It has been a weekend of good news for Niantic's monster-catching mobile game Pokemon GO. Hot off the heels of the confirmation that the title's Safari Zone event in Sweden was a smash hit, Niantic rolled out a new update that seemingly contained only minor bug fixes to enhance overall gameplay ahead of the Halloween season. However, an early datamine of the update has revealed that Generation 3 Pokemon will be added to the game when the Pokemon GO Halloween event kicks off.

Conducted by the Pokemon GO fan community The Silph Road, the datamine details that Pokemon GO update 0.79.2 includes a never-before-seen loading screen that features five Generation 3 Pokemon: Banette, Dusclops, Duskull, Sableye, and Shuppet -- all of which are not currently included in the game. Gengar and Murkrow are also featured in the image, with the Ghost/Poison type standing proud in the center and the Dark/Flying type off to the left.

The third generation of Pokemon was born during the Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire era, which originally hit Nintendo's Game Boy Advance handhelds in Japan in 2002 and in western countries in 2003, and is comprised of 135 total Pokemon (number 252 to number 386 overall). Alongside the third-generation creatures came the Hoenn region, located south of Sinnoh, and home to Professor Birch of Littleroot Town who offers Treecko, Torchic, and Mudkip as starter Pokemon.

Additionally, the new update includes sound files for the third-generation Pokedex up to number 386 (the Pyschic type Deoxys that first appeared in FireRed and LeafGreen). A badge to reward players for successfully capturing Generation 3 Pokemon was also found, as well as code referencing Halloween music, chunks of code altered for bug fixes, tracing tools, and new debugging.

This information hasn't been officially confirmed by Niantic, but past information helps bolster the legitimacy of this datamine. At last year's San Diego Comic-Con, Niantic CEO John Hanke hinted that new generations of Pokemon would eventually make their way into Pokemon GO. "Beyond first generation, there are some others that may make their way into our universe. We’re looking forward to finding interesting ways to make that happen in the coming months and years," Hanke said at the game's panel. More recently, an earlier Pokemon GO datamine revealed that Generation 3 creatures would be folded into the current roster sometime soon.

For Generation 2, players got their hands on seven baby Pokemon and one evolution in December 2016, an introduction that was quickly followed by a near-complete release of the generation in the early months of 2017. It remains unclear whether Generation 3 will be released in a similar fashion, staggering the introductions with the five revealed in the datamine and the remainder coming later, or if they will be added to the game in one fell swoop.

Though a bundle of new Pokemon appear to be inching their way toward Pokemon GO, and while the title recently added three Johto Legendaries and Mewtwo to the mix, the game is still without a handful of creatures, including Celebi, Delibird, Ho-Oh, Mew, and Smeargle. Perhaps the Generation 3 roll-out will start a trend of more frequent creature releases.

Pokemon GO is available now on Android and iOS devices.

Source: The Silph Road - Reddit