Pokemon Sword/Shield Softlocks If Players Have All Boxes Filled And No Pokeballs Before Key Story Battle

Pokemon Sword And Shield players have discovered another bug that could potentially trigger a softlock while completing the game’s main story.

As the part where the softlock occurs could be considered a major spoiler for the game, we will not be elaborating too much in this first section of the article.

All players need to know to avoid the softlock is that it happens when BOTH the following conditions are met:

• All the boxes in your PC are completely filled with Pokemon (all 34 Boxes)
• You enter a specific main story battle without any Pokeballs on hand at all (although the game will give you one right before the fight if you happen to have none)

If you wish to learn the full details about the bug and where it occurs, proceed beyond the spoiler tag below:

The issue in question was documented by Youtuber Collector Togami and verified by Pokemon dataminer SciresM. It happens during the final battle with the game’s third legendary Eternatus, in which you will be forced to capture it in order to end the battle.

Collector Togami wanted to find out what would happen if the player had no space for new Pokemon in their boxes and had no Pokeballs on hand to capture it, and this was the result:

As it turns out, the game just softlocks with no way for players to end the battle and continue. Although the game does have a “contingency”  in the form of a free Pokeball when you have none, that doesn’t seem to address the part where all the player’s PC Boxes are full. In order to get around this, players would likely have to reset the game, empty a space in their PC, then challenge Eternatus again.

It should be noted that previous games in the series had even stronger contingency plans to avoid this potential issue:

• In Pokemon Black/White, Reshiram/Zekrom will wait for you to empty your boxes or buy Pokeballs before challenging them.
• In Pokemon X/Y, the game will not allow you to unlock the final box in your PC until you have caught Xerneas/Yveltal.

While this bug is fairly easy to avoid and likely won’t happen during normal gameplay, its still a glaring oversight that Game Freak might want to look into correcting.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.