into Home)
This tracker lets HOME distinguish individual specimens, detect duplicate uploads (like when someone clones a Pokemon and uploads it from multiple accounts), and reconstruct each Pokemon’s per-game state when it moves between titles. The logical conclusion here is that if you’re editing or generating a HOME-distributed or “HOME-mandatory” Pokemon “from scratch,” HOME expects specific tracker history that won’t be there. Those tend to get blocked from trading or flagged server-side.
(“HOME-mandatory” meaning that there is no way to obtain that Pokemon without it going through HOME, like a 3DS-era Pokemon or a Pokemon GO-stamped Pokemon.)
What HOME Actually Checks (And What It Doesn’t)
HOME cares about:
Game compatibility: You can only move a Pokemon into a game where that species exists. This one’s straightforward – incompatible targets just won’t accept the Pokemon. BDSP won’t take Koraidon, for example.
Ball legality: HOME preserves the original ball and displays it accurately in HOME itself. If you move that Pokemon to a game that doesn’t have that ball, the destination might show Poke Ball or Strange Ball instead, but move it back to HOME and you’ll see the original ball again. This isn’t often a big issue but it does sometimes have ramifications, like the long period where the Paldean starters were only available in Poke Balls due to only being obtainable at the launch of a game. Then, when Pokemon GO came out, they were only obtainable in Poke Balls, Great Balls and Ultra Balls. Eventually their fully-evolved forms came to raids which opened up all the other ball options.
Event data: HOME knows which event distributions exist and enforces obvious event constraints. Cherish Ball, fixed OT/TID formats, “Fateful encounter” flags, certain ribbons that must or must not be present, and so on. This is typically what’s keeping your Pokemon out of HOME if you genned it wrong. Most generators have legality filters built to fix this stuff for you, but they’re not all perfect, so you sometimes have to get exactingly specific with what you put in the generator.
Movesets per game: HOME stores a Pokemon’s moves separately for each game. When you send a Pokemon to a title where its current moves are impossible, HOME replaces them with valid moves. Send it back to a previous game and HOME restores that game’s last known moveset. We don’t know how it’ll handle Champions. I imagine Champions will have its own movesets.
Shiny locks and mythical restrictions: HOME and GTS filter out combinations that are theoretically possible in code but not actually available, like shiny-locked distributions. This is something that seems to be manually handled by the Pokemon Company as it’s not always 100% right.
Where to Generate Pokemon, For Free, Online (Actual Generators)
Current Generator Landscape
We’re ignoring shiny-rigged Tera raids and Dynamax raids, but those are an equally viable way to get shiny Pokemon with good IVs if that’s what you’re after. Problem is, you can’t choose what raids are hosted most of the time.
The way Pokemon generation works is that someone with a hacked Switch will, using community tools, generate a Pokemon on request in their Switch and trade it to the person who requested it. Most active generators are in Scarlet and Violet right now, with some still running for Sword/Shield, Legends Arceus, and BDSP. Most Let’s Go generators have shut down, probably because the audience moved on.
Pokemon Twitch streams are the way to find generator services. Twitch’s homepage for specific Pokemon games pretty much always has a top stream that’s a 24/7 generator service. They’re all the same: join their Discord, take a description of a Pokemon from the Pokemon Showdown Team Builder in text form, paste it into the right channel of the Discord (after accepting rules and identifying the channel of course), check the channel description to see what the command is, and the server’s bot will DM you a trade code immediately. It’ll generate the Pokemon within the proper parameters and hand it off to you. This is a typical example of what you’d paste into the generator chat:
“stupid idiot (Okidogi) (M) @ Shell Bell
Ability: Toxic Chain
Tera Type: Poison
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 SpD
Adamant Nature“
(Berichan is a good free one and the most common one, in my opinion. However, the OT is always “Berichan”. All Pokemon with an OT of Berichan are obviously hacked, so if you’re wanting something that doesn’t look hacked, skip Berichan.)
Probably the most important thing to keep track of is whether the generator you’re using lets you change the OT or not. Many of the free ones don’t, as that OT is their best way to advertise and bring in revenue to fund the generator, whereas Discords with paid generator services (typically the cost of a monthly Twitch subscription) often will.
Game-Specific Limitations and Strategies
The first consideration for any generation attempt is whether your target Pokemon can conceivably come from the game you want. If there’s never been a legitimate way to get that Pokemon/shiny form in that specific game, you’re dead in the water. Bulbapedia’s your best friend here – check the availability for each game. Otherwise, keep an eye on what is in the Pokedex for that game, and what’s available as a shiny in that game. Generally, only legendaries, mythicals and shiny-locked Pokemon are unable to be shiny, and some legendaries and mythicals can still be generated as shiny if the game has had an event distributing them as a shiny.
Scarlet and Violet: Shiny locks on all legendaries except for a few distributed ones. Check Bulbapedia’s distribution page and use Ctrl + F to find your desired Pokemon. When a Pokemon is distributed online, it often has preset IVs, so if you’re generating something like shiny Chien-Pao and it’s not working, check your IVs against the official distribution.
BDSP: Only lets you trade out one legendary and mythical per save file. The workaround is simple – trade another one back in to reset the counter. Generate a Shaymin, take it out, can’t generate another? Put one back in first. BDSP is… not ideal for generating.
Sword/Shield: Surprisingly lenient. I’ve managed to generate a shiny Diancie without a HOME ID and with a Pokemon Go stamp, then successfully place it in HOME. Logically this should never work, but SwSh seems to have fewer locks than expected, at least when it comes to Pokemon GO stamps and recreating the Pokemon events that were distributed.
Legends Arceus: Every Pokemon available in the game can be generated, though the legendaries are shiny-locked. Pretty straightforward. Just keep an eye on the ball they’re in and you’ll be okay.
Let’s Go: If you can find a working generator, remember you can’t get a shiny Mew since there’s no legitimate way to get one in Go. You’re also limited to the basic five Poke Balls – Poke Ball, Great, Ultra, Master, and Premier Ball.
Where Pokemon Go Goes Through
All Pokemon from GO have to come through HOME first and need legitimate HOME IDs to be legal. Most generators will let you put GO-stamped Pokemon in your save file, but they won’t give you the proper HOME tracking that makes them legitimately tradeable.
Move Generating
Don’t get attached to generating Pokemon with specific movesets for HOME storage. HOME resets moves basically every time you transfer between games, and modern games make it absurdly easy to get the exact moveset you want through normal gameplay. Egg moves are rarely more than a minor inconvenience to obtain.
We don’t know how Pokemon Champions will handle movesets yet, but if it follows HOME’s model, then moves won’t matter for long-term storage anyway. Odds are you’ll set them in-game, and they’ll be independent of what the Pokemon had in HOME.
Looking Ahead to Pokemon Champions
We’re still waiting to see how Pokemon Champions handles Pokemon transfers and legality checking, and we can’t actually know any of that until it’s in our hands. Maybe it takes exactly what’s in HOME as-is and incorporates it into the game? Maybe each Pokemon has its own moveset in Champions? Maybe it won’t even allow shinies? Everything is speculation right now. The conservative bet is that Champions will be at least as strict as HOME, possibly stricter given that it’s a competitive format.
Amiibo Doctor 