>>36625372>>36625685>>36625720>>36625773It's not specific to Chikorita or Meltan. That bug has been in the game since forever, it's just more apparent at the end of a Community Day. It may not even really be a 'bug', since it's more tied to the way encounters work in general.
The way it works is that if you start an encounter with a Pokémon and run, and then that Pokémon spawn changes into another species (usually due to the start or end of a special event), re-starting the encounter with that Pokémon will cause the old species to appear instead of the new one (and catching it will give you the new species). This is because the server saves your state with each unique encounter ID, so that you can't just re-enter the encounter over and over to regenerate the Pokémon (i.e. savescumming for Shinies or higher levels).
So at the end of this Community Day, people were quickly Shiny-checking all the Chikorita around them without actually catching them, and then all those spawns changed into Meltan. Restarting the encounter caused the old Chikorita to appear, and catching transformed them into Ditto (since that was the new spawn species).
