‘Pokemon Go’ Bugs: ‘Pokemon’ Changing After Being Captured

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go players are encountering a strange glitch where Pokemon will change into an entirely different species upon capture.

With this glitch, users will capture a Pokemon like normal, and everything appears to be functioning as usual. But then when they go to check their Pokedex, they’ll find a completely different species listed there, as if the game somehow registered the wrong Pokemon.

For some, this has been a welcome surprise, as they’ve captured a Caterpie only to have it appear as a Charizard. For others, it’s more frustrating than anything, as they were setting out to catch a specific Pokemon, but soon found themselves wasting a bunch of Pokeballs catching something they didn’t need.

Via Reddit, here is one example of the glitch where a Meowth turns into a Ponyta after being registered to the player’s Pokedex.

In general, it seems that both the original and the new Pokemon always have the same CP, and so in the example above, a 824 CP Meowth is replaced with an 824 CP Ponyta.

There doesn’t appear to be a fix as of yet, making this merely another game-altering glitch that Pokemon Go players will have to deal with until Niantic Labs comes out with an update. It’s certainly one of the strangest bugs yet, and some players have expressed bewilderment that after the seemingly never-ending series of glitches, the game somehow has managed to become even more broken.

“I couldn’t have imagined a glitch like this happening even if I tried to,” one Reddit user wrote.

Some have theorized this could be Niantic testing out the way they want to unveil Ditto. That Pokemon is known for disguising itself as other creatures, and so the behavior exhibited i n this glitch is actually quite reminiscent of how a Ditto would probably behave. As of yet, nobody has been able to find one, but perhaps it will be discovered sooner rather than later.

Recently, some users have claimed to have found Articuno in the game, and while this might be a hack, it’s also possible this is the product of the changing Pokemon glitch.

Niantic Labs, Pokemon Go‘s developer, recently released a statement saying that they’re hard at work attempting to expand the game into additional regions, adding that due to the various bugs users have been experiencing, they hope to be more transparent with players in the future.