Pokémon Blue Shiny Mew Farming

In order to transfer a mew from Pokémon Red/Blue to Pokemon Bank, it needs to match the UK event mew in two ways:

Pokemon transferred from the Gen 1 games will be shiny if they have:

Here I will detail a quick way to farm mews that satisfy all four of these constraints in Pokémon Red or Blue. This setup will not work in Pokémon Yellow. We'll be starting from a new game. You could theoretically make a setup that works from an arbitrary save file, but the easiest way to get the name 'GF' is to simply choose it from the start. You can also see me follow along with this route in this video. Getting 200 shiny mews took just over 1.5 hours.

This is a long write up, but many of the glitches are probably familiar to many of you. There will probably be some new things at the end, but none of it should be difficult to execute if you follow the directions carefully. If you are in doubt as to what I mean, you can check the video to see what I do. I am also assuming that you are playing on the English VC releases. You can try it on the other language versions but I do not guarantee that the same setup will work.

Starting the Game

Before starting, clear your existing save file with Up+B+Select at the title screen. This is probably only necessary if your existing save was corrupted, but you'll be overwriting the save anyway so there's not much harm.

When you start the game, pick the name 'GF' and name your rival '[MN][Space]'. The rival name is two characters. The first one is the MN character that's used when the game writes PkMn and the second is the space, which is right above it. The rival name will be useful when we set our trainer ID later on.

Pallet Town

Before you leave your room, get the potion out of the PC. Then trigger Oak's cutscene and pick Bulbasaur. You can give Bulbasaur a nickname if you'd like, a one character nickname will be the fastest. When you fight Charmander, keep using tackle and use the potion if you drop to 4 HP or below.

Route One

As you walk up and down route one to retrieve Oak's parcel, do not fight any encounters. Simply run from any encounters you get at this time.

Viridian Forest

While walking through the forest, you can avoid most encounters by following the path shown in this image. Pick up the antidote that's along the way. If you do get an encounter, just run from it. Once you get to the trainer with the level 9 weedle at the end of the forest, pick up the hidden potion that's in front of him and fight. Growl the weedle once and then tackle until it's dead, and use the potion if you're at risk of dying.

After defeating the weedle, you should reach level 7 and learn leech seed. Now comes the first glitch setup. You want to set up the following things:

To set this up, kill one wild encounter. Swap growl to slot 3 and tackle to slot 2 (use select to change the order of your moves), then growl and tackle metapods and/or kakunas until you have the appropriate amount of PP.

Pewter City

Before actually executing the glitch, we'll get some items that we'll want later. Go to the Pewter mart and buy a Pokéball, a Potion if you no longer have one, a Burn Heal, and an Escape Rope. At this point your inventory should look like this.

  1. Antidote x1
  2. Potion x1
  3. Pokéball x1
  4. Burn Heal x1
  5. Escape Rope x1

Brock Through Walls

Here comes the first real glitch! Open your start menu and move your cursor to save. Then walk toward route 3, staying a tile away from the Youngster that would take you to Brock's gym. He should talk to you on this tile. When he says "Follow me!", press B and then start (X is bound to start on the virtual console versions). If you did it right, your start menu should pop up before he takes you to the gym. You won't be able to move the menu cursor, but because you already put it over save, you can save the game. Save the game, then reset (you can hold A+B+Start+Select to do a 'soft reset').

Now walk to the right to this tile to load route 3, then up to the top and back left until you're directly to the right of the youngster. Open your Pokémon menu (to show your party), then close it again and talk to the youngster from the right. If you did it right, you'll be able to walk through walls. Walk to Saffron Pokémon Center avoiding any out of bounds areas that crash the game. Hold B during this walk to avoid the start menu repeatedly popping up. You can see the path I take starting from 17:05 in the video. If you do crash the game, don't worry! You saved just a moment ago so you can just reload that save and try again. If you find that after talking to the youngster you cannot move, check that your PP is set up properly and also make sure that you opened the party menu before talking to him.

Saffron City

Once you're safely inside Saffron Center, heal your party. This will set your teleport location to Saffron, which we'll be using a couple times throughout the rest of this guide. Afterwards, walk out the left guardhouse toward Celadon City. The guard will let you right past.

Once in Celadon, get the Coin Case from the man at the top left of the hotel. Then get enough coins from the game corner to buy an Abra. If you're on Blue version, you'll only need 120 coins and you can pick up 100 coins here and 20 coins from this NPC. If you're on Red version, you'll need 180 coins total. You'll be able to find the rest that you need lying around.

