Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl has been a glitch-fest so far. While some of the bugs have been annoying or just plain weird, others, like duplication glitches, have effectively broken the game. First, players found a way to clone one Pokémon at a time. Then they found a way to duplicate entire teams. Now, the exploit has escalated to cloning entire Pokémon Boxes.
This new exploit revolves around a menu glitch, and unlike the previous duplication tricks, lets you clone dozens of rare Pokémon in one fell swoop. The result is that Pokémon BDSP legendaries have quickly flooded the trading market. Want an entire army of Dialga? No sweat. They are now almost as ubiquitous as Starly.
Here’s how the new exploit works via YouTuber PanFro Games:
- Make sure you have one Box full of Pokémon you want to clone and a second that’s completely empty.
- Go to check summary on one of your current Pokémon and press ZL + ZR + A simultaneously until you eventually get a double menu overlay glitch.
- With the menu overlay glitch still up, go back into your Pokémon Box.
- Keep the cursor on one of the Pokémon in that Box.
- Press X, followed by B, followed by X, followed by B again.
- You should be on the Pokémon teams menu.
- Press X again and then A on the Pokémon menu.
- You should now be inside of a menu inside of a menu.
- Press R to bring up the Box list and then press A to open it.
- Press Y on your full box and swap its position with the empty one.
- Back out three times until you get back to your initial Box screen.
- Check the summary on one of your Pokémon there and then back out again.
This exploit will also duplicate each item the Pokémon was holding. This new trick has a lot more steps than the previous ones, but is also a lot faster, and doesn’t require you to have any “sacrificial” Pokémon. Instead, everything simply copies over as if you were right-clicking JPEGs from one folder to another.
It’s unclear why these duplication glitches are so rampant in Pokémon BDSP, but it could have something to do with trying to take the old-school gameplay of the original games, and add modern features like being able to access your storage boxes at any time. It could also simply be a result of the game being rushed out. For anyone who hasn’t been following the wild saga of BDSP’s release, the game leaked weeks beforehand, after which publisher Nintendo rushed out an early 3GB patch to add things like missing animations and music files.
This also means that if you want to take part in the current exploit bounty, you’ll probably want to act sooner than later. Most of the rarest Pokémon and items in BDSP can’t be accessed until the end game, and I’m sure developer ILCA is already working to try and patch out these bugs, along with a litany of others. In the meantime, fans can artificially farm the Gen IV Sinnoh region to their hearts’ content.