every year, matt "absolblogspokemon" absol hosts a shiny hunting event called safari week. safari week is a really simple little event. a bunch of shiny hunters descend upon the safari zone en masse and look for shiny pokemon. if they're lucky, they encounter them. if they're even luckier, the shiny pokemon actually gets caught. you see, pokemon encountered in the safari zone have the fun little caveat of... being able to flee. you might spend hours trying to get a shiny pokemon to show up and manage to get that special encounter, only to fail them as they skidaddle away from you.

of course, it's not for everyone. recently, i was in a pokemon streamer's chat and they expressed disbelief over it, saying that safari pokemon weren't all that rare and calling full odds hunting in general a waste of time. (pretty rude imo, but that's beside the point... haha!) their comments got me thinking: why shiny hunt in the safari zone? the answer is the same for any other shiny hunt: because it's fun! it might sound like a 'waste' to people who are unfamiliar with full odds hunting, but i can assure you that it's absolutely not from our point of view. moreover, running into a shiny pokemon under such high stakes makes for a truly heart-pounding experience. it isn't a matter of 'rarity,' either. sure, running into a rare spawn is extremely cool - not to mention CATCHING one! - but any bozo with pkhex can generate anything they want in these early generations. in my opinion, safari zone shiny hunting isn't about catching the shiny... it's about seeing it. it's about the experience itself, and the excitement of sharing your finds with others.

legends can be born of failed shiny encounters - and i, jamie seafare, had one such legend.

last year, i didn't take part in safari week - but i did some safari zone hunting as a means of catching my doduo for my leafgreen badge quest. 3210 encounters into my doduo search, a shiny pinsir showed up: a beautiful blue bug with a 3% appearance rate. (i was doing a level 26 repel trick at the time, so i actually had better odds compared to pinsir's typical 1% appearance rate! essentially, this trick entailed keeping a level 26 pokemon at the front of my party and popping a max repel. this made it so only pokemon that were level 26 and above could run into me; namely, doduo, nidorina, and pinsir). pinsir is one of the rare spawns of the safari, so i was SUPER shocked to encounter a shiny one. i panicked and threw a safari ball at it immediately. this was the wrong course of action, as pinsir was displeased with my rudeness and scuttled away.

later on, i found my doduo, who didn't flee (iirc, he stayed in the very first ball i threw). pickles was my very first caught shiny safari pokemon, and he became a crucial and cherished part of my leafgreen team. i evolved him eventually, and he's with me on my team to this very day.

still, over the past year, my thoughts kept drifting to that fateful shiny pinsir encounter. as summer began creeping its way to us, shiny hunters began whispering about safari week... and absolblogspokemon put up the poll so that the community could decide on a week for the event. once a week was chosen and the announcement video for safari week 2025 was posted, i decided that i'd take on the safari week challenge. my goal was to find at least one shiny, even if it ran away... and, furthermore... i hoped that the shiny would be a shiny pinsir. my white whale was a blue bug.

with all of that said, this post is going to be a summary of the absolutely BONKERS safari week that i had!

even though pinsir is a leafgreen exclusive, i decided that i'd also set up a copy of firered for safari week so that i could encounter a more diverse pool of pokemon. that obviously meant that a shiny starter hunt was in order.

i got this naughty little golden charmander from prof oak fairly quickly; he was my 3307th charmander seen! i named him chorizo. here he is in all of his fully evolved glory:

i played through firered all the way up to fuchsia city - namely, the city that houses the kanto safari zone. since i had my leafgreen badge quest file in the post-game, i was all ready over there and didn't need to do much prep at all in it. my main order of business was setting up for a pinsir-specific repel trick. since pinsirs showed up at level 28, this meant that i could repel trick for one and boost my base odds of encountering them in the eastern part of the safari zone by a WHOPPING 8% (for a total of a ~9% encounter rate). nidorinas would also show up ~91% of the time. (btw, i used the pokemon encounter calculator to work out these repel tricks!)

i already had a level 26 staryu from my doduo hunt, so i simply raised it 2 more levels (and evolved it for good measure)! ftr, i also used staryu/starmie for it's illuminate ability. this passively doubled the amount of wild pokemon that i encountered once i had the staryu/starmie in the first slot of my party. i figured i'd just go fish up another staryu in firered, only to realize that staryu was very much a leafgreen exclusive. i ended up catching another staryu with illuminate in leafgreen and trading it over to firered. even though it couldn't encounter pinsirs, i figured it'd be fun to try for a shiny chansey over there, so i raised that staryu to level 26 to repel trick for it in the northern part of the safari zone. the spread of pokemon available there was definitely a lot more varied, but i figured it'd be fun regardless.

