Many of you are just starting your adventures in this world of Pokemon and for lots of people, it will hold familiar elements but you must remember that this is not your standard Pokemon game!Â
The provided tutorial is weak at best, so I’m here as a previous beta tester to answer all of your questions! It’s a LOT to read, so I’ll try to make searching for what you’re looking for easier!
TL;DR Spend 10 dollars on lucky eggs and incubators, time your throws for the smallest circle when catching, when you place a Pokemon in a gym it’s stuck until it gets defeated, dont forget your daily bonus!, train using lower CP Pokemon, get stardust/Pokemon candies to strengthen your Pokemon, Pokemon candies evolve your Pokemon.Â
If none of that made sense, you should keep reading!
Let’s go over the original tutorial or “tips!”Â
Poke-stops! Professor Willow explains them pretty well and they’re simple. When you’re close enough, it’ll change shape and expand. Tap it to bring up the monument or art piece nearby and swipe the disk to spin. You can tap the individual items to collect or just exit the Poke-stop and you’ll automatically collect everything that pops up
Next he shows you what a gym looks like. When you hit level 5, you’ll be able to join one of three teams. Team Instinct (Yellow), Team Mystic (Blue), or Team Valor (Red) and then you’ll be able to interact with these gyms
Assigning Pokemon leaves a Pokemon at that Gym until it is defeated. It cannot be interacted with (leveling up or evolved, etc)Â
Training Pokemon! the tips doesn’t explain this at all. I will later.Â
Challenge a rival gym to lower its Prestige and level! again not explained.
During Battle swipe to dodge attacks. They forgot to mention that tapping attacks and holding does a special attack.Â
(my words in bold)
A LOT of this game is “how does this thing work?” so I’ve written a FAQ to answer your questions!
To answer all of your “How do I play this $&*#$ game” needs
1. How does catching Pokemon work?
As you wander around, Pokemon will pop up around you! Tap the Pokemon to enter a new screen. You can choose to have Augmented Reality mode on or off (uses your phone camera to place the Pokemon in your surroundings) There’s a convenient AR swipe button at the top right to turn off and on. A poke-ball should be floating in front of you. You can flick it at the Pokemon and if it connects, you’ll attempt to catch it! Think Safari mode in a standard Pokemon game
2. Are there any tricks to catching Pokemon?
Yes! If you hold the poke-ball, you’ll notice the Pokemon has a green(easiest) or yellow or orange or red (hardest) circle around them that cycles from large to small. The smaller the circle, the better your chances of catching the Pokemon.Â
You can also continually swirl the ball to create a curve throw in the direction that you’re rotating. So if you’re rotating clockwise, the ball will curve right.
Accuracy is also a factor! You’ll notice if the poke-ball lands directly, you’ll get “nice” “great” or “excellent” experience bonuses
There are also Razberries from Poke-Stops that you can feed to a Pokemon to increase your catching chance on your next throw! It says next throw, but what it really means is the next time you hit the Pokemon with a poke-ball!Â
Besides Pokeballs, there are Great Balls and Ultra Balls confirmed in the game to catch even stronger pokemon!
3. Now I’ve caught the Pokemon, how do I make it stronger?
Good job! For catching the Pokemon, you should receive 100 Stardust, some EXP, and 3 Pokemon Candies of that Pokemon. (IE a Pidgey will give you 3 Pidgey Candies, An evolved form of a Pokemon will give you their basic form candies. IE a Pidgeotto will still give you 3 Pidgey Candies)
Each Pokemon has a CP or Combat Points which is their strength. To increase CP, tap the Pokemon you’d like to strengthen and you’ll notice a large POWER UP button with a Stardust cost and Candy Cost. If you can fill those costs, you can up your CP meter. Once your CP Meter is maxed, the CP of that Pokemon wont go any higher until your trainer level also increases!
4. Wait, you just said I also need candies to evolve?
Yes I did! Each Pokemon with an evolved form has a candy cost to evolve. Pidgey requires 12 Pidgey Candies to evolve into a Pidgeotto, and then another 50 Pidgey Candies to evolve into a Pidgeot!
