A popular meme right now is “pondering the orb“, a series of jokes based off an illustration of a wizard-esque figure looking into a glowing crystal. Now, while playing the new Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, we discovered you can do the same.
The orb, in Pokémon, is a small interactable item inside of the Grand Underground, more specifically the player’s Secret Base. This item is used to change the appearance of the base.
Players can decorate their Secret Base with statues they dig up in the Grand Underground, but if you’ve been casually mining down there and found some statues you may notice that the orb in your base isn’t glowing.
This is because the colour of the orb is dependant on the rarer shiny statues. These statues light up the orb to reflect the type of the Pokémon.
In the header image above you can see a pale blue orb we chose because it looks so much like the orb in the original meme image. This colour represents the Steel type and it’s a rather close match to the original image used in the meme.
For those who like a bit more glow in their orb the Water type is your best bet. It offers a darker blue colour that may not look as close to the meme, but you can a nice aura around the orb in return.
More on different types and how they affect the colour of the orb later.
How to get your own shiny orb to ponder
You can get shiny statues for your secret base just by mining normally, but the chances of one appearing are rather low.
We used this great video guide to increase the odds in our favour which involves running around the Grand Underground and picking up powerups left by Digletts and Dugrtrios.
The advice in the video lead us to acquiring around 20 shiny statues in just under two hours, which is exponentially faster than trying to do it haphazardly.
On top of the instructions in the video we also recommend abusing the fact that entering a Lair resets the chances of Digletts and Dugrtrios appearing. This is mentioned quickly in the video but if you find a Lair entrance near a corner or intersection, and then repeatedly enter and leave the Lair, you can cause the Pokémon to spawn much faster.
If you don’t have time for all of that you can see the colour of the orb according to 12 different types below. There are 18 types in total in Pokémon and we’ve only been able to dig up these 12 after many hours of grinding in the Grand Underground.
