Introduction
I’ve been playing Pokémon Go since 2016. I’ve learned a number of things about the game that aren’t obvious to new players. I thought I’d begin to collect tips, tricks, and descriptions of these more advanced gameplay lessons.
Tips and Tricks
New Pokémon trainers are walked through a number of research tasks that introduce them to basic gameplay. You’re walked through how to catch pokémon, how to throw curve balls etc., but you’re not shown many of the features below. Some of these things came about secretly as methods of testing the app, others were bugs that players came to love and have remained.
~ Quick Catching
Quick catching is a method for skipping the animations/screens that appear after you catch a pokémon. This makes catching several pokémon in a row a lot faster and is useful for things like Community Days. This is a video detailing the quick catch method. It takes practice, but is totally worth it.
~ The Circle Lock
The two circles targeting a pokémon with a pokéball indicate where you have to aim for catching it. The inner circle measures how close to the center of the outer circle you are and rates your throw as “Nice! Great! or Excellent!”. Pokémon Go at its core is a game of statistics and random number generation. Excellent throws give you a higher likelihood of catching the mon.
This is especially important when encountering a Legendary pokémon, generally considered more valuable/useful. You’re unlikely to catch one of these if you can’t land several Excellent throws.
Circle Locking is a technique for freezing the oscillating inner target circle in a location that ensures you achieve the throw rating you want. This video demonstrates the circle locking technique.
~ Task Stacking
Task stacking is pretty simple. When you receive an encounter from a research task in the “Today” tab, you don’t have to catch it. The catch is guaranteed, the pokémon won’t run away. You can feed the pokémon a berry for easier catching or increased candy later and just exit the catch screen. When you return you’ll see a thin orange “Claim Reward” box. Clicking it will return all the encounters sequentially for catching.
As of the time of this writing, it was believed you could stack a total of 100 encounters. This is especially useful for maximizing double candy, stardust or XP event rewards for mon that already have increases in these rewards.