If you’re brilliant like me, you’ll have already caught a Ditto and a Zorua in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, through sheer luck. But for lesser mortals, some more direct help might come in useful. Also, you might be after those super-high-level Dittos with the max IVs for your creepy Pokémon breeding needs. We’ve got you.
Why do you want them? Well, for Zoroark, it’s just a neat Pokémon that you can’t get any other way. If you’re looking to fill a Pokédex, or want a buff fox with epic hair on your team, you’ll need to know how they hide. Ditto, meanwhile, is even more useful: It’s used by breeders to ensure they can create ideal versions of their favourite monster. By pairing them with any other Pokémon, you can make sure all the other parent’s moves and abilities are passed on, but when given a Destiny to hold, the Ditto can also pass on its IVs to the youngster. (Yes, this is eugenics.)
Where To Find Ditto In Pokémon Scarlet And Violet
You can find Ditto and Zorua in a bunch of places, but they congregate in certain areas en masse in West Province Areas Two and Three. The very best place to find and and catch Ditto around level 30 is just West of Medali. If you fly to the more Westerly Poké Centre, then head North to the first path that runs North-West between the rocky walls, you will find both in ridiculous numbers.
When it comes to finding them in Tera Raids, they’re spread across the map at random, but see below for tips on getting around that.
How To Find Ditto And Zorua In Pokémon Scarlet And Violet
The easiest, and honestly, the cheapest method, is to use ZR to look at Pokémon in the wild.
It kind of sucks that this works, but if you use the (rather flaky, in my experience — you need to make sure they’re the right distance from you, and then in the very centre of the screen) ZR to identify a nearby Pokémon, if it’s a Ditto, Zorua or Zoroark, it’ll just say so. Which is kind of day one at Spy School level of thing you should know not to do. “Are you in disguise?” “I sure am! Oh, dammit.”
This does rather take the joy out of the process, but is certainly the most effective if you’re actively hunting. Note: if you’ve not encountered them previously, you’ll see “???” instead of their names, but that’ll be them for sure.
Watch Out For Weird Behaviour To Spot A Ditto In The Wild
But there are much more fun ways to go about it. The best of those — especially when you’re not actively hunting them down — is to notice wild Pokémon behaviour.
One of the pleasures of Scarlet and Violet is that everywhere is a wild area, and all the Pokémon you meet behave according to their characteristics. Gone are the days of wandering through long grass and getting “surprised” by your fourteenth Murkrow in a row — now they’re all just out there in the open.
Some, like say Sudowoodo, are cowards, sweating and running away when you go near. Others are incredibly bold, like bloody Lokix who has no understanding of personal space, and will charge toward you, hungry for battle. Then there are those who just chill out when you’re around, unfussed, like say a Skiddo. Once you notice these behaviours, it becomes second nature to start noticing when a particular Pokémon is not behaving that way. And that’s a very good sign you have an imposter on your hands.
Ditto is, as you’d imagine for a purple blob of amorphous jelly, is very chill. If you see an aggressive Pokémon like a Mankey who’s just not fussed that you’re there, then something is up. There’s a fairly good chance you might have found yourself a Ditto. Run up and engage, and it’ll reveal its true form.
Zorua, meanwhile, is a wimp, and so if you see a Pokémon getting all afraid when you’d expect it to be bold, chase after! Zorark is much the same, but will be disguised as much higher level Pokémon. Austin John has a great guide to this here, especially a good location to do it:
Reboot Your Gam To Find Ditto
By far the most cumbersome, yet also the most effective method, is one spotted by Atrius on Twitter.
Zorua, Zoroark, and Ditto can be found in Scarlet & Violet, but they are disguised as other Pokémon in the area, losing the disguise in battle.
However, the game does NOT remember the disguise if you save and reboot the game, revealing any nearby.#PokemonScarlet #PokemonViolet pic.twitter.com/2r0suLGGnU— Atrius (@Atrius97) November 17, 2022
If you’re suspicious you’re surrounded by Zorua, Zoroark or Ditto, you can manually save the game, quit out, and then load it back again. Because the game saves the locations of about 20 Pokémon around you, it’ll load them all back in when they were. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t save the disguises, so the tricksy Pokémon will load back into the game in their true forms. Far easier to spot, although, honestly, just ZR-looking is a lot quicker.
How To Get A Ditto With High IVs
IV stands for Individual Values, the numbers that define the stats of any given Pokémon. If you take your Pokémon battling seriously, you’ll be all over this, and wanting to make sure you have only the very best figures for your team. And to best ensure that, you’re going to want to be able to breed them to order. Yes, hardcore Pokémon players are no different from inhuman puppy farmers.
For this, you don’t want to be wasting your time trying to get lucky in the wild. To find the finest Ditto, you need to head to the Tera Raids. But again, not just by looking for them on the map — no no, you want to be using the Poké Portal.
A rather unsung feature of the game, the Poké Portal is your means to take part in the non-co-op multiplayer — stuff like the Battle Stadium, Surprise Trades, and for us today, Tera Raid Battles. Select that from the Poké Portal menu (and make sure to hit L to go online), and it’ll search for a bunch of possible Tera Raids you could take part in, bundled together with strangers from the internet. Now, here you do have to be patient and wait for a Ditto’s shadowy shape to appear as one of the available battles, or use one of the sites that shares Link Codes and try to be preternaturally fast with an uploaded code for a Ditto raid. (You will not believe how hard this is.)
If you can get into a six star raid, you will be guaranteed five max IVs for your Ditto, which is pretty much perfect. It’ll still be a tough fight, however, although there’s a very clever way around this, too. Check out this video by Osirus, which explains how hosting a six star Ditto raid, while going in with a Ditto, allows you to trick it into letting your companions batter it to bits without the usual difficulty level:
There you go. Now you too can add the elusive beasties to your rota, into your sicko breeding program, or at the very least, fill in those gaps in your Pokédex.
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