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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