Poké Pelago GuideIntroductionAfter the third trial with Kiawe in the sweltering Wela Volcano Park, you and your party happily walk back down to Route 7. Lots of options are available at this point. Perhaps you could save the game and call it a day... or you can walk into the grass to test your newfound power from Firium Z. Before anything, however, you have decided to feed your party some Poké Beans for their hard work in the trial! But it turns out that you're fresh out of Poké Beans, and the number of Beans the Pokémon Center provides is simply insufficient as your party's size just keeps growing. Thankfully, a man named Mohn walks up to you, sees your new Charizard Glide, and invites you to his Poké Pelago! This place is nothing like one of those arduous tutorials for beginners. It isn't something like Festival Plaza where you are stuck with the host until you spend a considerable amount of time learning new things. As soon as you arrive to Poké Pelago with Mohn, you will quickly learn what a wonderful place it is - for both you and your party! What is it about?Poké Pelago consists of 5 islands: Isle Abeens, Isle Aplenny, Isle Aphun, Isle Evelup, and Isle Avue. Once you arrive at the Pelago for the first time, Mohn will assist you in unlocking and upgrading the isles if you have enough Pokémon in your PC and enough Beans. He will also let you exchange rarer beans for plain ones. In this guide, we'll have a look at each of the 5 Isles, explain what they're useful for, and detail how to get the best results from them. Poké Beans will be used as a sort of currency on Poké Pelago. There are 3 kinds of beans. The most common ones are Plain Beans, of which there are 7 variants. Patterned Beans, of which there are also 7 variants, are rarer than plain beans. Finally, there are Rainbow Beans, which have only 1 variant and are the rarest of them all. Patterned Beans can be exchanged for 3 Plain Beans and Rainbow beans can be exchanged for 7 Plain Beans. Each variant of beans has a 255 limit, so the overall limit of how many beans you can hold at once is 1785 Plain Beans, 1785 Patterned Beans, and 255 Rainbow Beans. Beans can be placed in a box on each isle to increase the effect of or shorten the wait on the isle's function. The longevity of the beans' effect depends on how many beans you use and how rare they are. Plain Beans give 20 minutes per bean, Patterned Beans give an hour per bean, and Rainbow Beans give 2 hours per bean. Upon unlocking an isle, you will only be able to put 20 Beans there at once; when an isle reaches level 2 you'll be able to put down 30 beans, and at level 3 you'll be able to put down 50 beans. As mentioned earlier, beans will also be used to unlock and upgrade isles on Poké Pelago. In order to unlock and upgrade islands of Poké Pelago, you need to meet specific requirements of Pokémon in your boxes, as well as paying Mohn a certain fee of plain beans to have them built - it is worth it!
Isle AbeensWhen arriving at the Pelago for the first time, Isle Abeens will be the only available island. Here, you can pick up a sizable sum of beans per day. You collect beans by tapping on the ones that are lying on the grass; if you don't see any on the grass, you can tap the beanstalk to make more beans appear. As you upgrade Isle Abeens, beans will generate quicker, so upgrading Isle Abeens should be one of your highest priorities. Wild Pokémon may appear on Isle Abeens; however, instead of attacking you like wild Pokémon found by walking into tall grass, they'll wait at the island for 12-24 hours and then judge whether they want to join your team or not. You can put beans in the box next to the Beanstalk to make Pokémon more likely to settle with you, which is handy if there is one that you really want. Isle Abeens will always be the best source of Beans, but they can also be obtained at Pokémon Center Cafés by purchasing beverages. While you're working on upgrading the Islands of Poké Pelago, the Pokémon that settle on the island will come in handy for meeting the requirements of Pokémon to upgrade islands. Once the Pelago is fully upgraded, the wild Pokémon lose relevance, since they don't come with better IVs, Egg Moves, their Hidden Abilities, or a higher chance of being Shiny. Isle AplennyThis is where Berries can be grown in Sun and Moon. You start off with 6 spots to grow Berries, but as you upgrade the island, you'll get up to 18 patches and the Berry trees will produce more Berries when they're done. Berries will take between 24 and 72 hours to