‘Pokémon GO’: This Exclusive Strategy Will Take Your Game To The Next Level


Look, we’re all playing Pokémon GO. Let’s just face up to that right now. And given that we’re all playing Pokémon GO, we’ve all noticed the nasty tracking bug that Forbes has already highlighted, which is making it really difficult for trainers to find new Pokémon — in fact, many nations have never even seen the tracking system working properly.

But there is hope. I’ve been, uh, researching an exclusive strategy for finding and catching Pokémon, and while I’m not the first person to notice it — Reddit has had a thread going for some time — most people still don’t know about it yet — and it’s going to give you a real advantage in taking your Pokémon GO game to the next level.

Before we get started, you’re going to need to download and start an account in Ingress. It’s not absolutely necessary, and I’ll get to that, but it’s going to make things a lot easier. If you’re unaware, Ingress is the game that Niantic Labs made before Pokémon GO, and all of Pokémon GO‘s maps and gyms and PokeStops are based on it — and so, it seems, are Pokémon‘s underlying systems.

Here’s how it works; actions in Ingress are fueled by something called XM, which spawns out in the world, and players have to walk around to collect it. It spawns in two places — around portals, which are the gyms and PokeStops in Pokémon, and in seemingly-random areas everywhere else — the latter is sometimes known as ambient XM, and that’s what we’re going to focus on. And one of the big, important differences between Ingress and Pokémon GO is that the XM is visible. So, let’s take a look at a comparison.

A nearby Pokémon farming location, as seen in ‘Pokémon GO’ and in ‘Ingress’ [Image by Don Crothers]
So here we have a nearby location — it’s got a major intersection, a shopping center, an inter-city bus stop, a gas station and so on. Note all of the ambient XM that’s visible.

Now let’s take a look at what happens when we get closer to that pile of ambient XM in Pokémon GO.

There are four Pokémon waiting for us on the near side of the street alone, and the leaves suggest that more are going to spawn. [Image by Don Crothers]
If you need to find Pokémon, there’s no better way — at least right now. It’s better than Lure Modules. But, you do need to get pretty close to see the ambient XM in Ingress — how can this help us determine where to go in the first place?

Well. The prevailing theory on ambient XM is that it spawns mostly in places where people are using mobile location services. This intersection has a long light, a multi-service bus stop, and more; the shopping center has a huge grocery store, multiple restaurants, etc. In contrast, in spite of all the PokeStops, there is very little ambient XM in the local park or cemetery — because people don’t tend to hang out there using their smartphones. And while that may change over time, it takes a long time for ambient XM spawns to change (if they do so at all).

So, we can make some educated guesses about where we’re going to find people using their phones a lot in the first place — and when we get close, we can check our guesses with Ingress. We can also take a few good guesses by watching for “leaf piles,” which suggest that a Pokémon will be spawning somewhere soon.

In point of fact, it’s likely that wild Pokémon can only spawn in areas where environmental XM spawns — and as such, mathematically, are going to really heavily favor those areas full of ambient XM, whether they’re common or rare.

Of course, you might ask how regularly catching a mass of Pidgeys and Rattatas is going to help your game. Aside from getting some Stardust (which, to be fair, does become a very valuable commodity before long,) how does this revolutionize your gameplay?

Here’s the other half. You may have experienced it by now or you may not, but after a certain point, leveling in Pokémon GO is a grind. It drags on. And nobody even knows what the max level is yet. But by knowing where to catch a lot of “trash” Pokémon, we can do a lot to accelerate it.

First things first, save up those candies. Stockpile them. Keep a few of each Pokémon, but transfer most of them, and sit on the candies until you have a lot. Our goal here is to stockpile until we can do a large number of evolutions in one sitting. Make sure you’ve got a stockpile of Lucky Eggs hanging about, too.

Lucky Eggs aren’t normally much to speak of. Their half hour of doubled XP is usually worth a couple hundred extra, maybe a bit more if you spend them at gyms or catch something new. But Pokemon evolution is a steady source of XP — and if we’re doing this right, you’re going to evolve 15-20 Pokemon while your doubled XP is active. In a lot of cases, it will be practically guaranteed to bump you to the next level — and that’s important, both to the strength of the wild Pokemon you’ll find and how far you can eventually push their CP.

Once more for good measure: this is what you’re looking for, and this is where you’ll find Pokemon. [Image by Don Crothers]
Does it sound a little simple? Well, it is. But I didn’t make level 17 in the course of a week, one riddled with severe server issues, for nothing. And if you stick to it, you will too.

[Image via Niantic Labs/The Pokémon Company]

Share this article: ‘Pokémon GO’: This Exclusive Strategy Will Take Your Game To The Next Level
More from Inquisitr