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‘Pokemon Go’: The Trick To Creating New Pokestops Brings Hope To Rural Trainers

By Dustin Kemp
Published on: 20:53 PST, Nov 14, 2016

Earlier today, major tech news source Mic reported on a recently discovered trick to create new Pokestops in Pokemon Go.

Loads of people, regardless of where they live, love Pokemon Go. It has established itself as a revolutionary and highly addictive mobile experience since it was released in July, and there are not many people, regardless of age, who are not onboard with the augmented reality geolocation game.

Unfortunately, Niantic, the development studio behind Pokemon Go, have made it really difficult for Pokemon trainers living in rural areas to enjoy the app to its fullest. The main way in which they have done this is by failing to create many Pokestops, the refueling locations that make Pokemon Go more fun, in locations other than big cities.

Because of this, many Pokemon Go fans who live in small towns may wish for more Pokestops near them. The problem is that, at the time of this writing at least, Niantic has shut down the page on the Pokemon Go site that accepts requests for new Pokestop locations. There is currently no way to send requests for totally new Pokestop locations, but there is indeed a way to push Niantic into creating stops in areas it has already scouted out. All it takes is a smartphone with an internet connection.

First, you need to understand where Pokestop location data comes from. Before the idea for Pokemon Go was conceived, Niantic created another game called Ingress. The mechanics of the game were similar to those of Pokemon Go. It used geolocation to track where players were in the real world and had them interact with digital objects. There were even “Portals” in the game that worked in the same way as Pokestops. Although most of the Portal locations were taken from player submissions, the application process is long since closed.

When Pokemon Go was created, it took many of the Portal locations from Ingress to use as Pokestops. Many of the ones it did not use were the Portals that did not have any photos tagged to them. This stipulation was probably meant to make Pokemon Go’s user interface seem cleaner, since players will always see a photo of a Pokestop when they view that location on their screen.

Reddit user TheFarix was the first to notice that going into Ingress and adding photos for a Portal that does not have any associated with it will often result in that Portal’s location automatically becoming a Pokestop in Pokemon Go. This process can be accomplished easily by following a few steps, listed below.

  1. Download Ingress, available for free on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store.
  2. Open it and locate a Portal without any photos uploaded. You will be able to tell because in the Portal screen there will be some static lines where the photo should be, accompanied by the text “add photo…”
  3. Tap on the text and you will be given an option to either take a new photo from your phone or upload an existing photo.
  4. After uploading the photo, wait a bit.
  5. Go back into Pokemon Go and odds are a new Pokestop will have appeared.

This method does not work 100 percent of the time, as not all of the Ingress Portal locations made the transition to Pokemon Go. It is proven to be fairly reliable, though.

There are definitely more Portals in Ingress than Pokestops in Pokemon Go. In fact, rough estimates suggest there are 5.4 million of the former and only 3.5 million of the latter. So the chances that there is at least one unphotographed Portal near you are really not that bad. It is definitely worth a shot for big Pokemon Go fans, especially those in areas where Pokestops are few and far between, as it is free and takes only a few minutes.

[Featured Image by Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Images]

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