grow from the Berry to a tree you can harvest from once; after harvesting Berries from a tree, the tree will disappear and you can plant a new Berry in its place. Placing Berries in the crate on this island will cause the growth process to double in speed while the beans are in effect. Optimal usage of beans here would be to put in beans that last for half the time the last tree will grow to full size. Aside from the Berries you'd want depending on your situation in a playthrough of the main game, the ones you should consider farming the most would be the Berries that raise a Pokémon's happiness, at the cost of EV points in a particular stat. Those Berries are Pomeg Berry for decreasing HP EVs, Kelpsy for Attack, Qualot for Defense, Hondew for Special Attack, Grepa for Special Defense, and Tamato for Speed. They can all be found in the Berry pile on Route 10 and they are the only kinds of Berries there. Using these Berries is the most efficient way to reduce EVs on a Pokémon in USM if you make a mistake while EV training. They also help with getting Pokémon that evolve through friendship like Silvally. Always make sure that you never use your last of a kind of Berry, as it is easier to grow more from a Berry with Isle Aplenny than it is to hope to find the one you want from certain trees in Alola. As soon as you pick up Berries under any Berry trees in your journey, it is always a good idea to start planting new Berries. Leppa Berries are very helpful in any part of the playthrough for preserving PP. Start planting Sitrus Berries and Leppa Berries and multiply them, and you may even find yourself not needing Pokémon Centers! Isle AphunHere you can send Pokémon to gather rare items for you by selecting paths of the cave. Upon unlocking the island, they can only be sent down a path where they can find colored Shards and Hard Stones. Upgrading to level 2 means the option of sending them down to look for evolution stones and a path for all three will also be open, and upon upgrading to level 3, they will be able to go down a path where they can search for valuable items, like Comet Shards and Gold Bottle Caps. A trip down the cave will take the group of Pokémon 24 hours, but if beans are placed in the crate, the timer for them to come back will go twice as fast. Putting enough beans to last for 12 hours in the crate right after sending the Pokémon in to explore is a good idea, as that makes them come back at the same time as the beans run out. There are various paths to be explored. Starting from Odd-Shard Hunting, where players won't find interesting items apart from Shards and Revives, new paths will be unlocked as the isle develops. Brilliant-Stone Hunting provides various stones that are needed for evolutions, which can be helpful for players whose Pokémon are struggling to evolve and catch up in the playthrough. Rare-Treasure hunting provides the player with valuable items most of the time, and it sometimes even provides Gold Bottle Cap or fossils that can be revived into a Pokéon! Interesting-Item Hunting is a little bit of everything. It's always a good idea to have Pokémon exploring Isle Aphun, as even if you have maximum money, there's still a chance the Pokémon can find Gold Bottle Caps if you set them to search for Rare Treasures or Interesting Items. Colored Shards can also be exchanged for Bottle Caps in Festival Plaza; a Bottle Cap will cost 30 of 1 type of Shard. Isle EvelupOn this isle, you can send your Pokémon off to train on their own. They can train for experience points or Effort Values depending on the drink you provide to the Pokémon. You select the amount of 30-minute sessions the Pokémon will train there, and each session gives a small amount of points depending on what level Isle Evelup is at. Upon unlocking, the isle will have 6 spots to put your Pokémon on; they can only train for either 1 kind of EVs or Experience Points where 1 session gives 1 EV of the respective stat or 100 exp. At level 2, 6 more spots are unlocked, which can be assigned to different drinks from the first 6 spots and provides 2 EVs or 150 exp per session. At level 3, 6 more spots are unlocked and each session increases by 4 EVs or 300 Exp. Training a Pokémon to have 252 EVs in one stat at level 3 takes 63 sessions, which translates to 31 hours and 30 minutes (15 hours and 45 minutes with beans). If you use vitamins to increase the EVs to 100, you would require 38 sessions, which is 19 hours (9 hours and 30 minutes with beans) to reach 252 EVs. The main draw of the island to