How to get Unown in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl

The Unown are some of the most mysterious Pokemon ever discovered. This Pokemon exists in 28 distinctive shapes, each shaped like a different letter of the alphabet or punctuation mark. According to the PokeDex, no one’s sure whether the Unown existed before or after the concept of written language. As individual Pokemon, they’re nothing special, but if you can catch all 28 unique variants, that’s something to write home about. Here’s how to get Unown in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

In the entirety of Sinnoh, the Unown only appear naturally in a single location: the Solaceon Ruins, located near Solaceon Town. If you follow a path at the back of the town, hidden by a treeline, you’ll find three ledges you can hop over, followed by the entrance to the ruins. The first floor of the ruins has a mural with a message written in Unown characters as well as four staircases leading down. There are several of these main rooms, each one playing home to encounters with a distinctive shape of Unown. In order, those shapes are:

1. F
2. R
3. I
4. E
5. N
6. D

How to get Unown in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl

To get Unown in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl

1. Go to the Solaceon Ruins near Solaceon Town
2. Encounter the 26 letter-shaped Unown in the ruins’ rooms
3. Talk to the Ruins Maniac at Route 214 to open the path to the last two Unown

Taking an incorrect staircase leads to a dead end room, though it’s in these rooms that every other shape of Unown spawns. You can get the F, R, I, E, N, and D Unowns in the main rooms, but to get the other shapes, you’ll just have to trigger encounters repeatedly in the dead end rooms.

Once you’ve caught the 26 letter-shaped Unown, you’ll need to jump through an extra hoop to get the two punctuation-shaped Unown. In the Route 214 cave, there’s a Ruin Maniac who challenges you to catch all of the Unown before he can finish his dig. This isn’t actually a race; every time you catch another Unown shape, he’ll get a little further automatically. Once you’ve gotten all 26, his cave will reach an end point, connecting to a special area where the question mark and exclamation point Unown can be captured. Find those last two, and you’ve got the whole set!