Are Shinies Caught From Tera Raids Legitimate?

by Doc – Owner, Founder, Has Done Over 5,000 Tera Raids But Never One Shiny

So you caught a Pokemon from an online Tera Raid and it turned out to be shiny. You’re thinking hey, the odds of this happening are 1 in 4096, is this legitimate? But you’re not sure.

Back up a second. One of the most common ways that shiny generator services fund their maintenance costs is by hosting Twitch live streams where they have automated Switches that will use RNG manipulation to force Tera Raids to be shiny, and post the codes for viewers to watch. They get the ad and viewership revenue, you get the shiny, life is good. Typically they’ll also open a raid up to the general public lobby for Tera Raids so other people can find them (and, I suspect, to throw off any shiny generator detection software Game Freak might have, if it exists at all).

So if you join one of these raids and catch the shiny Pokémon, is it legitimate? Well, that comes down to whether you consider RNG manipulation to be legitimate. If RNG manipulation is legitimate, then so’s the Pokemon. If not, then not. That’s a discussion to be had with yourself, but I’ll say this – the Pokémon you catch from an RNG manipulated shiny is just like any other shiny Pokémon that you would normally find in a Tera Raid. The game accepts it and aside from a note showing that it’s from a Tera Raid, nobody could know the difference. It has your original trainer ID, was caught by you, and is completely unique to you.

I personally consider these legitimate, but only if they were caught by someone who wasn’t aware they were joining a hacked raid. If you get on to one of these Twitch streams looking for a shiny that you know is RNG manipulated, that seems like outsourcing your cheating, and that’s not legitimate.

Additionally, if you found this raid through a Discord server where someone you know is hosting it, it’s almost certainly legitimate. Bot hosts tend to label themselves as such, and even if you found it through the public listings it’s common practice that when someone finds a legitimate shiny Tera Raid they’ll host it and use a glitch to regenerate the same raid. So it’s very possible that you just attended the raid of a generous individual who wants people to participate in their good fortune! Given all this information, I err on the side of legitimacy.