So each Pokemon you catch will give you 3 candies. If you like, you can also Transfer any Pokemon to Professor Willow for an additional candy! So each Pokemon will provide 4 candy total, but it’s irreversible, so be sure you don’t want that Pokemon you’re transferring!
If you look at the picture from Q3, you see that EVOLVE has a price of 12 and I have 28 Pidgey Candies on hand.
5. How do I get more Stardust?
There are three ways to get stardust! 1. Catch more pokemon! You’ll get 100 stardust per pokemon you catch, 2. Hatch some eggs!  3. Control gyms for a daily Stardust/Coin bonus!
6. How do I get and hatch an egg?
You’ll eventually come across eggs at Poke-Stops and there are three different kinds. 2km, 5km, and 10km eggs. Your character comes equipped with an eternal Incubator that has infinite uses as well! You can hold up to 9 eggs at one time
Go to your Pokemon tab and at the top, you should have an Eggs tab. Swipe or tap to the tab and all of your eggs will be shown.Â
Tap an egg and hit “Start Incubation”
You’ll get an option to place it in any open incubator you have. You can purchase more from the store at 150 coins each for a 3-time use incubator.Â
Here’s the crappy part. As of launch, your PokemonGO app only records distance traveled while the app is open. Which is a HUGE battery drain. Hopefully they change this in the future.Â
Once you’ve walked the requisite distance, your egg will hatch and you’ll get a Pokemon from it! Also quite a bit of stardust (1000ish for 2km, more for longer distance eggs) and 10-15 candies of that Pokemon!Â
7. If I have multiple incubators going, will they all accumulate distance?
Yep! So you should get those eggs in incubators ASAP!
8. So … how do gyms work?
First, get to level 5. Once you do, you’ll be prompted to pick a team. Team Instinct (Yellow), Team Mystic (Blue), or Team Valor (Red) Once you pick, you’re stuck! so choose wisely!  *coughINSTINCTcough*
If you come across an empty gym, you can place a Pokemon that is at FULL HP there. If has taken any damage, it cannot be placed in a gym. Be careful though! Once it is placed, it cannot be leveled up, evolved, or transferred or anything else until it has been defeated.Â
9. What about an enemy gym?
An enemy gym will be any gym that’s not your team’s color. So since I’m Team Instinct, all Red (Valor) and Blue (Mystic) gyms are enemy gyms. An enemy gym will have at least one Pokemon defending it with a certain number of Prestige points as well. You can take 6 of your Pokemon in an attempt to defeat all the Pokemon at a gym. You can also team battle if you’re training with your friends to work together to take down a gym.
10. How does combat work?
Combat in PokemonGO is pretty simple. You can only fight in gyms and it’s a pretty quick experience. ATTACK TYPE MATTERS. Using a water move on a fire Pokemon will be SUPER EFFECTIVE
In an enemy gym, you’ll set your lineup of 6 Pokemon to come out in order, while the enemy gym will bring out Pokemon from lowest CP to highest CP. Combat is a tap/swipe game. If you bring up a Pokemon’s stat page, you’ll notice that everyone has two moves. A basic attack and a special attack.Â
Every time you tap, you’ll perform a basic attack. every time you tap and hold, you’ll perform a special attack. However, you need to build up energy to use a special attack. Under your Pokemon’s HP bar, you’ll notice a small bar that fills up with each basic attack. Once a bar is filled (there might be multiple) then you can use a special attack.Â
You can also dodge enemy attacks by swiping left or right. Your pokemon will attempt to dodge out of the way. You can’t avoid special attacks though!Â
DONT SPAM THE APP BY TAPPING A MILLION TIMES. In beta, there was a huge bug where if you tapped a bunch of times without letting the app catch up, the opponent’s Pokemon would get stuck at 1 hp and keep attacking all of your Pokemon. Honestly, just wait until the animation is close to finished before tapping again and you should be fine and still do the same amount of damage.Â
11. How do I take over a gym?
Once you’ve defeated all of the gym’s Pokemon (or been defeated) you’ll come to a end battle screen that will tell you how much EXP you earned and how much Gym Prestige you’ve lowered. If you managed to lower the Prestige all the way to zero, then you’ve defeated the gym and can place your own Pokemon there now! You might need to defeat the same team multiple times to lower their prestige all the way to zero.Â
12. What about a friendly gym?
A friendly gym can be trained to increase prestige! If there is a slot for more Pokemon, you can also add one of your Pokemon like you would add to an empty gym! If you look at the top of the gym, under the name, there should be a Crown for the highest CP Pokemon and some dots next to the crown. If any of those dots are blank/empty, then you can add a Pokemon! If not, that means they’re full, but you can train a gym to a higher prestige level so that it can hold more Pokemon!
