Pokémon Sword And Shield’s Biggest Riddle Has Finally Been Solved

Pokemon Sword Shield Wailord spawn Anubis

Three and a half years ago, the first wave of paid DLC for the Nintendo Switch game Pokémon Sword and Shield was released, the Isle of Armor. It was a fairly short, battle-focused DLC that saw trainers training up and evolving a legendary Pokémon, while learning a few things about the Dynamax phenomenon in the process. With it, came Sword and Shield’s biggest mystery: the case of the disappearing Wailord.

Here’s the gist of it: in the ocean in front of the Isle of Armor, the eponymous location in which the DLC takes place, is a gigantic, full-scale Wailord. It’s the only wild Wailord in the game, likely due to how massive it was, and it was the only way to see a full-sized Wailord in any Pokémon game. The problem was that if you ever battled against the Wailord – regardless of if you ran away, caught it, or knocked it out – it would disappear forever. Or so it seemed.

A few weeks after the release of the DLC, players started reporting that the Wailord they’d encountered had reappeared. As far as anyone knew, this was impossible — once Wailord was gone, it was gone for good. But as more reports came in, it seemed like somehow, someway, the glorious whale Pokémon could return.

Nobody was really sure how to make it respawn, but the evidence was clear: it is possible for the Wailord to come back. For years, Pokémon researchers have wondered how it worked; was it a bug? Was it never meant to disappear in the first place? Was there a secret flag somewhere that brought it back? Now, we have an answer, and the mystery has been well and truly demystified.

Pokémon dataminer and researcher Anubis, who goes by Sibuna_Switch on Twitter, tweeted a thread earlier today confirming the mechanics behind it, and it’s surprisingly simple. Simply put, for every day that you visit the Isle of Armor map, there’s a 1% chance for Wailord to respawn.

There are a few caveats. You get one chance per day, and you have to actually load the map from scratch — simply opening the game on a specific day while you’re already in the Isle of Armor map doesn’t count. As Anubis points out, you also can’t visit the Isle of Armor multiple times a day to increase the chance, your first load of the Isle of Armor map each day is the one and only check you get.

In a tweet further down the thread, Anubis lays out a simple way to quickly check for a respawn, which you can see above. We’ve seen multiple people report success with this method, so if you want your happy little Wailord back in the bay, this is how to do it.