You can see the stats of your unhatched egg in Pokémon Sword & Shield thanks to a bizarre glitch.
Normally, eggs are little mysteries. You probably have a good idea of what species is inside that egg (unless you get it from some random guy on the street, of course), but otherwise, it could have any combination of EVs and abilities. It might also be a shiny--you just never know until you break it open and find out.
That is until the recent discovery of a new glitch that lets you check under the shell, so to speak, of an unhatched egg.
Teaching Your Egg New Moves
Here’s how it works. First, you need an egg (duh). Second, you need to know what kind of Pokémon is inside that egg, which is easily doable if you bred the egg yourself. The female Pokémon will always pass down its species, so just keep the mother around to know what’s inside the egg.
Third -- and this is perhaps the most crucial part -- is turn off auto-save and save your game. This means if something goes wrong, you won’t corrupt your save file and you can just reload your game to continue on as if you didn’t just try to perform forbidden alchemy on Sword & Shield. However, we recommend saving before trying this.
Now, we get to the actual glitch itself. The glitch is quite simple: when using an item, you normally can’t use it on an egg, but if you press A to use that item and them IMMEDIATELY press and hold the down directional button, you can apply that item to the unhatched egg.
Normally, this wouldn’t do much -- after all, what’s the point of using a potion on an egg with zero hit points? However, what you can do is teach your unhatched egg new moves using TRs and TMs.
Why would you want to do this? Well, if you’re unhatched egg already knows four moves, you’ll have to tell your egg to forget a move it already knows. This makes absolutely no sense, of course, but the mechanic is the same as if you taught an already born Pokémon a fifth move. You’ll be taken to the same stats screen as normal, which says that your egg needs to forget one of its already-known moves. On that screen, you’ll also be able to see the egg’s stats.
Cool, right? Well, sort of. While you can see your eggs stats, it doesn’t really tell you much since they’re for a level 1 Pokémon. A number that’s a little higher than your average level 1 ‘Mon might indicate a high EV, but it might just be a strong type of Pokémon. A bit more useful is learning what ability your Pokémon has, but it’s relatively easy to pass down the ability you want during breeding in Sword & Shield these days, so that’s also not super useful.
That said, we can take this hack further. Not only can we teach eggs moves, but we can also even evolve the unborn Pokémon inside that egg.
Evolving Unborn Pokémon
This second glitch makes use of the first glitch (which is using item and pressing and holding down at the same time), but adds a second step. In this step, you need a Pokémon of the same type that is just a single candy away from evolving and an unhatched egg. The positioning of both hatched and unhatched Pokémon is important: the egg should be on the bottom of your list, with the hatched Pokémon just above it.
Also, you'll need to have exactly one candy left in your stack of candies. Don't ask us why -- it's just how the exploit works.
Now, use that candy on the hatched Pokémon and then use the down + A glitch. This will cause the unhatched egg to evolve, although it still is unhatched.
Austin John Plays used this method to hatch a Gyarados at level one, which is normally impossible.
However, another YouTuber named BLAINES performed the same glitch, but his Sword & Shield crashed every time he tried. Obviously, this is unsafe and might cause your game to crash, so player discretion is advised.
As with any exploit, this down + A glitch isn't likely to last long. Nintendo is almost certain to patch it out eventually, so make use of it while you can.
Source: Austin John Plays, BLAINES