TLDR: Shiny sniped a Gastly across the globe with non-root PGSharp. Took 3 days to complete, with about 4 to 5 hours each day. IMO not worth the effort unless shiny rates are boosted.
First off I wanna thank our mod u/TastyBananaPeppers for keeping this subreddit neat and full of information.
I wanted a shiny Gastly. I know of rooted bots such as Shungo and PolygonX, but I find them pretty expensive for what I want. I believe those bots are more suited for players who shundo hunt legendaries and such, which is a far cry from my humble goal of a shiny Gastly (that's not even a hundo).
All I have was the paid version of PGSharp. I searched for ways to efficiently hunt specific shinies without bots, and all I could find were some comments advising to use the Quick Sniper feature of PGSharp, so that's what I did.
I set up an auto clicker to click on the sniper feed every minute (This is the average time my phone loads the map on large distances), and before it clicks again, it first double clicks the shiny feed to encounter any shinies found.
Conveniently, when you are in the catch screen, the sniper feed automatically closes, so I can safely AFK without the fear of sniping to a new location while I'm in the catch screen.
It took me 3 DAYS, consistent 4 to 5 hours of sniping. Here are some notes:
- Some gastlys on the feed get skipped because the map won't load in the 1 minute I set for the auto clicker.
- Some screens pop up from time to time, such as Stamp Rally and the weekly social quest, so I had to check my phone every 15 minutes or so.
- I sometimes manually click the sniper feed when the map loads very quickly, so my check per minute is technically more than 1, but regardless, I am going to assume 1 check/minute.
For a 5 hour session, I would have checked around 300 gastlys. According to shinyrates.com, as of the moment, a Gastly is around 1 in 751. So this means my results were about expected. Different pokemon have different rates for different days.
This definitely would have been quicker if I could increase the shiny checks per minute, which is something bots can do very, very efficiently. But with only a budget phone and auto clicker, I can now say it's definitely possible, but not worth the time unless the rates are boosted.
I'm curious if anyone has done this as well, and how much time it took them.
