The Presents that took place on this year's Pokemon Day included a lot of good news for Scarlet & Violet players. Confirmation of some pretty extensive DLC rolling out later this year, and the ability to pair the games with Pokemon Go. However, reports of the latter potentially corrupting saves has tainted the latest update, but someone may have found an unofficial fix for the bug while Game Freak works on an official one.
Although the issue doesn't appear to be a widespread one – around a dozen players claim to have encountered it – people have been trying to find a fix for it for the past week. The issue appears to be corrupting saves, the worst case being a trainer who had almost 600 hours logged losing their progress.
Perhaps following these steps posted on Reddit by TragGaming (thanks, GameRant) will provide a glimmer of hope for anyone's saves that have been corrupted by the Go bug. According to TragGaming, the bug can be fixed by playing Scarlet & Violet on a different account on your Switch up until a point where you can save the game. Immediately switch back to your main account after saving and the problem should be fixed.
TragGaming claims to have tested this method three times on two different Switch consoles and it has worked every time. They do note that the fix only works when you encounter the “save data is corrupted” message which is the one everyone who has experienced the bug appears to have been met with. As for what exactly is triggering the bug in the first place, beyond it being introduced by the latest update, that remains a mystery.
Not knowing what triggers the bug has resulted in some of you refusing to play Scarlet & Violet until it is officially fixed, not wanting to risk potentially losing hundreds of hours of progress. That may well mean missing out on Scarlet & Violet's seven-star Decidueye raids. Decidueye will debut in the games next week via Tera raids, but it seems unlikely there will be anything more than the workaround above for the bug by then.