Shiny raid frame comments

##Choosing your den

Be aware of the fact, that if you've played through the game or at least beaten Raihan (you have all 8 badges), you will not be able to encounter any of the mon that are listed as only 1 or 2 Star raids, as raids will always be between 3 and 5 stars for you in terms of difficulty. This does affect your loot pool for all beams and all dens except for event dens. If you want to be able to get level 1 or 2 star shiny raids going, you will need to create a new save either on a different game (you can use the same Nintendo account for that, not having to pay online for it) or create a new Nintendo account with a subscription (will not be a problem for those that have a family subscription, but getting your seed would only work offline, which isn't covered in this post, the exception being with access to two Switches, but more on that later). Then, you play either until you reach the Wild Area and farm enough Watts to be able to afford a Wishing Piece (around 1-1.5h) and start going for 1 star dens (any Pokémon that will only appear in 2 star dens and higher will not appear in the rotation) or you farm enough to over-level your starter (have good experience with Scorbunny) and defeat the first two gym leaders (or at least until you get your Roto Bike to move around the Wild Area more quickly), which takes about 3-4 hours depending on how you optimize your raid farm and pathing.

##Frames vs date advances

You mention the disparity between frames and advances different tools use. I think a small example and a list of tools that use one or the other would help make it absolutely fool-proof.

Like:

- Dudu, Seed Checker (Leanny is the developer, might want to adjust that): show advances, the amount of day skips to perform - will allways be -1 of the count frame count of the desired frame
- Raidfinder, Lanturn Bot (Discord): will show you the frame calculated from the one you are currently on, will always be +1 compared to amount of dates needed to be skipped.

Example: Frame 1 needs 0 advances, as you're already there.
Example 2: If your shiny frame is at 4587, you need 4586 from your current frame to get to it.

##As for Dudu:

- Timing is definitely key, but it can be affected by high latency or NAT type (perform a connection test in your Switch settings to check your type on your current connection). A and B are perfectly fine, but you might encounter NAT types C and D. Portforwarding on your home network might resolve some of these issues, but it's no guarantee, as it's ultimately your ISP needing to connect to Nintendo services in time. Avoid using mobile hotspots, school or work WiFi networks, as they most likely will place restrictions on how an unmanaged device can connect through their network (if at all) when searching for Dudu.
So, these 3.5 seconds should be taken with a grain of salt, although, since there are 3 bots running silmultaneously most of the time, one can still get lucky.
- Not really mentioned, but matching people can be somewhat steered by yourself by blocking them in YCOMM. After an unsuccessful match, you can go back into YCOMM, search for your name (always in red font) and block the person you matches with (in 95% of cases in the bottom of you). As stamps refresh in batches, you sometimes won't be able to see your own stamp, in which case you should ignore the last person and just try and match Dudu again. It happened to me numerous times that after I've blocked someone, they were the next one to match it. Don't worry too much, you might have matched another person again in the meantime you can block and as well as about the one that got the trade, relieving the pool of potential matches by 2 people. Might not sound like much, but with an extensive block list, I've managed to first-try Dudu a couple of times.
- Keep the website open while trying to match Dudu. Dudu is an automated service run by an auto-trading hacked Switch that will check the PID of a Pokémon and output the seed on the site almost instantaneously (within a second), which is especially important for mobile users. If you need to (re-)load the site first after a match, you will most likely already have missed your seed and lost your time spent on matching the bot (you will have to do try and match it again).
- Have your friends help you find your seed: this is very much a thing, since the Pokémon caught from your raids will be perfectly identical to one another down to the PID that will give you your seed. So, if you have a second Switch you've done this on that doesn't have a Switch Online subscription, you can simply catch it with the other that does and try and match Dudu or Lanturn there. If you have 3 friends all trying to match Dudu with the same mon, you're 4 people upping your chances by a lot (and the other 3 can still save and go about their days). Bear in mind, that this does increase queue times and you might need to block your friends temporarily as you search yourself as not to match them (can be reversed later in the YCOMM menu).

##Notes on skipping

- I've seen VS glitches break after flying or exiting the Wild Area on foot - I recommend starting it when already in the Pokécenter.
- I've seen VS glitches break when not actually getting into the battle (happened to me and I was curious why I was still on frame 1 after a skip) - I recommend taking a little bit more time and only enabling Airplane Mode when the round counter starts in battle. Then just hit Run and Yes and B out.

##Re-orientation in the seed and date skipping

I feel like this topic is only very briefly touched upon and would like to share further insight here. This should cover questions on how to know how far along one is in their current seed if they've lost track. Combined with the dullness of the process and the slight nervousness when doing this the first time, mistakes can and will happen.
First of all: I do not recommend using Dudu again for the same den for the following reasons:
- Ever noticed how many people seem so incredibly lucky, that they all apparently have seeds with under 20 advances to go? I won't say some aren't but the vast majority is cluttering up the queue for others who haven't had their shot at all, because they don't know how to re-orient themselves in their seed otherwise. Obviously, this is more of a considerate viewpoint towards others at first, but is important for you as someone who is still looking for their seed as well, since the less people use Dudu or Discord bots for re-orientation, the more up-time the bot has for absolutely new requests, thus lowering queue time for everyone.
- Dudu will give you your new advance count, but a totally different seed. Why? Each and every frame or Pokémon has a seed that can be calculated from its PID, so Dudu and similar services will treat the Pokémon as the very first one you've caught. So the result will be a completely different one than you'd expect - this can be the cause for confusion in a lot of cases.
- Wait time: leveling a Pokémon up to L100, checking its stats in an IV calculator and filtering the actual IVs in any calculator of your choosing (takes 5 minutes including raiding) vs the potential wait time and queue clutter (see above) don't make it worth it in my eyes. One can disagree, I just want to be sure this method could and should be seen as an alternative for everyone involved for pragmatic reasons.

