Mass outbreaks/swarms in gen 3

[bluebird12]

I've been researching and one thing has me scratching my head. Do pokemon outbreaks in gen 3 only occur after you beat the E4? Also how do you get informed of an outbreak? I'm trying to get a surskit

 

[QuentinQuonce]

Probably best to put these sorts of questions in this thread.

Bulbapedia's page on Mass Outbreaks has the answer to what you're after - yes it's only post-E4; to get Surskit in Emerald you need to mix records with a copy of Ruby or Sapphire, to get it in Ruby or Sapphire it's probably quicker to just search on Route 102 until you find one rather than waiting for a swarm. It's a 1% encounter but if you search long enough one'll appear.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mass_outbreak#Generation_III

 

[bluebird12]

It looks like that thread is only for sun and moon if im not mistaken.

The bulbagarden doesn't really say how to get informed of an outbreak though

 

[QuentinQuonce]

It looks like that thread is only for sun and moon if im not mistaken.

It isn't.

The bulbagarden doesn't really say how to get informed of an outbreak though

Yes it does:

After entering the Hall of Fame, every time the player wins a battle, there is a ~0.5% (328/65536) chance that the game will generate an outbreak; this does not apply to link battles, e-Reader battles, the Safari Zone, or the Battle Tower/Frontier. After an outbreak is generated, the television program announcing it will appear the next day. Once the television program has been watched, the outbreak becomes active.[1] Once outbreak has been activated, it will last until the end of the next day - during this time there's a 50% chance the game will generate the swarming Pokémon instead of using the usual encounter table (effectively halving the encounter rate for non-swarming Pokémon). However, seemingly due to an oversight, once a particular savefile generates an outbreak, it will never generate another one outside of record mixing.[2]

The record mixing feature of Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald allows players to give an outbreak they've seen to other players, regardless of whether that outbreak would naturally occur in the player's game. The traded outbreaks will be announced on television in the following days after mixing records.

So if you're playing Ruby/Sapphire and are trying to trigger a mass outbreak, your best bet is to win a lot of battles - go and knock out a bunch of Wurmple. You may as well do this on Route 102 since it's time-consuming and not guaranteed to work, because this way you might end up actually encountering a Surskit in the process. It's rare, but it is there.

If you're playing Emerald, you need to mix records with a copy of Ruby or Sapphire that has already had a Surskit swarm to make one appear on your game.

 

[bluebird12]

Alright, sounds like outbreaks are more complicated in gen 3 than gen 2 lol