Requirements

• iPhone
• Mac OS X device (ie: macbook)

Disclaimer:

Following this guide is against Niantic’s guidelines and you risk getting banned. It’s only intended for people unable to play the game for whatever reason. So far I’ve heard cases of people being soft banned. (blocked for a few hours)

Overview

The whole process distills down to 4 simple steps:

Step 1

Plot your route on google maps. Here’s a sample route of Santa Monica pier.

We want the route to simulate a realistic walk. The route will be replayed in an infinite loop, so ensure your start location is next to your end location. Sudden teleportation is a bit of a red flag.

Copy the url address of your google maps.

Step 2

Visit Maps to GPX and convert your predefined Google Maps route into a GPX file.

Copy your Google Maps URL into the input box. Ensure the following boxes are checked:

• Xcode for Apple
• Simulate Travel Duration

Make sure you select a reasonable time duration as if you were completing the route on foot and hit the submit button! Remember where you saved the GPX file, you will need it in the next step.

Step 3

This is the step that scares off most people as it involves opening Apple’s Xcode IDE. Fear not, this guide requires zero coding.

• First install Xcode if you don’t already have it. It is free on the app store. Note that is a large download (3.8 gigs at the time of this writing) and may take awhile.
• Create a new project and select “Single View Application” as your template.

• Fill out your project info in the subsequent form

• Make sure “Devices” is set to iPhone. Choose any folder to save the project to your disk.

The next screen will be your project view:

• Make sure your iPhone is connected and selected as the target device.
• Hit the “play” button to build and deploy your empty app to your phone. Almost there!
• If this is your first time using Xcode, you will be asked to associate it with your Apple ID and update your phone settings to “trust” your Macbook. Simply follow the prompts. Some steps may require you to unplug and reconnect your iPhone cable.
• After you hit the deploy button, you should see a blank page on your iPhone. The last step is to import your GPX file from Step 2.

Click the navigation icon button and “Add GPX file to Project”. Import your previously generated GPX file. I suggest you rename it to something more readable, ie: “SantaMonicaPierWalk.gpx”

Step 4

The final step! Click the navigation icon again and select the route you just added.

As soon you select the route, your phone will start spoofing the location of the route and simulate walking over the time duration you specified. Open up the Pokemon Go app and you should see your trainer moving on his/her own! Ensure that you start your route spoofing BEFORE opening Pokemon Go. Otherwise you will look seem like you suddenly teleported to the game servers.

Party Time!

If you found this guide useful, please share! Check out our guides too.

Originally published at www.pokemongoprotips.com on July 20, 2016.

Step by Step Guide on How to Spoof Geolocation on the Iphone Safely was originally published in Pokemon Go Tactics on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before we answer the question, let’s take a look at the all powerful CP (combat power) stat.

All pokemon have a max CP value which is determined by your species and trainer level. When you capture a wild pokemon, it gets a random CP value somewhere between 10 and this max value.

The semi circle above the pokemon shows how close it is to its current max CP potential. If you catch a wild pokemon that’s already near its max CP potential (like this Rhydon example), then the cost of powering up the pokemon to its max CP is relatively low.

Key Definitions:

• Powering Up a pokemon consumes increasing amounts of stardust and a small amount of candy. The pokemon gets a small boost to CP and HP. The amount of CP gained is intrinsic to the pokemon species CP tier.
• Evolving a pokemon consumes a large amount of candies (typically 25, 50 or 100). This transforms your pokemon to its next stage and is typically accompanied with a large increase in CP. An evolved pokemon will have the same % CP Progress as before it was evolved. Check the evolution chart to see all the possible evolution stages.

General strategy

Keep your highest CP pokemon of that species and trade in the rest for candy, but there are a couple of other important considerations:

• Evolving can change your pokemon’s attack skills. Opt to evolve your pokemon to its final stage before investing Stardust into powering up.
• Every time you level up, you increase the max CP of all your pokemon. This means in a few levels from now, you’ll likely find a wild pokemon with a much higher CP, precluding the need to power up your current pokemon. I recommend waiting until you’re higher level and focused on competing in gyms before spending your hard earned Stardust on powering up.
• Every trainer level adds 2 new potential “power up” levels to all your pokemon.

To paraphrase it simply:

• Don’t power up or evolve your pokemon until you’re ready to get serious about gym competition
• Otherwise, evolve first before powering up.