13. How do I train a Gym?
You can only train at friendly gyms to increase their prestige level! You get to choose ONE Pokemon to fight all the Pokemon at the friendly gym. You can definitely choose to stomp that gym with a Pokemon with a MUCH higher CP, but you wont gain much in Prestige.Â
The real trick is to take a lower CP Pokemon and defeat as many Pokemon as you can! Even if the Pokemon is only one CP lower, it qualifies for full prestige benefits (i think it’s 500 per Pokemon you defeat of a higher CP) while a much higher CP Pokemon will only net like 100 prestige or less.Â
14. So how does having a Gym get me Stardust?
If you go to the shop, the top right has a “Defense” bonus that can be activated once every 21 hours. For each pokemon you have that is currently defending a gym, you gain 500 Stardust and 10 coins for a maximum of 5000 Stardust and 100 coins! So if you have at least 10 gyms when you collect, you’re receiving the maximum gym benefit!Â
15. My Pokemon fainted! How? Why? What can I do?
Don’t worry! It’s going to happen a lot in this game. If your Pokemon fainted, then it was either in a gym that was just defeated, or you were training and it couldn’t go the distance and beat all the Pokemon at the gym. If the Pokemon is at 0 hp, you can spend a Revive or Max Revive on it to give it HP then top the Pokemon off with Potions/Super Potions/Max Potions etc.Â
If you don’t have any more revives, you can spend stardust to level it up just a teeny bit and give it a few HP so that you can spend potions on it.Â
This is the ONLY way to heal a Pokemon! There are no PokeCenters or anything else. You just have to keep collecting potions and what not.Â
16. My Item/Pokemon bag is full! What do I do?
You can purchase a 50 slot upgrade for either Item or Pokemon bag at 200 coins each (pricey!) or you can go to your items page and start throwing away excess things. You probably realistically only need 100 pokeballs at any given point because you’ll get tons back as you hit Poke-Stops
17. What is the Nearby Tab and what does it mean?
Remember in the show they used to do “WHO’S THAT POKEMON?” This is kind of like that! The nearby tab will show you any (but not all) pokemon that are nearby! If you haven’t seen them yet, you’ll only see the silhouette, but once you’ve at least seen it, the silhouette will fill to show you the pokemon!Â
18. What are the multiple paw prints?
Each paw print represents distance away from you (at least it did in the beta, but I’m pretty sure it’s equivalent) The less paw prints, the closer they are.Â
In the nearby tab, you can select a specific Pokemon to keep track of so that you can tell if you’re going closer or farther away from them. Usually once you’re within 1 paw print, they’ll pop up on your screen.Â
19. What does the compass button do?
Hitting the compass button will orient the map to north or south and will toggle between the two.Â
20. Is spending money worth it?
Honestly, I’ve already spent 10 dollars on just Lucky Eggs and Incubators and I’m level 10 after about 2 hours of actual play time. Lucky Eggs double your EXP and whenever you unlock a pokedex entry, it’s normally 500 EXP plus 100 catching EXP plus any extra bonuses from a Nice Throw or a Curve throw. So each new Pokemon I get ends up being around 1300 EXP, which lets me level SUPER FAST. Each egg that hatches is also 1000 EXP at least so that gets doubled as well. Having lots of incubators is also always super useful.Â
Whew! Okay! That should be pretty good for any basic questions people might have about this game!Â
If I neglected to cover something, please let me know! Throw it in my ask or hit me up on twitter @MyLifeAsJoeKim and I’ll answer ASAP!Â
Are there any more questions?Â
