The purpose of this guide is to visually portray how some Pokémon are classified in the Sword and Shield games to better explain some technicalities. Please message Skadiv#6984 on discord if there are any mistakes, you may also find me as Skadiv in the Smogon forums.

A few caveats:

• Dynamax Adventures are classified as Raids because they utilize raid xoroshiro. They are forced shiny like the guaranteed distribution events are, except instead of forcing to xor0 (square), it forces to xor1 (star).
• Even though Trees are listed under Encounter Slots, they are odd in the sense that they follow csprng while being affected by the shiny charm. Technically, they are considered "scripted" encounters.
• The 500 Pokémon encounter boost to shiny rates is implemented through Brilliant Aura spawns. This means that only Overworld Grass spawns and chained Fishing have access to the bonus. Thank you Anubis for the research.

Complementary definitions:

• Hidden encounter: All of the Encounter Slots that don't have an overworld model. Includes Grass (exclamation mark), Fishing and Tree Pokémon.
• Symbol encounter: Every encounter that has an overworld model that the player can walk into. Includes Overworld static encounters and Grass Encounter Slots.

Acknowledgements and credits:

• Thank you Anubis for the corrections and review.
• Thank you LegoFigure11 for the HTML formatting.