‘Pokemon Go’: Do Shiny Pokemon Appear Shiny on the Nearby Tracker & the Map?

Shiny Pokemon are now available in ‘Pokemon Go.’ (Niantic)

Pokemon Go players are beginning to discover shiny Pokemon in the wild.

As soon as these reports of shiny Pokemon began to surface, the natural question became: how do the shiny Pokemon appear on the nearby tracker? How are players to know whether a shiny Pokemon is nearby?

So far, the early indications are that the shiny Pokemon appear non-shiny on the map, so you don’t know they’re shiny until you get into an encounter with one.

The shiny Pokemon also do not appear shiny on the nearby tracker. You will not know you’re dealing with a shiny Pokemon, then, until you actually start battling it, and therefore you’re going to want to try to capture every Magikarp you see in the wild on the off chance that it is a shiny one.

In fact, some players have reported that their shiny Magikarp actually appeared to be a normal color Pokemon throughout the entire encounter, and it wasn’t until they restarted the app that they realized they had a shiny Pokemon. However, this is likely just a temporarily glitch and not the way the new Pokemon will actually work going forward.

There are also reports that shiny Pokemon sometimes do not appear shiny for everyone, with two players looking at the same creature and seeing different colors.

The good news is that Niantic just recently launched a “water festival,” a week-long event in which certain water Pokemon, including Magikarp, spawn in the wild at a higher frequency than usual.