Powering up an account

Summer's here again, and some of you might have friends who belatedly decided to jump on the bandwagon.

But starting now at level one, is it really feasible?

Well, some hardcore (but not insane) gaming should see a new account reach thirty in a month, without spending any money, even though I personally recommend an initial investment in the shop for 2500 coins, all spent on bag-upgrades. Those 600 extra slots are golden.

For this post I'll assume a new player paying for an upgrade from 350 to 950 bag slots. Atleast day one should be spent together with someone already playing at high level.


Day one:

• Create the account
• Get familiar with the interface
• Pick a starter pokemon and activate the buddy
• Move to a spawn cluster with a few pokestops
• Start throwing poke balls left and right
• Spin some stops
• Activate the permanent incubator
• Do save a few potential bubble strategy attackers and defenders and star them up
• Watch the account hit level five and pick a team
• Activate an incense
• Learn one or two routes between clusters
• Activate an incense
• Activate a blue incubator
• Hit level ten (two or three hours into the game) and take a break
• Chat about the game
• Try to push for level 15 and make sure to activate every incense and incubator gained from levelling up
• 100 000 xp in total

Why spend those rewards so early? Well, you want to get a new player into a game that has grinding built into it. It's better to hit level 20 as quickly as possible and rotate through all collected eggs as quickly as possible since the pokemon gained from hatching is determined when you receive the egg and not when you hatch it.

Have the new player become familiar with the appraise interface. End the day by transferring out every pokemon below 82% plus which aren't attractive for power-evolving later on, apart from storing extra cute ones or whatever seems fun to keep.

Don't spend any Lucky Eggs yet.

Week one:

• Daily grind as above
• Spend at least one break using a lure
• Spend one break power-evolving
• Hit a gym a day and collect from one gym daily (sure, if you can get more then why not)
• Learn basic bag management, but don't forget that your game is heavily weighted towards catching pokemon and almost no gym battling
• Spend another break power evolving when you've restocked on pokemon after the first one
• After a week you should hit level 23 with over a third of all experience gained coming from the two power-evolve sessions. Level 24 is doable depending on how well you do on the two power-evolve sessions and how far you fill up your pokedex
• Approximately half a million xp in total

The first week is sweet, because you receive quite a xp-bonus from adding new pokemon to the pokedex. Let's say you end up with 100 pokemon in the dex (probably too low a number, but still). That's 50 000 xp just from the bonus.

Week two:

• You'll receive another three lucky eggs. Spend them for around 300 000 xp gained from power-evolves
• Spend incense gained on routes between clusters and use up your lure modules during the breaks you don't spend power-evolving
• Use up every incubator you gain
• Buy 50 pokemon slots when you've collected 100 coins (there should be 100 left from your initial investment
• If you decided to pump in more money into the game from the start, then push your bag space to 1000 and spend the rest on pumping up pokemon storage capacity
• Evolve potential top class pokemon and make a prayer
• Decide which three pokemon are your best (I recommend one attacker and two defenders) and start spending stardust
• After level 25 add one pokemon to that list for each level you gain
• Your target level is 27
• Approximately one million xp in total

Weeks three and four:

• Evolve and transfer as you go, and keep this activity to pokemon you've learned are pretty crap anyway.
• You're losing out on power evolves, but the steady inflow of 500 xp per evolve is a greater gain in the long run
• Save the 12-candy-to-evolve -pokemon. You want them for the lucky eggs you receive once you hit 30
• Learn gym battling basics
• If you got lucky with bubble strategy pokemon early on, now's the time to try it out. If you 'sacrifice' yourself by dropping a prestige pokemon at the bottom of a gym you'll have an easier time being accepted into your local raid team
• Retune your bag -- you're likely to want more material for gym battling by now
• Push your best pokemon
• Your target level is 30
• Approximately two million xp in total
• Eight maxed out high quality pokemon for level 29

This is a lot of time spent on the game. I'm talking about maybe six hours a day for a month, but it's definitely doable.

A casual hardcore player should be able to do this at a leisure two months spent with Pokemon Go as the primary hobby, which means a raidready addition to the team by the end of July.

Pushing the first month to two million xp could be worth it. In the long run, however, I believe a million a month is more than enough. It's still a lot of time spent over a smart phone, but not enough to make you puke at the sight of it.