use with EV training would perhaps be the convenience of training for more specific EVs than 4, 8, 248, and 252. You can easily calculate how many sessions are required to get the desired EV spread by using this formula: Required Sessions = Target EVs/4. So if you, for example, want a Landorus-T to have 216 EVs, you can use the formula like this: Required Sessions = 216/4 = 54, which means that you'd need 54 sessions of training with the Defense drink to get 216 Defense EVs on the Landorus. It may seem like Isle Evelup is a very slow method of EV training, but it should be noted that the 3DS doesn't even need to be on for the Pokémon on Pelago to train. If you need some Pokémon EV trained but have to go to bed or something, putting the Pokémon you want trained on Isle Evelup is a good idea. Isle AvueLast but not least, there's Isle Avue, which is a hot spring area where you can leave your Pokémon to relax, which increases their friendship. You can also leave Eggs to hatch. Similar to Isle Evelup, the island will have 6 spots for Pokémon upon unlocking and gain 6 more for each upgrade. Leaving the Pokémon relaxing for more than 25 hours, though, will cause them to be overheated, meaning their friendship will be gradually lowered instead of increased. Eggs cannot become overheated, however. Tapping any one of overheated group of Pokémon will restore their condition, and they won't be overheated again until 25 hours have passed from that point. Leaving beans in the box here will make the Pokémon relax more and make Eggs hatch quicker. It is by no means an important island compared to the others and is the most expensive. However, it does have its uses, so if you have already upgraded everything else and you've met the bean and Pokémon requirements, then unlocking and upgrading it would be a good idea. A common strategy on simulators like Pokémon Showdown is to use the move Frustration with minimum friendship as opposed to Return with maximum friendship. This is done to make sure that potential Imposter Dittos will most likely do minimum damage with Frustration. In past generations, this strategy has been difficult to replicate on cartridge, since it there aren't many convenient methods of getting minimum friendship on Pokémon that don't have a base friendship of 0. However, thanks to Isle Avue, giving your Pokémon 0 friendship is effortless, though potentially time consuming, as it will take up to 76 hours for a Pokémon to reach minimum happiness when the isle has been fully upgraded. Tapping on the sprite of a Pokémon gives an indication of its happiness. Depending on how much Isle Avue has developed, the friendship increases much more rapidly. At level 1, friendship increases or decreases every four hours. At level 2, it updates every 2 hours, and at level 3, it updates every hour. Like other Isles, using Poke Beans doubles the speed. As mentioned earlier, Eggs can be put in Isle Avue to hatch. It works like this: Egg cycles will slowly but surely tick down to the point where the Eggs will only require a tap or a step to hatch. When the Eggs have an exclamation point (!) above them, you can choose to tap them to watch them hatch in Poké Pelago or put them back in your PC and hatch them by taking it out and taking a step. This is also perfect for Egg's Shiny Value hatching, as you get Eggs that are 1 step away from hatching without having to risk hatching the Egg when walking around with it. Isle Avue may not be a great method of hatching Eggs on its own, as the time it takes to hatch the Eggs is far more than it takes when riding Tauros around. Here's an optimal way to use it while breeding: first off, you'll have to go to the options menu and set the Party/Box mode to automatic. While collecting Eggs, don't stop talking to the Day-Care girl once you have 5 Eggs in your party; continue collecting Eggs to fill your box up in the PC. When you have as many Eggs as you can fit on Pelago in your boxes, go to Isle Avue and put your Eggs there to hatch. Now, you should in theory hatch 18 Eggs slowly in Pelago, in addition to the 5 Eggs that are being hatched quickly in your party. ConclusionNow that you know a lot about Poké Pelago, go ahead and start picking up beans that grow on Isle Abeens, growing some Berries on Isle Aplenny, sending the Pokémon off to hunt for cool items on Isle Aphun, having them train for experience or EVs on Isle Evelup, or incubating some Eggs on Isle Avue. It is always a good idea to have something running in Poké Pelago, so use it for your good! |