Gaming
Become a Pokémon master on the double, all without spending a penny.
The Pokémon GO hype train continues, but as the day goes by, it’s becoming very clear to see who’s sitting in first class and who’s sitting in third. Newcomers and casual players in urban centres are finding gyms dominated by Level 20 plus players armed with 2,000CP+ Gyarados, Snorlaxes and Vaporeons, effectively cutting out all but the boldest or luckiest from a major element of the game.
Reaching those same giddy heights can seem like a tall order – to reach Level 30, as a few elite players now have, requires a staggering two million experience points, or the equivalent of catching 20,000 Pidgeys. But boosting yourself into the upper teens and beyond can be done quickly with a bit of planning – follow our tips to keep up with all the Pokémon masters out there in the race to hit the level cap.
Save your Lucky Eggs
The first rule of levelling in Pokémon GO, above all others, is to make your Lucky Eggs count. Confusingly, these are not like the eggs you need to incubate to hatch, but items that when activated, will double all XP you receive for half an hour. You will receive a couple of these for free when you reach Levels 9, 10 and 15, and unless you plan on prostrating yourself before the master of micro-transactions, lord of bondage and pain and in-app purchases, do not use these without some serious planning. Follow the tips below, and simply do as many as you can in the time allowed – it’s perfectly possible to jump from Level 10 to Level 14 using just one Lucky Egg.
Hoard your Pidgeys
You’re probably sick of the sight of Pidgeys already; they’re augmented-reality vermin, winged rats with CP so low they’re barely worth wasting a Pokeball on. And yet, you should catch each and every single one – and not just because of the 100XP for each catch you make. You only need 12 Pidgey candies to evolve one into a Pigeotto for 500XP, you see, which of course doubles to 1,000XP when using a Lucky Egg. A quick bit of napkin maths tells us that to jump from level 10 to 14 in just half an hour, you’d need to catch 120 Pidgeys in advance (Fewer, if you transfer some of them to part time super model Professor Willow for the extra candy, but make sure you have enough on you to evolve them all when the time comes to crack open your Lucky Egg and start power levelling).
That’s just using Pidgeys as well; this technique also applies to Rattattas, Zubats, Nidorans and to a lesser extent, Drowzees, Weedles and Spearows, so keep on chucking those curve balls and you’ll soon be ready to evolve an entire ark of mediocre Pokémon, then discard them all once you’re done.
Hold fire on evolving your new hatchlings
Evolving jobber Pokémon for double XP during a Lucky Egg window is easy, but if you can do so, hold fire on evolving rarer creatures as well, especially if you know their evolved form isn’t in your Pokédex already. This is because you’ll get another 500XP for capturing a new Pokémon on top of the bonus for evolving it, meaning some evolutions can be worth 2,000XP during a Lucky Egg window.
Now, it’s hard to capture enough of the less common Pokémon to scrabble together enough candy to do this in bulk, unless you’re lucky enough to live on a Charmander nest, but you will find that many of your hatched Pokémon come with enough candy to be instantly evolved. Eevee, bless its little indecisive heart, hatches from a 10km egg with enough Eevee Candy to morph straight away, but hold fire until your power levelling session if you can.
Put all your eggs in one basket
This will take some serious patience and all of your incubators, but if you can get multiple eggs to hatch during your Lucky Egg party (that’s the official phrasing, we’ve decided) you’ll get lots of extra XP – 400 alone from the hatching, plus an extra 1,000 if it’s a new species. Since you’ll be walking around anyway while frantically evolving your Pidgeys and watching their gains grow with one eye on the clock, it can be worth juggling your incubators and getting to 4.9km before you start.
Combine Incense and Lure
So you’ve cracked open your Lucky Egg, you’ve evolved all your vermin, and you’ve still got some time left before the double XP bonus ends. It’s time to catch as many Pokémon as you can. So long as you haven’t splurged on them already, you should have a couple of Incense and Lure modules (We thought about making a pun here about bringing gold, Poke-incense and lure, but that would imply Niantic is the baby Jesus and we don’t want the studio getting ideas above its station just yet). Park yourself near a Pokestop, set these off and hoover up everything you can before the clock runs down – the incense will draw nearby Pokémon to you, while the Lure will increase the likelihood of their spawning.
Get moving
After all this hard work, it can be tempting to just sit back at a coffee shop and watch the levels whizz by, but you really should be moving whilst hunting in a Lucky Egg session. This is because Pokémon will spawn more often as you walk, so trudge the perimeter of the fluttering confetti in laps to keep them coming.
Buy more Lucky Eggs
As you can imagine, with each passing level the amount of XP required increases exponentially; ultimately, developer Niantic is hoping you’ll get so sick of grinding Pidgeys that you’ll start stumping up for more Lucky Eggs to keep up with the Joneses and their Scythers with muscles so rippling you can feel them through the screen. You could fork over money for these, but Niantic is not so heartless that it doesn’t offer an alternative route: earning coins from taking over gyms. You can earn these for seizing gyms. Holding onto them for a day will get you even more, but this is extremely difficult in urban centres at this point. Still, that’s at least 10 coins a day (more, if you can make a clean sweep of a few nearby quickly) for a few quick battles, which means you can earn enough for a Lucky Egg in just over a week. Better get saving – see you at the level cap.
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