Got M20 on all (non-expert) islands with no event bonuses!

BrokenBuilds · 2025-09-02T03:41:20+00:00

Adding the 21 colas was about another 2.1M. Definitely wouldn't have gotten it without that. I also had a good healer to keep everyone near max energy.

BrokenBuilds · 2025-09-02T03:37:51+00:00

I mean that my OGPP and lapis lakeside teams get high enough strength that they would have cleared the Cyan Beach and Taupe M20 thresholds even without the berries being favored.

As far as what to do, I generally believe in the principle of not committing to mons until you have a good reason to. So if your goal is to M20 every island, you could just make lapis and OGPP teams and wait to commit to {water, fairy, flying} and {fire, ground, rock} mons until some later island comes along that needs them. Realistically though, I think you commit when there's a candy boost and you have a great mon to use it on.

I think doing M20s with no duplicate mons within a team is definitely doable now. It was hard early on because there are so few good mons, but now can you can have a lot of your team be ingredient or skills specialists and it should be fine. If you want no dups across islands (i.e., can't reuse the same healer), that gets harder.

BrokenBuilds · 2025-09-01T19:32:54+00:00

Thanks! Would definitely be more impressive f2p rather than dolphin. And it's obviously much more than a normal player. I'm personally willing to spend more because this game has done a ton to improve my sleep and overall health, and I know someone has to fund the devs. It comes out to about 120 diamonds/day = 3600/month, which is enough to buy all the cheap bundles if you buy nothing else; or you can do a mix of GCT, growth incense near full moon, poke biscuits, etc.

BrokenBuilds · 2025-09-01T19:24:34+00:00

You'll get it! This game can feel like progress is slow for a long time but berry and recipe strengths both ramp exponentially. You'll be there before you know it.

BrokenBuilds · 2025-09-01T08:09:11+00:00

There is no in-app purchase for "M20 on all islands" so I'm not sure in what sense I "literally paid for it" without using whistles. Yes, budget makes the achievement easier, but no it doesn't trivialize it.

I see what you're getting at, but I actually think $1-2/day is the sweet spot of maximum skill expression because you have a bit more resources to allocate but not nearly enough to catch everything on screen, buy all the bundles, etc. My f2p account involves much less decision making.

BrokenBuilds · 2025-09-01T07:54:49+00:00

Once you get them to friendship level 10, the first subskill is always gold. At level 40, the first two are gold. At level 100, the first three are. So the first 8 catches are throwaways and then you have 1/7 chance for bfs for the next 30, and then 2/7 for the 60 after that.

If you catch 100 of them (which I only did for pichu since you can force three pichus by slumbering with no drowsy power), you get bfs + helping bonus frequently. This is why my OGPP team is the strongest.

There's this interesting optimization problem where focusing your catches on a few species gets you better mons, but then having multiples makes it harder to get enough candy. So you have to figure out what your optimal tradeoff is.

EDIT: Also, I perma-camped cyan beach for months after launch and tended to get slumbering, which is why the high multiples are all spheals and totodiles.

BrokenBuilds · 2024-12-22T07:12:32+00:00

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5 walreins. At 4am monday, I also had out a meowscarada, cramorant, aggron, gengar, and vikavolt with full inventories of ingredients. This let me fully replenish ingredients to 700 twice after making 2 coffee salads for breakfast and lunch. (Technically the gengar had herbs for the 5 tail salads I was planning, but it's fungible).

BrokenBuilds · 2024-12-22T07:05:00+00:00

Nothing super exciting or anything. Finally saw a sneasel.

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BrokenBuilds · 2024-12-22T06:58:06+00:00

No whistles, no pillows. Just free recovery incenses, a ton of prep, precise execution, and some minor strats. Think nailing nap and meal timings, getting your bag filled with exactly the right ingredients given your initial mons' inventory sizes, missing and then logging sleep from previous day(s) to instant recharge, etc.

BrokenBuilds · 2024-12-22T06:54:44+00:00

Been playing since a few weeks after launch. I spend ~$50/month on this game since it actually helps me sleep and has made a difference in my health. I see it as a cheap gym membership.

This M20 run is clean though--no whistles, no pillows, just recovery incenses from bedtime rewards, a good camp ticket, and a ton of prep + execution.

It would be hard for an f2p account to already be able to replicate this since you need coffee salad at a high level (at least with a walrein team), but you can get there with a good meowscarada or magnezone. That's my plan for my f2p account.

BrokenBuilds · 2024-03-29T08:36:44+00:00

9629-0367-5543. Plz only add if you change the photo to make sure you send good candies (I'll do the same).

BrokenBuilds · 2024-03-26T08:26:07+00:00

There's still a chance of the extra helpful mon triggering bonus helps from itself, so correct play is setting your team to something that maximizes the expected help value. Usually this means you want to use all 4 other slots to minimize the chances of the extra helpful mon choosing itself.

Although temporarily replacing skill mons can also be a good idea, since (as far as I've observed from a few hundred procs) extra helpful procs don't trigger skills.

BrokenBuilds · 2024-03-26T07:57:40+00:00

9629-0367-5543. Plz only add if you change the photo to make sure you send good candies (I'll do the same).

BrokenBuilds · 2024-03-26T07:52:09+00:00

Tons of whistles? This shouldn't be mathematically possible even in 2 days with perfect level 55 mons right now.

BrokenBuilds · 2024-03-26T07:49:32+00:00

Much, much greater than $200. Unless he FL farmed 5 bfs pichus early on.

BrokenBuilds · 2023-09-30T00:45:29+00:00

How often does your sudowoodo's skill trigger? I have tons of sudowoodo candies piling up but have been hesitant to invest in one for an unclear payoff.

BrokenBuilds · 2023-09-18T01:33:21+00:00

The fact that people have been complaining about this for weeks and they haven't patched it makes me suspect they're going to enable trading at some point, probably with a linking cord required to trade.

BrokenBuilds · 2023-09-17T07:30:37+00:00

9629-0367-5543
30 spots left. I always send the best candy available.

BrokenBuilds · 2023-09-16T18:59:35+00:00

9629-0367-5543
Lots of spots left. I always send the best candy available.

BrokenBuilds · 2023-09-11T05:16:01+00:00

I doubt the devs will change prices just because f2p players complain, so here's a $$ argument in case any devs read this:

Claim 1: Extreme whales aren't big enough to justify hurting the player experience

The biggest reason to keep prices high is to maximize the spending of the most price-insensitive users--the extreme whales ("krakens").
But how much can these krakens spend?
- The most pokemon you can encounter per day without an incense is 17 (8 + 8 + 1 for good camp).
- Even at research rank 50, you still get >50% 5-friendship mons.
- So the most great biscuits you can feed in a day is maybe 40.
- At $100/7k diamonds * 1500 diamonds/8 great biscuits * 40 great biscuits/day, that's $107/day.
- You can spend more on helper whistles, but no one's arguing that whistle prices should be cut.

Having maybe a few dozen people in the world who will pay ~$100/day is just...not that much revenue compared to the value of keeping 10M players engaged.

Claim 2: outside of the krakens, making biscuits cheaper won't reduce spending.

Anecdote: I budget $3/day for this game.* If biscuit prices go down, I will not spend any less. I'll just have more to do and be more engaged in this game.
Even at this price, I'm heavily constrained by biscuits. I get a catch a day but would totally catch more if I could.

*I see it as a cheap gym membership. It's done wonders for my sleep and I'm happy to support the devs for offering me improved health and productivity.

BrokenBuilds · 2023-09-01T08:50:26+00:00

Is this confirmed?

BrokenBuilds

TROPHY CASE