Now that you have 120 or 180 coins, go to the prize counter next door and buy an Abra. Then walk outside and use the Abra to teleport back to Saffron City. Once back, deposit Bulbasaur in the PC.

Missingno

The next step is to get 255 of an item. In our case, we'll be getting 255 escape ropes by encountering two Missingnos. You are probably familiar with encounter Missingno on Cinnabar coast, but that method is very long, so we'll use a much quicker setup. First, swap escape ropes into slot 6 in your inventory. Then, go south from Saffron City and set up a trainer fly on the first trainer. If you are unfamiliar with trainer flies, you set it up by walking onto the linked square from the right and holding start as you do so. If you do it properly, your menu will pop up with the trainer on screen, and you can then use Abra to teleport away back to Saffron City.

Once you've set up the trainer fly, walk to the fighting dojo and walk in front of the first trainer, leaving a gap. This trainer has a Machop with an appropriate special value to give us a Missingno. Once you've lost to the trainer, open your start menu and close it again, then walk out Saffron City toward the south. Your menu should pop up along the way and when you close it, Missingno will appear. Run away from Missingno and you should have 129 escape ropes.

Then open your menu and toss two of these escape ropes, so you are down to 127. Set up another trainer fly and follow the same procedure to get a second Missingno encounter. Once you've run away from that, you'll have 255 escape ropes. Now you are ready for:

Shopping!

Before we actually go shopping, swap the Escape Ropes up to item slot 3. Your inventory should look like this:

  1. Antidote x1
  2. Potion x1
  3. Escape Rope x255
  4. Burn Heal x1
  5. Coin Case
  6. Pokéball x1

Walk up to Cerulean City and go to the Pokémart. Sell slot 1 three times. You'll notice that the escape rope stack gets duplicated each time, and the third time you'll sell all 255 of them for lots of money. Then, buy a Pokéball, a Potion, and a Repel. Once done, teleport back to Saffron. When you leave Cerulean City, your inventory should look like this:

  1. Escape Rope x255
  2. Escape Rope x255
  3. Escape Rope x255
  4. Pokéball x1
  5. Potion x1
  6. Repel x1

Next we're going to go shopping in Celadon Department Store. Walk over there and make the following purchases (one of each):

Take the elevator back to the first floor and exit and teleport back to Saffron. At this point, your inventory should be full and look like this:

  1. Escape Rope x255
  2. Escape Rope x255
  3. Escape Rope x255
  4. Pokéball x1
  5. Potion x1
  6. Repel x1
  7. Super Potion x1
  8. Super Repel x1
  9. Awakening x1
  10. TM02 x1
  11. TM01 x1
  12. Water Stone x1
  13. Thunderstone x1
  14. Fire Stone x1
  15. Soda Pop x1
  16. Lemonade x1
  17. Carbos x1
  18. XAccuracy x1
  19. XDefend x1
  20. XSpeed x1

Item Underflow

Here comes the next glitch. Now is a great time to save in case you get one of the next steps a little bit wrong.

If you did these steps correctly, the top item slot will be Escape Rope x0 and you'll be able to scroll down past your normal inventory size. This is called Item Underflow. Once you've verified that you've gotten underflow, it is reasonable to save the game.

Set up your TID

Now is when we'll set our trainer ID to 22796, so that all of the mews that we get pass that check. Go to the route south of Saffron. This square is perfectly fine. Open the item menu and scroll past your inventory. This sequence of item manipulations is where we use the Rival name that we set at the beginning of the run.

Once you've done this, close the item menu. Open the options menu to make everything go at normal speed again (if it looks like nothing is happening, press B a few times until the options open and close again). Then go to the Pokémon menu and teleport to Saffron. Don't try to walk back as that will cause the game to crash.

Set your item quantities to zero

We've got 1 of each item right now, but we will want a lot more than that. In these games, an item quantity of 0 functions much like you'd expect a quantity of 256 to work, so by setting quantities to zero, we'll have essentially unlimited access to those items. We could use Missingno encounters to get enough of each item, but this method should be faster and easier once you get used to it.

To do this, walk to this column of tiles. The exact column doesn't matter, but you want to be unrestricted vertically. Do the following steps for each item that you have 1 of in your inventory except Super Repel.

When you do this, each item should become a stack of 0 instead of 1.