in terms of hardware, i used an emulator with my own ROMs and save files of firered and leafgreen (each of which i yoinked myself by using a flash cart). i know that this is sacreligious to some hardcore full odds hunters, but i'm firmly in the "multiple game consoles cost way too much money, as do multiple copies of these games" crowd - and i'm not ashamed to say it! since the 1/8192 odds were unaltered (as per usual, no cheats were used AT ALL; there'd be no point in taking part in safari week if i used any of those!!!), i figured that my participation was just as #valid as that of those whipping out the gba pianos for the event.

speaking of gba pianos... admittedly, the main MAJOR advantage of this setup was that i could use a game controller to comfortably control multiple windows of the game at the same time. i didn't want to get drunk with power with this (LMFAO), but i was inspired by johnstone's 6x setup (though he uses physical hardware) and ran 6 windows: 4 leafgreens and 2 firereds. someday, i might try to participate in safari week with physical hardware alone... but i am extremely familiar with the trials and tribulations of single system hunting (prior to this week, i never multi-hunted EVER!!! not even on another emulator) and didn't want to go through a glacial pace of encounters on top of having the very real chance of failing the shiny pokemon that i ran into. this was the setup that i was working with, along with pkounter for counting each of my encounters!

i also was thrilled to see that my chosen emulator had a feature that let me record in-game footage, which allowed me to take videos of my catch attempts! it made me super happy given how there was a chance that i could fail the shinies as they fled. sadly, the emulator didn't allow for mic recording, but i figured that was okay since i'd just be shrieking the whole time anyway. LMFAO. i've embedded each of those videos here for your viewing pleasure.

anyway, with my preparations all handled, all that was left was to wait for the event itself to begin on june 20th...!!!

...except i decided to start shiny hunting two days early. i won't go too much Into It, but a bunch of stressful life stuff happened, and i couldn't focus on anything that required a whole lot of thought. shiny hunting is pretty mindless when you get into a groove with it, so i decided to do some safari week "pre-gaming." (thankfully, the stressful life stuff was resolved!!! but the Zone definitely gave me a much-needed anchor when i was struggling. it was like a beacon of light through some serious brain fog.)

then, on safari week eve, something amazing happened.

my 995th encounter was a shiny nidorino in my firered version! my friend cody joked that chorizo the charizard would make the safari zone his chorizone, and he was so right. i was shaking so intensely when i ran into this nidorino, and when i caught him, i really almost cried. just like that, i met my main goal of at least SEEING a safari shiny pokemon - even if it wasn't The blue one that i had as my main, far-fetched goal. successfully catching him in such a painless manner was truly the cherry on top.

i am planning on evolving this nidorino into an awesome nidoking. i named him 'hero' because, as silly as it may sound, encountering this nidorino when i was steadily recovering from being a nervous wreck due to the events the night before had me feeling like he saved me. for that reason, i wanted to include him in this post as my first safari week 2025 shiny.

my second shiny encounter was this adorable nidorina!

she was my 2758th encounter in my copy of leafgreen. much like hero, she behaved and stayed in the safari ball. i named her strawberry because of her cute pink... fur? skin? i have no idea what texture nidorina's body is. all i know is that she is SUPER cute.

3604 encounters later, strawberry's relative decided to pay me a visit.

to say i was amazed that she also stayed is a total understatement. i know that the nidorino and nidorinas of the safari zone have a 25% chance to flee - which is pretty generous, all things considered - but THREE in a row? THREE????

since another nidorina showed up, i decided that i'd evolve her into a nidoqueen so that she could match hero. (admittedly, i wish that they let nidoqueen Serve and kept her pink instead of turning her green, but she's an awesome pokemon anyway so i have no complaints.)

my 7752th encounter of the next phase presented... yet another shiny nidorina!

the gang is, quite literally, all here. i was so amused that she stayed that i thought i was flat-out losing it. was i actually the nido whisperer?! i named her after the hot pink bitch named breakfast.

my next shiny encounter was a break from my swarm of nido family shinies...!!!

my 3402th encounter for this phase was this glorious batch of gold eggs in my copy of firered. i lovingly named him Pipis, after deltarune's pipis. pipis also has astoundingly good ivs, with 31 points in both defense and special attack. surreal.

from this point on, i got antsy about not running into pinsir before the event was over. i decided to just run 6x windows of my leafgreen save until i saw that blue bug of Legend...

...only to run into yet another nidorina a short 1535 encounters later. LMAO. i wasn't all that surprised, as my pool of encounters was now solely comprised of nidorinas and pinsirs. moreover, nidorina's ~90% encounter rate meant that i'd likely see more adorable pink nidorinas.

i welcomed this nidorina with open arms, and she put up one hell of a fight. i was certain that she was going to run, but she just kept staying - until, finally, she stayed in the safari ball for good. i was deemed worthy, i guess. i named her fighter for her safari zone prowess. admittedly, a small part of me kind of WANTED her to flee, if only to experience a novel spin on yet another Nidorina Encounter... but, ultimately, i'm glad that she didn't and that my safari catch streak was miraculously left untarnished.

a short 1068 encounters later bestowed yet another nidorina into my life.