The in-game IV judge is already a fairly good indicator for where you stand, but each individual species within the same difficulty tier will have the same amount of guaranteed minimum perfect IVs. Unfortunately, Serebii doesn't appear to list these other than for lower-tier raids which players that have completed the game don't even have access to.

Meaning, assume each 4 or 5 star Salazzle from this den (which is actually the case, but not shown) has a minimum of 4 perfect IVs:

https://www.serebii.net/swordshield/maxraidbattles/den77.shtml

Sure, you can enter yours from the 10th skip away from the assumed shiny frame, you know the spread of perfect IVs and you may even get lucky and get a 5 IV one, which will narrow down filtering on Leanny's Seed Checker, but if your current seed only has a shiny 5K advances or more ahead, chances are that there will be a lot of candidates with the same spread in that list, making you unsure as to whether or not you've skipped the correct amount of days or if you've already overshot your target frame.
Raid Finder is great for finding out which Pokémon from which beam at which star tier can how many guaranteed perfect IVs.
In any case, do not be afraid to save as long as you know you're well away from your current target and do not see setting the VS glitch up again as just something tedious. Some people will be more confident in their hand-eye-coordination while skipping, some others won't, some others won't trust their 2-digit math anymore when getting close, which is all super understandable.
Once you've skipped a fair number of dates (use the touch screen, not your controllers, you'll be way faster), you can simply do the following to verify the exact frame/advance you're on:
- Save in the Pokécenter
- Go to your den
- Fight the mon currently in there and catch it
- Level it up to L100 (won't be an issue for most, otherwise have someone join your raid with sufficient candies and do that for you)
- Enter the stats of that Pokémon in Raid Finder, the Serebii IV calculator or what have you
- Go back to Leanny's Seed Searcher, select the Pokémon you caught (important), filter the max. frames to the number of advances you actually need to get to your shiny (especially on mobile to make loading times faster) and calculate the frames with your seed with the IVs you've gotten.
- If you still have multiple candidates with the exact same spread in your seed, enter the gender, nature and ability which should give you an exact match.
- Close your game
- Set your date something easy like 01/01/2020 (as long as you've closed the game, it doesn't matter, if you need to revert - seen that the Switch is locked beyond the year 2060, you might want to keep that in mind).
- Use a date calculator like this one to help you keep track:  https://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html
- Get in range and proceed according to the instructions of the OP.
You can repeat this is as many times as needed before getting to your target frame.
What will happen while skipping at some point:
- You overshoot a month - e.g. skipping from 31/01 back to 01/01 again. Don't worry about that. Only actual skips forward within the same session (of the game being opened) will count as adavances. As long as you realize that and switch to 02/01 after, you're good.
- If you're using a touchscreen, you might tap on a day skip twice before pressing OK. This will only count as one frame advance and not two. If you have a fairly long way to go, re-checking your seed is vastly preferred over just relying on dates only, as the disparity between these occurrences will make the difference between what you think your frame is and what it actually is grow. It's not that bad, as this mishap will not make you overshoot your target but can make the difference of having only 10 advances to go and 200 advances to go.

##Abilities and IVs

Once you're at your shiny frame or even before starting out, make sure to use Leanny's Seed Checker with the appropriate Pokémon selected. As gender, ability, stats, etc. are all rolled in a specific sequence and can be broken or just different if the raid tier or minimum guaranteed IVs do not match, if the Pokémon is single-gendered or neutral and so forth, you want to make sure if your primary target out of this den actually has at least the ability you want or can at least be capsuled. Change the Pokémon in question on Seed Checker and search for the next shiny frame again or select calculate with appropriate filtering.
If you don't give a hoot about shinies, you can employ this entire method to just look for 6IV comp viable mon, too.
Or if you're willing to re-host this den for a longer amount of time, you can try and skip to the second shiny frame which might have Pokémon with abilities and IV spreads more suited for comp.
Just be sure, just because a certain Pokémon does have a hidden ability in a den, does not mean all of them do. Please check that before advertising your den as a shiny HA den, when only a couple of Pokémon have HA.
Furthermore, certain Pokémon can only be GMAX or have hidden abilities in certain dens. Raid Finder tells you all that via its Encounter Lookup, so if you have a Windows, Linux or Mac computer, I strongly recommend downloading it. Serebii is at the very least accurate about abilities, but kind of plump to navigate for GMAX encounters.

This turned out way longer than I thought it would.