Set up the items in your PC

Before going further, take the following steps

By doing this, you should have a Super Repel x1 just above a Repel x255. Once that's done, you're ready to deposit items in the PC. Deposit the following items in order:

  1. Super Potion x1
  2. XDefend x213
  3. Super Repel x1
  4. Escape Rope x8
  5. Repel x21 (you'll have two stacks of repels at this point. Pick one of them to deposit from)
  6. XSpeed x20
  7. Awakening x100
  8. Potion x175
  9. TM02 x72
  10. Lemonade x1

Set up the items in your bag

This will be a little bit more complicated than the PC items. In order to set up the bag properly, we'll need to change three of our items into other items. But do not worry, this is essentially the same procedure as setting the quantity to 0.

Go to this area of Saffron so that you have the ability to walk right a decent ways. We're going to do three mutations:

Mutation 1

Mutation 2

Mutation 3

Once these mutations are done, teleport to make the map look normal again, and go inside the Pokémon Center.

The real setup

You're now ready to set up the bag. Here is what you want the first part of your bag to look like:

  1. Thunderstone x211 (Toss 45 from 0)
  2. Escape Rope x8
  3. Lemonade x170 (Toss 85 from 255)
  4. Bicycle x20 (Quantity is hidden; you set this up in Mutation 1)
  5. Cascadebadge x0 (Quantity is hidden; you set this up in Mutation 2)
  6. Repel x32 (Toss 223 from 255)
  7. Carbos x218 (Toss 38 from 0)
  8. XAccuracy x177 (Toss 79 from 0)
  9. Water Stone x119 (Toss 137 from 0)
  10. Soulbadge x5 (Quantity is hidden; you set this up in Mutation 3)
  11. Fire Stone x250 (Toss 6 from 0)
  12. TM01 x0

Acquire the Mews!

You're almost ready to go. If you were paying attention, you'll notice that there are two item stacks that we haven't really used. We haven't touched Soda Pop at all, and nothing we've done so far needed the second repel stack. Now is their time.

These are the entrypoints into the code that you've set up. To acquire mews, swap the Soda Pop x213 into what we call the 'Text Pointer' slot of your item underflow. To locate this slot in Saffron Center, scroll down until you find a slot that is Coin x85. There will be one "click item" along the way. When you encounter that item, your cursor will stop moving and you'll need to press B once for each of the times you scroll with it on screen, a total of 4 times each time you pass by it. Go somewhat slowly here, since if you accidentally close the menu you'll have to scroll past the click item again to start the swap again.

Once Soda Pop x213 is where the Coin x85 used to be, talk to Nurse Joy. You'll get a level 100 mew!. You can keep talking to her until your box is full. Unfortunately, these mews have random DVs, so they will (almost certainly) not be shiny. That's where the second part comes in.

Swap the Repel x211 into the text pointer slot, so with Soda Pops assuming you haven't done another swap in the meanwhile. Talk to Nurse Joy. You'll see an empty textbox appear, and when you press A it goes away. What just happened is that all of your pokémon in your current PC box have had their DVs set to 10/10/10/10, which means they'll become shiny when you transfer them.

Warning! Before going to the PC, swap the Coin x85 back into the text pointer slot. If you don't, the PC will still work normally, but it will reload the proper text pointer, so you'll lose your Soda Pop or Repel stack and need to set up a new one. You don't need to actually use the PC at any time to transfer to Pokémon Bank. Once you have a box full and shinified, just save and transport them, then repeat.

Variations

This setup allows you to relatively easily acquire any species of pokemon at any level. The only changes you'd need to make are in the PC inventory. In the Repel x21 slot, the 21 corresponds to the species, in this case mew. If you want a different species, refer to this list. In the Awakening x100 slot, the 100 corresponds to the pokémon's level. Keep in mind that the nature of the pokémon upon transfer will be determined by the experience it has. A level 100 mew will come out timid, but if you want a particular nature you may want to find a level that has the proper experience. Keep in mind that different species have different experience values for each level!

Credits

While I created the bulk of this setup on my own, it's built on a lot of knowledge from a lot of people. I'd like to give my thanks to several of them:

Changelog

28 May 2018 - Updated pokeworld links to new site 31 May 2017 - Add link to glitch city hex list 17 May 2017 - Change HM04 mention to "HM04 or HM05" 02 Feb 2017 - Made a few clarifications with feedback from MolluskMoth 01 Feb 2017 - Added mentions to hold B during Brock Through Walls and to clearing save data before starting.