pokemon | borysSNORC ™

If you usually tune into this blog for travel updates, you will just have to ignore a couple of posts… rest assured, the travel will be back shortly! 😀

I have been playing Pokemon Go since coming back from Barcelona and have to say it is sure keeping me active. I have walked nearly 300kms (time that I undoubtedly would have couched) in the last couple of months, and that’s nothing to sneeze at for a chronically pained person… pain levels are through the roof of course, but an extra bonus, I’m down a few kilos. Go me.

Anyway, we have a little Facebook group chatting about Pokemon Go, called the Magikarp Appreciation Society, and I said I would post up some experiences with egg hatchings because most of us in the group have some level of OCD/compulsive behaviour going on in varying degrees 😉 and the randomness of egg hatchings is driving some of us crazy!

I decided to try and hatch whole batches of the same egg to try to not keep getting ‘random’ shit hatches. It felt like every 5km egg I was hatching was a silly Psyduck or a Polliway, and every every single time I hatched a 2km egg it was undoubtedly a Zubat or a Weedle, and of course all of those are everywhere! Now I can’t really back that up with empirical evidence, because I wasn’t writing them down, but it certainly felt like every hatched 2km or 5km egg was completely common rubbish. So I thought trying to hatch a bunch of the same kms eggs together was worth a crack (pun intended).

The first clutch of the same eggs I managed to get together were 5km eggs… Took a little while to get most of the screen full of 5km eggs, but by walking off the 2km ones, and leaving the 5km ones behind, I eventually got what I was hoping for. It seems 10km eggs are hard to come by in Pokestops hereabouts. I picked up a bunch of incubators from The Shop, and off I went. Results were:

At this point, I was pretty happy with my wash – eight 5km eggs hatched and every single one of them a different creature. Plenty of candy and no Psyducks or Polliwags in sight! If this works, and eight eggs reliably ends up with eight different creatures – I wanted to work my way into having a whole page of 10km eggs to try and get something other than another common-as-all-giddy-up-annoying-as-fuck Pinsir from a 10km egg!

So I tried it again… with eggs as per image to the left. 10km being held over to hopefully one day get a screen full of them. Results were, again, pretty good… some the same as last time, but importantly, all eight were different creatures.

This seemed to be working, so I kept up with the mass evolvings rather than just walking them off sporadically or starting them out of time with each other. The next batch, I only had six 5km eggs (as I was hoarding 2kms and 10km ones so I could try and do similar mass evolvings…

As you can see, this batch of four sadly hatched two Psyducks, which blows my theory that the game isn’t mean enough to throw up multiples of the same creature in a mass egg hatching. Though I have vague recollections of having to stop part way setting these going in order to fetch another incubator from The Shop, and was doing it in the car while Mr K was driving, so it’s possible that the last Psyduck wasn’t in the batch but rather 100-200m behind the others, but popped up at the same time because the in-game GPS and pedometer is a bit fickle. I’ve notice big discrepancies between what my Apple Watch says I have walked compare to what the game thinks I have walked… Watch will say 2.2kms walked, game will show only 1.8kms walked..? Go figure, they’re both running off the same phone.

The next batch was all different again – and this time I know they were set going in one hit at home…

So by now I am sitting on three 10kms eggs waiting to get a whole batch, and a few 2km eggs that I thought I’d try and get going together. I’d say about 75-80% of eggs I pick up are 5km eggs, which will make getting eight or nine 10km eggs quite a lengthy process. The first 2km batch looked like this:

Charmander and a bunch of candy – very cool; Magikarp candy never goes to waste, and the rest is what I usually see when I hatch a 2km egg one at a time. Second batch of 2km eggs yielded pretty much the same deal, one ‘coo’ hatch and rubbish:

I have run two more batches of 2km eggs, and each time got one ‘good’ Pokemon – another Charmander and a Pikachu – each of which hatched along with three really common ones: Pidgey, Zubat, Weedle or Caterpie (sorry, I stopped screen-grabbing the commons because I am sick to death of goddamn Weedles!). So far, I feel that hatching in batches is definitely worthwhile. The bigger the batch, the higher likelihood of getting a few decent egg hatches in one hit.

After that I had enough for another batch of 5km eggs… again, all different.

So overall, my very unscientific, completely subjective user reinforced opinion is that it is much better to hatch a bunch of eggs together than to walk off just one at a time, or to walk off a few that have been set going at different times to avoid Zubat overload. However, yale has rightly pointed out that this could just be a really obvious case of subjective user confirmation bias. 🙂 So take it with a grain of salt.

Oh, and I will totally update this if I manage to get a handful of 10km eggs together to hatch all at once… I have four so far.

Update 11th Sept…

I am currently sitting on five 10km eggs and still trying to fill a screen full of them to evolve en masse. It’s certainly taking quite a while to get there with the 2km and 10km eggs hardly ever coming from the Pokestops.

I’ve been walking off smaller batches of three and four 5km eggs while I slowly accrue 10km ones, and some singular 2km eggs (which have yielded largely Weedles, Rattatas, Zubats, but also one Squirtle and one Pikachu).

The more recent 5km batches have spat out the following:

Very disappointing to see the double Krabby hatch – completely blows my theory that the multiples will be different. I guess they are ‘predominantly’ providing different monsters if hatched in batches, but not always… still, now I know I could do all this only to hatch a bunch of Scythers and Pinsirs when I get all the 10km eggs going. :/