With some more testing work (and the help of several friends), I've been able to confirm a few things about capturing in Gen VIII raids, and have updated the Gen VIII capture calculator accordingly. The main big conclucions for now are:

• This was already the common wisdom as I understand it, but we've confirmed that status does not apply to raid captures - the status has been healed by the time the capture is performed.
• Quick Balls never get their bonus in raid captures (which is to say, they are equivalent to Poké Balls). The turn counter ticks up before you can attempt the capture, so that even if you beat the raid in one turn, it counts as turn 2 by the time you actually throw the ball.
• Conversely, this means Timer Balls do always get a bonus, equal to 1 + (1229/4096 * turns it took to beat the raid).
• Raids do not count as "mystery terrain", and thus the grass modifier is not active.
• The difficulty modifier corresponding to catch difficulty 4 in event raid data is in all likelihood 0.5, or else 0.6.

There are still more tests to be done, and I would really like to be able to extract those multipliers from the game itself, but this is some good progress.

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I am incredibly frustrated that it took this long to get this up, but I've put up a Gen VIII capture mechanics explanation as well as an updated, accurate version of the Gen VIII capture calculator.

Max Raid capturing is unfortunately still a little up in the air, as we don't yet know some things about how they work. Most crucially, we've had no luck so far extracting the difficulty multipliers for raids, which are straight multipliers to the catch rate dependent on the particular raid in question, whether it's a Gigantamax raid or not, and whether you're the raid host or a guest. (This is not the same as the difficulty level, which you may have seen in data rips; each difficulty level corresponds to a multiplier, but we don't have the multipliers themselves.) Right now, the calculator lets you input a multiplier if you check the raid box, but obviously you won't know the multiplier either, so this isn't super helpful at the moment. I've been working on conducting in-game experiments to tease out some of the uncertainties here, but ideally we want to find the actual lists of multipliers in the game data, which hasn't worked out yet.

I will be continuing these tests in the coming days and hopefully getting to the bottom of some of the questions here, but in the meantime, this is accurate to regular battles (and should be to raids if you actually do know the multiplier). The big new additions are:

• the difficulty modifier, which for non-raid battles is 0.1x if your Pokémon is a lower level than the target prior to completing the story and 1x otherwise
• the low-level modifier, which multiplies the catch rate for Pokémon below level 20 by (30 - level) / 10
• the Catching Charm item, which doubles the chance of critical captures

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Hope you all enjoyed yesterday's jokes! I've now reverted the Favorite Pokémon Picker so that Pokémon other than Scyther can be your favorite and done a little writeup of the joke here.

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