Commonly, it is used to attempt to generate an in-game event Pokémon that is Shiny, or has particular IVs or Nature. This practice is widely considered useful, as rebooting the game (whether by soft resetting or hard resetting) will affect the values generated by the pseudorandom number generator.

A 'soft reset' contrasts to a 'hard reset', which is restarting the game by rebooting the system itself.Ī soft reset can be performed at any time during gameplay, except while the game is saving. It involves holding certain buttons on the game system at the same time, which causes the game to return to the startup screen. Soft resetting (often shortened as SRing) is a feature found in the core series Pokémon games, as well as several other Pokémon games. For the move commonly shortened to 'SR', see Stealth Rock (move).