25% flee rate... more like 0% flee rate. i truly AM the nido whisperer. since i was talking to my friend bree when this nidorina showed up, i asked him to name her for me. he named her Cutie2006, after one of his neopets.

we politely asked cutie2006 to send word for her shiny pinsir friend.

...and, would you believe, cutie2006 listened? she must've snuck out of her safari ball and let this pinsir know that i was looking for him, because he showed up on the FINAL DAY of safari week 2025. he was my 6271st pokemon seen!!!

everything surrounding this catch was totally crazy. he appeared, and i yelled, and then i had to LEAVE to go help my mom with a treadmill... and THEN i had to help my dad with a table that he accidentally managed to FLIP... it was a mess. LMFAO. in addition to that, my 7* pokemon raid group had finally gotten together after multiple unexpected delays that day to fight baxcalibur, but i had serendipitously managed to capture one the night before and instead focused on catching pinsir.

i had to swallow the urge to begin throwing safari balls at this guy with reckless abandon. my shiny pinsir fail of may 2024 taught me that it maybe wasn't the best approach to the encounter after all. an unbaited pinsir has a 45% flee rate, and i wanted to lessen that flee rate no matter what! professor rex conducted a whole lot of kanto safari zone research, popularizing a Bait Strat which made capturing the safari zone's rare pokemon easier. i consulted this lookup table, and, in the video, you can see me following the suggested pattern for maximizing my chances of catching that pinsir.

needless to say, it was totally worth it.

thanks to the level 28 repel trick, the bait strat, a whole lot of luck, and sheer DETERMINATION... i managed to capture one of the kanto safari zone's most elusive pokemon. shiny pinsir... my white whale... my Blue Bug... was finally mine.

naturally, i had to name this guy Moby. encountering him alone was the perfect end to safari week, and catching him... well, that was beyond my wildest expectations. this encounter was so intense for me that i feel like i didn't breathe at all while it was going on LOL i'm still a bit shaken over it. i never thought that a PINSIR would have me feeling so incredibly emotional, but... here we are. moby was absolutely a special case.

safari week 2025 went WAY better than i ever expected. like i said, i was hoping to run into one shiny - hopefully a shiny pinsir for a chance at the reclaim, though i wasn't picky - even if it fled. instead, i ran into a whopping EIGHT shinies across 27421 total encounters, which is kind of crazy for frlg's 1/8192 odds. to make things even crazier, i managed to capture all 8 shinies. yes, 7 of these 8 only had a respectable 25% chance to flee, but the 8th was a rare spawn with a 45% chance to flee... and, against all odds, the catch worked out. thank u bait strat. june was a pretty rough month for me (though i am ETERNALLY grateful that the stuff that worried me ended up working out fine!!!), and experiencing such a successful and fun safari week as a respite from all of my worries was really awesome.

i'm currently thinking about transferring a copy of moby (since pokemon can't go back and forth through the early gens, i like to keep copies of them in backed up saves here and there... fun fact: there are a few copies of my ribbon master kingdra, reides in some of my older gen pokemon games, haha!) up through the generations so that i can have him on my main pokemon legends: z-a team and let him be a swagful mega pinsir, but i'm not totally sure just yet. i guess time will tell, huh?

anyway, i hope you enjoyed reading about my wacky time in the kanto safari zone! safari hunting is an emotional roller coaster, and, at the moment, i'm eyeing the hoenn safari zone. (that 5% pikachu... it's calling to me... i can hear it...) i'm hoping that i'll be able to participate next year, if the stars align!

if you'd like to see some more safari week adventures, i'm not sure if anyone else is going to take my approach of writing a lil blog post about it... but you can always just look up 'safari week shiny pokemon' on youtube and find lots of great compilations. a few of my personal favourites are: absolblogspokemon's 2018 video (the first safari week video i ever saw!!!), thesupremerk9s' 2022 safari week video, sonikks' safari week 2023 video, kotatsuinunova's 2024 video, and absolblogspokemon's 2024 video. by the time i'm posting this, people may also have their 2025 videos up!!!

as for my own pokemon projects, i am currently a lil burnt out on my silver team challenge, but i just have one pokemon to go for it... (who just so happens to be a full odds egg hunt LOLLLL it's brutal out here). hopefully it will sparkle soon, and i'll have another pokemon post for y'all to peek at!

until next time!!

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mood: triumphant
music: glaceir - toby fox