Hi Bill! Perhaps you can help me with something of a problem? Although, in regard to the Aspiring Dark Rookie Trainer’s father, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. I run a ranch north of Tohjo Falls, and the Eevee family is kind of our signature. While my partners (a male Jolteon and female Umbreon) are only responsible for a handful of the Eevee produced, about 70% of the pups are evolving into Umbreon, even outside normal conditions. Some of my…less pleased clients are threatening to sue. Thoughts?

Hmm. It’s extremely rare, but there are cases in which eevee that are comfortable and raised in a fairly safe and consistent environment (meaning, there are no particular controllable factors that would affect their evolution present) will be “locked” genetically. That is to say, if one or both parents are eeveelutions, one parent will pass down genes that will essentially choose which evolution an eevee will undergo pre-birth.

There are ways to counter this, however. Usually, the introduction of another environmental factor will knock their pups’ genetics “off balance” so to speak, just enough to allow them to access all of their potential evolutions again. So for example, you could plant a thunder stone near the parents’ burrow, in a place the eevee themselves can’t access but just close enough to allow the stone’s radiation to seep into the nesting ground. Alternatively, samples of moss or ice rock or the other evolution stones will work.

Also, because you live in the mountains, you may wish to keep an eye out for clefairy. While eevee don’t evolve via moon stone, high exposure to fragments of moon stone (otherwise known as moon shards) can sometimes influence an eevee into evolving into an umbreon, regardless of the time of day, so long as its other requirement of closeness with a trainer is met. Clefairy often collect moon shards to build their own moon stones, so if you happen to see a clefairy nearby, there’s a good chance there’s a moon shard cache (along with a clefairy colony) nearby too. These are just as rare as the above possibility, especially if you live in an area that hasn’t seen a clefairy colony before, but given how capricious clefairy can be and given the possibility that the recent bizarre weather we’ve been having could very well have carried moon shards down the mountains, it’s still worth looking into. Should you have a clefairy invasion on your hands, calling in a trainer or few should help clear that up. As in, a sufficient number of humans heading directly towards a clefairy cache will often encourage the colony to pick up and leave on their own.

Best of luck!