So… Pokémon Go, huh? The app released in July 2016 (on a staggered schedule, region by region), and sure has had a wild ride in its relatively brief existence.

There have been numerous problems, attempted fixes that screwed up twelve other things in the process (see also: For Honor)… Niantic really didn’t know what they were getting themselves into with this one. The playerbase and ex-playerbase all feel some kind of way about Go and its issues, but what if we told you that an actually beneficial glitch had been discovered? That’s right, friends, it’s easy catch city around here.

If you’re a Pokémon Go veteran, you’ve learnt to be accepting of the game’s eccentricities. Learnt to work around them. The awful tracking system, for instance, which still isn’t what it could be. The sheer rarity of interesting Pokémon spawning, as opposed to the great influx of freaking Pidgey, Zubat and Ratatta. When your pact with Beelzebub finally pays off and a Dragonite does spawn, it’s infuriating to try to catch.

If you’ve been in that situation, and exhausted your entire stock of Ultra Balls on a ludicrously rare Pokémon that fled, you’re sure to appreciate this. A glitch has emerged that allows for instantaneous captures.

As YouTuber IllDepenCCe demonstrates in this video, exploiting this allows you to catch Pokémon in under ten seconds. In total for the whole encounter, mark you, because you even cut out that iconic ‘ball jiggle’ animation and the capture screen.

Pokémon Go Catch Glitch
Via: eurogamer.net

The clip itself is lightning fast, of course, so IllDepenCCe also left us a handy-dandy guide to pulling off the glitch. Here are the steps you must follow:

  • Start the encounter as normal
  • Open the Poké Ball menu
  • While the menu’s open, grab a ball from the very left edge of the screen
  • As soon as the Poké Ball makes contact with the Pokémon, select a second ball
  • Tap the icon to Run

It all sounds simple enough, but it’s the speed with which you’re expected to follow these steps that might trip players up. If you’re able to practise this and pull it off efficiently and reliably, though, it’s a super sweet little trick. Just how long Niantic might allow It to remain in the game is another matter entirely. It’ll be nice for some of those really tough legendary Pokémon raids.

There’s more to the exploit than just that, though. This being Pokémon Go and all, it doesn’t want to be too useful for us. The same bug can be manipulated to prevent catching, such as in this example (a Pokémon with a measly 12CP breaking out of the highest-buffed capture rate in the game). Like a lot of things in this app, it’s tough to tell whether it’s working for us or against us.

Both of the examples above were performed on Android; Pokémon Go version 0.91.1.