Pokémon fever has reached a new pitch with the release of Koei Tecmo’s Pokopia, a perfect meeting of their previous game Dragon Quest Builders, Nintendo’s own Animal Crossing, and the eternal colossus Minecraft. Social media is overflowing with players showing off their ridiculously intricate cities after just a few days, and it can be easy to feel like you’re falling behind on your own city. Never fear! These tips and tricks will aid you whether you’re blasting through with Crobat speed or taking it at your own pace like Slowpoke.
Take Advantage of the Day Reset Time For Fast Construction
Like Animal Crossing, Pokopia operates on a real-time 24-hour cycle of day and night. If you log in at 7 PM in your own time zone, it’s 7 PM in the world of the game, and so on. However, the game doesn’t reset the day at midnight – it resets at 5 AM local time. This means that right at 5 AM, daily items in the shop will reset, daily challenges on the PC reset, and most importantly, any buildings with a time gate of “Tomorrow” will finish construction. Because construction occupies your Pokémon, usually 4-8 of them, for its entire duration, you’ll want them to spend the least amount of time on construction possible. For instance, Pokémon Centers have a time gate of Tomorrow during construction. If you start construction at noon, they’re going to be occupied for the next 17 hours and unavailable for other tasks. Always begin construction as the last thing you do at night before shutting off the game! If you turn off the game at midnight and set everyone to construction right before that, they’ll finish the same exact task with only 5 hours of being occupied.
Steal A House with Drifloon!
Early on in Pokopia, you likely aren’t going to have the right materials in the large amounts you’ll need to construct an entire house (whether it’s for you or your Pokémon). Sure, there’s the classic Dirt Hut, but why settle for the poor mon’s house? Once players unlock Drifloon and set up their habitat, they’ll be able to fly to visit a Dream Island by presenting them with a Poke Doll. Dream Islands are procedurally generated from a seed determined by which doll is presented and are never the same on two different days. Each Dream Island will have a few rare finds, a lot of raw materials, and a handful of fully finished buildings. These do not belong to anyone and are yours for the taking! Simply use Rock Smash to tear down the building from top to bottom and suck up the cubes. Head back to your main island and rebuild the house from its components! It’s a little tedious and can take a few minutes, but especially in the early game, it’s much faster than hunting down such a large amount of materials. Once you meet Graveler and obtain the Rollout ability, it’ll become 10 times faster to steal houses with this method.
Build An Outdoor House for Nature Loving Pokémon
If you’re like me, you may feel guilty cramming some types of Pokémon into stuffy houses and out of nature where they thrive. This has been true especially for my grass and bug types that seem to be really enjoying flower beds. There is a solution! Pokopia considers fences to be walls as well, so by placing a completely enclosed fenced-in area around an outdoor habitat and adding at least one gate as well as three pieces of furniture, you can transform a small park into a house! This also means you can play with water features, caves, trees, and other outdoor items and habitats while fulfilling every Pokémon’s eventual desire for a homestead.
Steal Cool Late Game Items From The Developers Themselves
The developers of Pokopia at Koei Tecmo and Omega Force have been kind enough to create and share a Developer Island, a special Cloud Island that anyone with a Nintendo Switch Online membership can access. First, you’ll need to purchase the Mysterious Goggles at the PC for a measly 100 Pokecoins. Next, open your inventory and put the goggles on. The game will prompt you to enter a code – you’ll want to put in PXQC G03S . Once on the Developer Island, look around the island for any furniture or decoration items that catch your eye. Use the – Button to pull out your camera and snap a picture of it. Make sure that the camera is centered on it and the name of the object is shown at the bottom of the screen. This guarantees the game knows what item is in the image. Once you’ve collected all the pictures you want, head back to your home island and to the Pokémon Center to find a 3D Printer. Using Pokemetal as a resource, you can 3D print anything you’ve taken a picture of! Beware, the Developer Island may contain some spoilers.
Make Crafting Quicker And Simpler With Smart Chest Placement
Players coming from either Dragon Quest Builders or Minecraft have likely already organized and labeled a dozen chests in a crafting area. Regardless, there’s a lot you can do to make crafting painless and quick. First, purchase the first pack upgrade from the PC to get an extra 10 slots in a hotbar at the bottom of your pack. Move all of your base crafting materials to those spaces – this way, whenever you pick up a random stick or vine, it’ll sort directly into its stack but stay out of the way of the items in your proper pack. Next, place a large chest (or two small chests) such that it is directly touching your crafting bench. Fill that chest with your excess base crafting materials like stone, lumber, glow mushrooms etc. that won’t fit in your hotbar. Whenever you craft at a bench that is directly touching a chest, it is able to pull resources from that chest without you doing any extra work. For a bonus, putting a crafting bench in a house pulls resources from any chest anywhere in the house, so if you’re so moved, you can create an enclosed crafting hut with access to all your materials at once.
Miscellaneous Tips & Tricks
To cap it off, here’s a few simple tips to keep in mind while exploring Pokopia:
- You can quickly harvest vegetables using Cut. Be careful, as using cut again after harvesting will hurt the plants.
- Electric Pokémon supply electricity – before you have a large electric grid, having an Electric Pokémon follow you to power up one machine at a time will do the trick.
- You can create an infinite water source for water features by making a 4×4 indent in the ground full of water and using Wooper’s Suck Up Liquids ability.
- Using honey at a Pokemon’s home will instantly call them there.
- Relocating Pokémon from their starting habitats to a house allows the habitat to spawn a new Pokémon and ups the chances of getting a rare one.
- If you don’t like the sight of garish electrical wires running everywhere, you can run them underground, and they still work.
- Rarer items spawn more frequently on Sundays.
Any tips or tricks to share that we missed? Let us know in the comments!