Conflicting Theories

There’s a couple of conflicting theories out there I was interested in testing out:

• Powering up a pokemon before evolving it will lead to a higher max CP. This appears to be false. My experiment consisted of 2 sets of identical pokemon: Geodude and Machop. The first pokemon in the set was evolved first then powered up, the 2nd pokeman was evolved after power up.

Geodude 1 — CP: 54, HP: 19
Geodude 2 — CP: 56, HP: 20

Machop 1 — CP: 72, HP: 27
Machop 2 — CP: 71, HP: 27

• The data shows negligible differences in CP or HP. It also shows CP increased by 2 in one experiment and decreased by 1 in another leading me to believe it’s just caused by small randomization.
• Larger XL sized pokemon have greater CP potential and HP. This also appears to be false. I have powered up 2 arcanines to approximately the same CP. They have the same health and are at the same point on the CP progress meter, yet one if much heavier than the other.

My small sample size isn’t definitive and there’s a randomization factor in play as well making it hard to determine correlation. Please share your results in the comments too!

You might also find my power leveling guide helpful.

Originally published at www.pokemongoprotips.com on July 14, 2016.

When to Power Up or Evolve Your Pokemon? was originally published in Pokemon Go Tactics on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So you’ve just caught your 10th Pidgey and are now inching slowly towards your next trainer level. But now what? Skip the grind! This guide will arm you with techniques to level quickly and efficiently.

This is a more advanced guide. Checkout our Definitive Starter’s Guide if you’re a beginner.

• Why Leveling is Important
• Experience Bombs
• Shop Around

Why leveling is important

Higher level players have an increased chance of encountering rare pokemon, which are just intrinsically more powerful. As your player level increases so does the CP range of your captured pokemon. Consider the following example:

At level 1, your captured Pidgey had a CP (combat power) of 10. At level 10, captured Pidgey will have CP ranging approximately from 10 to 150 — potentially 15X stronger than your first Pidgey.

To succeed in gym battles, you’ll need all the CP you can muster. Motivated yet?

Pro Tips:

• Leveling up also increases your chance of encountering new pokemon, which provides a large 500 XP bonus.
• Maybe hold off on naming your Pidgey and getting attached. You’ll be constantly trading in your older pokemon as you encounter stronger versions of the same species.
• For the same reason as above, save your Stardust until you plan on participating in gym battles.

Experience Bombs

There are a few noteworthy events that grant large xp bonuses: “Capturing a new pokemon” or “Evolving a pokemon” yields 500 XP. Hatching an egg gives 200, 500, or 1000 XP depending on the distance.

Here’s the simple recipe for setting off an Experience Bomb™!

1. Consume a Lucky Egg which provides a 2x multiplier to all experience gained in a 30 minute window.
2. Go HAM! Trigger as many large XP events as you can within the window.
3. Watch your experience spike through the roof. You might hopscotch a couple of levels early on.
4. Walk with extra swagger.

Pro Tips:

• Lucky Eggs are hard to come by. As far as I know, they don’t drop from Poke Stops and are only acquired as rewards for achieving certain levels. Hoard them and use them effectively.
• Fight the urge to evolve your pokemon as soon as you can. Instead delay it so can you evolve multiple pokemon during the same XP multiplier window, each yielding a whopping 1000 xp.
• Evolving pokemon always gives you 500 xp, even if you’ve evolved that species before — so common pokemon are good candidates for multiple evolves.
• Don’t transfer all your common pokemon right away! Stage 1 pokemon are cheaper to evolve than later stages. Evolving a Pidgey requires 12 candies, while evolving a Pidgeotto requires 50 candies. So if I had a budget of 50 candies, I would opt to evolve Pidgey 4 times for a total of 4000 xp, as opposed to evolving Pidgeotto once which would only yield 1000 xp.
• Save all your Incense and Poke Stop Modules. You’ll want to activate these immediately after consuming a Lucky Egg. This will cause pokemon (hopefully new species) to flock to you within your XP multiplier window.
• Poke Modules and Incense effects seem to stack. Maximize your XP gains by using both during this multiplier window.
• Aim for extra pokemon capture bonuses. They add up are also affected by the Lucky Egg.
• Attacking gyms also provide decent XP, even if you don’t defeat all the members. Have a stock pile of Potions and Revives ready so you can continuously participate in gym battles during the multiplier window.
• You likely have picked up additional Egg Incubators from Poke Stops. Group eggs with same distance requirements together so they hatch at the same time. Each hatched egg will give you 400 XP during the multiplier window. Imagine what an army of incubators can do.

