Duplication glitch found in 'Pokémon Diamond' and 'Pearl'

Thanks to a couple of savvy gamers, a duplication glitch has been discovered in the newly released Pokémon(s) Diamond and Pearl. Initially reported by Nintendo Everything, a Twitter user by the name of Kevinfor5 first made the discovery public, which was then expanded on by YouTuber Orcastraw.

The steps are pretty straightforward:

• Visit a Pokémon daycare and make sure two Pokémon are in the same position but in different boxes e.g. in the bottom right corner of Box 1 and 2
• Select one of these Pokémon and place it in the battle box
• Visit the Solaceon daycare, interact with the woman, and then choose the Pokémon that wasn’t placed in the battle box
• Before exiting out of the menu, select the box list, which is located on the bottom left
• Click Y, swap the slots that each Pokémon was placed in, and then deposit them
• Reopen your boxes and navigate to the battle box
• There should be a glitch at the bottom, so you’re going to take a Pokémon that will be “deleted” and insert it
• Add the Pokémon you want to clone into the list
• Inspect the summary screen of the Pokémon you just added — after exiting it, the selected Pokémon will be cloned

Does the glitch work with items too?— In order to duplicate master balls or any other rare item, you can employ this method by having one of your Pokémon hold the item in question.

While this glitch was noticed pretty early on into the game’s existence, a patch is almost certainly coming. Time to get in on the action now before it becomes impossible. As noted by TechRadar there is also a possibility where a patch reverses the effects of any duplications, so be prepared for a world where you lose some of your rare Pokémon copies.

People have been discovering these loopholes within the Pokémon series ever since the first generation of games. I distinctly remember an item duplication glitch from Red version, which involved encountering an unidentifiable Pokémon, running from it, and then voila! The sixth item in my bag was duplicated.

Item duplication and Pokémon cloning is canon for this series, and if this specific glitch becomes fixed, I’m sure another one will be found eventually.