Pokemon Sword & Shield has one of the largest varieties of items in the history of the Pokemon series. Most of them can be purchased for the game’s currencies of money, BP, and Watts, there are a few that can only be found carried by wild Pokemon. Many of these are extremely valuable held items for competitive battling, and are fully lacking from Galar’s stores.
Getting these items requires you to catch or use Thief on a huge number of Pokemon until you find one, so if you need one, you’ll likely need to know exactly where they are to save you some time. Unless you want to gamble using the Cram-O-Matic or the unreliable Stow-On-Side salesman, these are the places you can find each Pokemon holding a rare item.
9 Light Ball
Being the face of the series, Pikachu has always needed to be a powerful and versatile option in any Pokemon game. They’ve never massively altered its stats through buffs, but the greatest improvement it received was the Light Ball, which originally gave fifty percent more power to its moves before being buffed to double all of Pikachu’s offensive stats.
Since Pikachu’s the only Pokemon that can utilize it, it makes enough sense that Pikachu is the only one who can carry it. They spawn most frequently in the overworld of Route 4 and in normal weather on the Isle of Armor’s Forest of Focus, but also in Thunderstorms throughout the Wild Area. Be ready for a long grind, though, as the Light Ball only shows up on five percent of all Pikachus you’ll encounter.
8 Focus Band
Less specific to a species is the Focus Band, a less-reliable version of the famous Focus Sash that you can buy in the Battle Tower. The Focus Sash will always let the holder survive a hit while at max health, but the Focus Band instead gives a ten percent chance to survive with one health from any lethal damage.
It’s not an ideal item, but important for filling collections and not a bad option for people feeling lucky. They’re attached to Machops, Machokes, and Machamps that can be found across the Wild Area, but they’re extremely common as random encounters in the grass on Route 3 if you don’t feel like scanning several territories for them. That said, they only have a five percent chance of appearing, so be ready to take some time if you want this risky item.
7 Leek
Far less rare in terms of battle items is the Leek, a signature item that’s meant to be held by both the Kantonian and new Galarian form of Farfetch’d. Much like the Light Ball, this gives a boost to this one specific Pokemon, but instead of improving damage, it raises the holder’s critical hit ratio by a significant margin.
Since you need to get three critical hits in a single battle to evolve Galarian Farfetch’d into the new Sirfetch’d, a Leek is almost fully necessary if you intend to evolve it. Thankfully, there’s a fifty percent chance that a Galarian Farfetch’d will be holding it, so you should be able to find one quite quickly if you need it.
6 Metal Powder
Before the debut of Hidden Abilities in Pokemon Black & White, Ditto was pretty much unusable in battle. Using Transform was an undoubtedly unique ability, but taking a turn off to use the move made Ditto extremely vulnerable. Its powerful new ability, Imposter, lets it transform immediately without this delay, but older Dittos still need a boost to be usable.
Thankfully, the Metal Powder gives it a defensive boost to prevent it from fainting too soon, raising its defenses by fifty percent until it’s transformed. Unsurprisingly, this held item is only found on Dittos, which are found easiest on a large island in the Workout Sea within the Isle of Armor.
5 Quick Powder
While you grind for Metal Powder, you’re more likely to see a different item that Dittos often hold that try to solve the same purpose. Metal Powder has existed since the original Pokemon Gold & Silver, but Quick Powder debuted in Pokemon Diamond & Pearl to give an alternate option of double speed before transforming.
Once again, this item is only found on Dittos, which again can be found within the Isle of Armor’s Workout Sea. Nonetheless, neither of these powders are massively effective for Ditto compared to having the Imposter ability, so you’re better off finding one from a Max Raid Battle or Dynamax Adventure than spending time looking for these items.
4 Quick Claw
Perhaps the most versatile battle item that’s oddly absent from stores in Galar is the Quick Claw, a classic item that’s existed since the dawn of items in Pokemon Gold & Silver. This item has a twenty percent chance of making you strike before your opponents, which can stack with abilities like Galarian Slowbro’s Quick Draw to help this slow Pokemon strike astonishingly fast.
Since it’s more competitively viable than most items, it’s thankfully quite easy to farm from weak and speedy Sneasels. They appear frequently on Route 8 just below Circhester, and their frequency compensates for the poor five percent appearance rate. They can technically be found on Meowths from Kanto and Alola too, but none appear in the wilderness of Galar.
3 Spell Tag
One genre of items that are usually quite common in Pokemon games are type-boosters, such as the Miracle Seed that raises the power of a Pokemon’s Grass-type attacks by twenty percent. These are typically found from NPCs and inside Pokeballs throughout the wild, but some are missing in Galar such as the Ghost-type move booster Spell Tag.
There are several Ghost-types that this is attached to with a five percent rate, but the easiest one to find it on is undoubtedly Duskull and Dusclops. These two spawn frequently in multiple weather conditions in the overworld right behind the Watchtower Ruins in the midwest of the Wild Area.
2 Twisted Spoon
The Psychic-type Twisted Spoon is another example of a type-boosting item that’s oddly difficult to obtain, but even stranger is that this item was hardly available in Pokemon Sword & Shield at all during its release. The one other way to obtain it was through the changing Stow-On-Side salesman, but since his one daily item is random it’s extremely rare for the Twisted Spoon to appear.
It took until the Isle of Armor’s release for this item to finally be available in another form, and even then only attached to the Abra family in the wild and with the usual five percent appearance rate. Abras appear most often in the Isle of Armor’s Fields of Honor, while Kadabras carrying it can appear occasionally in the Soothing Wetlands.
1 Lagging Tail
Technically speaking, the Lagging Tail is slightly easier to get than these items. This is because it can be found by a member of the Wild Area’s Digging Duo, which uncovers several items like Bottle Caps and other treasures in exchange for Watts. The Lagging Tail is findable through these two, but it’s hardly reliable to dig up if you need to specifically get this pile of rocks that slow the holder down to a halt.
Before the Isle of Armor, this was even harder to obtain since it only spawned on Cufant and Copperajah, which were already extremely rare finds within the Wild Area. Once again, the Isle of Armor made it much easier than these other unreliable methods, as they’re held on the more common Lickitung and Lickilicky across the Isle of Armor’s Soothing Wetlands.