Shop Around

Many people will call me crazy for suggesting buying items from the shop with cold hard cash. Well they’re not wrong… I’m running around the park at night flashing my phone like I’m exorcising. If you’re willing to spend money, a little can go a long way.

1) Buy Lucky Eggs. The entire power leveling strategy hinges on these and they’re hard to come by. Here’s the shop prices:

• 1 Lucky Egg — 80 coins
• 8 Lucky Eggs — 500 coins (62.5 coins per egg)
• 25 Lucky Eggs — 1250 coins (50 coins per egg)

2) Buy enough Egg Incubators so that you have 9 total.
Pokemon Eggs are a common drop and you can only carry 9 at a time. Egg Incubators can only be bought one at a time for 150 coins.

Checkout our comprehensive starter’s guide.

This guide was originally published on www.pokemongoprotips.com

The Definitive Guide to Power Leveling for Pokémon Go was originally published in Pokemon Go Tactics on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The world of Pokémon Go can be daunting for the uninitiated. This guide aims to clear the mystery around a lot of the game mechanics and show you how to level efficiently… so soak up the valuable insights and maximize your trainer potential! Let’s GO!

Quick Links

Hidden Secret — Unlock Pikachu Right Away

World Map View

• Poke Stops
• Pokemon
• Gyms

Pokemon Crash Course

• Pokemon Stats Explained
• Catch Them All
• Powering Up
• Incubation

Tips for Leveling Efficiently

Is the Server Down?

Unlock Pikachu

If you have a soft spot for a certain yellow rodent, ignore the initial 3 starter pokemon presented to you at the beginning of the tutorial. Instead walk around for a few minutes until a pikachu appears. Click on him to initiate capture.

Pro Tips:

• Your starter pokemon choice isn’t important except for sentimental value. Any pokemon can be caught in the wild later.
• Catch as many pokemon as you can even if they’re duplicates. It will give you experience and Stardust, which is used to power up your pokemon.
• Aim to level quickly. The higher your character level, the more powerful and rare the pokemon you can catch.
• Don’t spend any Stardust just yet. Hold off on upgrading any pokemon until you’re ready to participate in gym battles (level 5+)

World Map View

You’ll spend the majority of the time navigating the world map view so here’s a quick summary of what you’ll encounter:

Poke Stops

These are stationary landmarks that activate when you are physically within 40 meters. Swipe the disk to get more poke balls and other random items.

Pro Tips:

• Poke Stops replenish every 5 minutes and have unlimited supplies. They also give experience so visit often!
• Install a Poke Stop module to attract wild Pokemon to the Poke Stop for 30 minutes. This is especially effective if you have a Poke Stop near your home or work.
• Poke Stops with purple confetti around it means someone already placed a Poke Stop Module. Go and reap the benefits.
• You don’t have to manually touch all the items that the Poke Stop spits out. If you simply leave the screen after they appear, they will automatically be added to your inventory.

Pokemon

Pokemon are creatures that can be captured and commanded by trainers. So far there are 138 “generation 1” pokemon that are available in game. Most pokemon have biome affinities. ie: you’re most likely to find Krabby near the beach. Try visiting city, rural, beach areas to discover more pokemon! Poison type pokemon also tend to come out at night.

Gyms

These are battle arenas where teams will fight for glory and rewards. You won’t be able to participate in gyms until you reach level 5 so ignore these for now.

Pokemon Crash Course

And now for the juicy parts…

Pokemon Stats

• Type describes the attributes of a pokemon. This will play a huge role in battle strategy later in the game. ie: water pokemon are very effective against fire pokemon as you’d expect.
• CP stands for Combat Power. It determines how much damage your pokemon’s attack will do
• HP stands for Hit Points. The higher the HP, the more damage your pokemon can take
• Size varies from XS to XL. This doesn’t seem to have effect in game yet.
• Weight and Height are also attributes that don’t seem to have an effect in game yet.

Catch Them All

Tap the bottom right icon to bring up a menu of nearby Pokemon. Beneath each pokemon icon will display 0–3 footprints, with 3 footprints being the furthest away. If a pokemon has 0 footprints you can click on it to make it immediately visible on the world map and initiate capture.

In capture mode, a colored ring will appear around the pokemon. The color will vary between green and red with red being difficult to capture. Red means the pokemon will have a higher chance of breaking out of the poke ball. If a pokemon escapes you will either have another chance to catch them right away or they disappear.

