Pokémon Home keeps crashing, and some of the bugs are downright scary

Pokémon Home's launch Tuesday brought meant a lot to players who want to bring Pokémon from past games into Sword and Shield, including 35 that weren't available beforehand, and the service even allows new kinds of trading for some really cool Pokémon. Just a few days in, however, glitched Pokémon have invaded Home's ecosystem, and if transferred into Pokémon Sword and Shield, they can cause irreversible problems for some players.

Watch out for glitched Pokémon. They'll be super effective against your copy of Sword or Shield.

When a feature like Wonder Box exists allowing players to gamble for random Pokémon, it becomes a risky roll of the dice when Pokémon like this exist in the now wider-than-ever Pokémon ecosystem. If you do end up putting a glitched Pokémon into Sword and Shield through any means, the game will crash when you try to collect it.

Polygon reports a specific problem where the glitched Pokémon causes the game to try playing the trade animation over and over again until the whole thing crashes. After you do experience the crash, you will be locked out of using Sword and Shield's Y-Comm online features. This means you can't trade or battle with others online or in the Wild Area at all. And the damage is seemingly permanent.

In most cases, it seems like hackers create these glitched Pokémon using special programs that can input the digital creatures into Nintendo Switch systems, so they in many ways resemble regular Pokémon. But they're not.

For now, there are no workarounds or fixes. So the best option right now is to just avoid using Surprise Trading via Pokémon Home's Wonder Box feature. If not, you may risk having to restart your entire save file or just elect to never use Sword and Shield's online features again. Neither Game Freak nor Nintendo has commented on this issue yet, and so there's no telling when some kind of patch might be implemented to prevent the glitched Pokémon from being accessible in either Home or Sword and Shield is released. If not, one of Pokémon Home's cooler features will be very risky to use for the rest of the application's lifespan.

While that is certainly the most severe glitch, a few other concerning ones also exist. As soon as some users try registering for the Pokémon Home app, they might run into different issues. Some Twitter users report that if you try to use sign-in or password related services like as FaceID or LastPass, you will get a communication error when attempting to link your Nintendo Account. If this has been preventing you from even using the app, just enter your information manually and you should be able to access Pokémon Home just fine.

The scarier problem is "Error 992." This is an error with no known cause that has a small chance of wiping out the entire Pokémon collection that you are trying to transfer from Pokémon Bank to Pokémon Home. It seems to be more common when larger batches of Pokémon are sent. Until things smooth over, it may be best to transfer only smaller numbers of Pokémon you really need. More than 400 Pokémon still can't even be used in Pokémon Sword and Shield, so this is definitely the best option.

Pokémon Home is an awesome resource for players in theory, so it's disappointing to see such glaring issues exist. The ability to transfer Pokémon from almost every game in the series all the way to the current generation, coupled with the trading features from within the service all make for a surprisingly robust and unprecedented experience.

Unfortunately, with so many prevalent issues, Pokéfans should be careful.

Pokémon Home is available now across Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.