Pokemon Go Tips, Tricks and Stats

Maximising XP/minute

Whether you buy mountains of lucky eggs, or only use those you are given on level-up, maximising the XP/minute when using your lucky eggs is a valuable exercise. In short, Pidgey Spamming is great, but the table below shows other valuable insights.

The table shows the average time in seconds required to complete an action in Pokemon Go relative to the XP awarded. The times are averages of multiple runs. The tests were conducted on an S7 in patch 0.43.4 while connected to an uncongested 4G network with no perceptible lag.

The first three rows show that catching Pokemon yields pretty poor XP/minute. These are best case scenarios for catching Pokemon; no lag, and a single successful throw. Any missed throw or escape will make the average XP/min plummet. We'd encourage trainers not to waste time catching Pokemon whilst under the influence of a lucky egg if they still have normal eggs to hatch or Pokemon to evolve.

An important insight is that curveballs don't just increase the total XP gained, but relative to the additional time required to "spin up" the ball, they generate more XP/minute than catching a Pokemon itself. The time taken to throw a curve ball relative to a normal "flick" will vary from trainer to trainer, but we'd encourage all trainers to get proficient at curving.

The next three rows tell the opposite story. Evolving a Pokemon yields a reasonable amount of XP/minute, but needing to transfer Pokemon for Candy to maintain evolution spam hurts the XP/minute materially. We've assumed that the Pokemon being evolved has an effective evolve price before transfer of 11 Candy (e.g. Pidgey), therefore the expected XP of transferring is 500/11 =~ 45, not enough to compensate for the time cost of transferring. It would be better to wait a little longer until you have enough Pokemon to evolve continuously without the need to transfer the evolutions.

Finally, hatching a Pokemon, from tapping on the Egg, to getting back out to the map screen, takes only 11.4 seconds. The XP/minute gained, even for a 5km Egg far exceeds that of Pidgey Spamming. In light of this, PA recommends an "XP Batching" strategy.

XP Batching

If your access to lucky eggs is not infinite, try to never use a lucky Egg without having 9 normal Eggs hatch within in the double XP effect. This means using your infinite (orange) incubator to repeatedly hatch 2km Eggs as you play until you have nothing but 5km and 10km Eggs in your inventory. Then put all 10km Eggs in incubators. Walk 5km further. Put all 5km Eggs in incubators. Approximately 4.5km later, pop your lucky Egg and begin Pidgey spamming while you walk. Your Pidgey Spam will be interrupted by 9 Eggs hatching for +9000XP in approximately 1:40s.

How many 10km Eggs a trainer receives will be luck based, but assuming even only one, XP batching with Egg Hatching is 6% better than just Pidgey Spam alone. This is also an optimistic assessment of Pidgey Spam. Over half an hour, a trainer is likely to miss-click or suffer some lag and the benefits of XP Batching with Eggs is likely higher than 10%.

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