Pro Tips:

• Use the nearby map to do a quick scan of which Pokemon are available for immediate capture. They don’t always show up right away on the world map.
• You can “track” a specific pokemon by clicking on its image in the Nearby window. Slowly spin until you see the tracker window pulsate green. Then you know you’re facing the right direction.
• Turn off AR (augmented reality) mode by clicking the upper right switch in capture mode. The game seems to crash to less and you also stretch your battery life further.
• Turning off AR also makes it easier to capture pokemon as it’s always front and center
• Don’t be stingy with poke balls — they are easy to come by. Strive for additional XP bonus by accurately landing the poke ball within the colored ring.
• Holding down the poke ball will shrink the colored capture ring. If you throw the poke ball when the ring is at its smallest area, you maximize your change of capturing the pokemon.
• If a pokemon has a green capture circle, there’s no real point to shrinking the capture circle to improve your chance of capture. Instead, keep the circle large which makes it easier to achieve the XP bonus of landing the poke ball within the capture circle.
• If a pokemon is difficult to capture. Feed it berries (dropped at Poke Stops) to greatly improve your capture success rate

Powering Up

You can spend Stardust and Candies to increase the HP and CP stats of your pokemon.

• Power Up requires 1 Candy and varying amounts of Stardust. This increases CP and HP by a small amount.
• Evolve requires a lot of Candies and will cause your pokemon to evolve into a stronger pokemon and increase CP and HP by a large amount. It will also cause the pokemon to learn new abilities.

The general strategy is to trade in duplicates of pokemon for Candies, which are then used to power up or evolve your pokemon. When trading in duplicates, keep the one with the higher CP. If the CP is comparable, then keep the on with more HP.

Pro Tips:

• Sort your pokemon alphabetically to easily scan for duplicate pokemon that can be traded in.
• Use the nearby map to do a quick scan of which Pokemon are available for immediate capture. They don’t always show up right away on the world map.
• Powering Up before or after Evolving doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.
• Try to Evolve before Powering Up. This way if your pokemon learns a skill you don’t want, you can invest in another pokemon of the same species instead.

Incubation

Occasionally you will receive Eggs from Poke Stops. Eggs are marked with a distance 2–10 km, which means the distance you have to walk during incubation for the egg to hatch. Eggs that require longer distances to hatch tend to be more powerful and rare pokemon. They’re also available for purchase from the shop.

Here’s a handy table of which pokemon to expect from hatching eggs:

You start out with an infinite use incubator. To incubate an egg, navigate to your pokemon collection and swipe left to the EGGS tab. Poke Stops will also occasionally drop 3-time use incubators allowing you to incubate multiple eggs at the same time!

Pro Tips:

• Leave the app on while you’re driving. Driving at low speeds seems to count towards the incubation distance. Do not drive and play at the same time!
• Successfully hatching an egg gives you a large XP bonus (100 xp per km). Try to time multiple eggs to hatch at the same time and use a “Lucky Egg” to double your XP.

Tips for Leveling Efficiently

• Don’t forget to use your items. Incense and Poke Stop Modules attract pokemons.
• You get massive 500 xp bonus for capturing new pokemon. Travel to different biomes to increase your chances of encountering new pokemon.
• Achievements and evolving pokemon also give you large 500 xp bonuses.
• Use Lucky Eggs to double your XP for 30 minutes. Stack them with large XP bonuses to level quickly.
• Use the battery save option and place your phone facing down. This will turn off the screen but you will still receive alerts in game.
• Don’t get attached to your pokemon. As you level up, you will constantly be finding stronger versions of the same pokemon and trading in your old ones.

Is the Server Down?

The game developers severely under estimated the popularity of this game, leading to constant game crashes and blackout periods. It will hopefully be resolved soon but in the meantime, you can monitor game server status here:

http://cmmcd.com/PokemonGo

Pro Tips:

• Capturing a pokemon will often result in the game hanging and happens in both iOS and Android versions. It’s best to force restart the game.
• Disable AR mode as mentioned above. Not only does it decrease the chance of the game freezing, it also makes catching pokemon easier as the pokemon is always dead center in front of you.
• Retry logging in a few times. I’ve seen the guy next to me playing while I couldn’t login.
• Take a deep breath and do something else. There are other things in life (although probably less important).

Checkout our guide on power leveling.

This guide was originally published on www.pokemongoprotips.com

The Definitive Starter’s Guide for Pokémon Go: A Comprehensive Introduction was originally published in Pokemon Go Tactics on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.