"A Guide for new an up-and-comers. (An updated version of my old guide "10 things I wish I knew 22 levels ago")"

#PokemonGO: (I rewrote this because a few people contacted me for permission to use it for some blogs, so the language will be weird sometimes)When Pokemon GO was about a week old, I put together a guide for newer players and anyone who wanted to see some of the things that could be done a bit differently. I called it “10 things I wish I knew 22 levels ago”. Since then, some of the information has changed so I decided to go through it and fix some of the outdated information. Please enjoy, and feel free to leave me any feedback!SAVE YOUR STARDUST! By the time you find this article you’ll likely have powered up your starter a bit and maybe a few others. That’s ok, but from here on out, don’t spend any of it! I know you want those pokemon to have the highest cp they can get, but try to be patient. In the beginning you level up pretty darn quick, and as you do so you naturally catch stronger pokemon, and without having to spend your all-too-precious stardust. More on this later.Those gyms? Ignore them. At least for a while. “What?! Isn’t that the whole point of the game?! I’m finally allowed to click them and you want me to ignore them?!” Yeah, pretty much. At level 5 Pokemon GO lets you finally pick your team (choose carefully, there is no redo on this one). You will probably also notice that the pokemon defending those gyms are massive compared to yours. You’ll barely be able to scratch them. Right around levels 12-15 you can probably start practicing a little bit, or if you have some higher level friends to play with maybe they’ll help you get your foot in the door, but you won’t be able to put a good hurtin’ on gyms for quite a while. And that’s ok. Spend that time leveling up and learning the mechanics and how to dodge and all that fun stuff. There are tons of articles and all kinds of conflicting opinions on how best to attack and defend and boost a gym, so I won’t cover that here. Just get some 1000+ cp pokemon and learn how best works for you.IMPORTANT! When you finally are able to attack gyms and get a pokemon in there, DON’T FORGET YOUR COINS! For every pokemon you have in a gym at the same time, you can collect 10 free coins and 500 stardust. Doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up. When you’re confident you have the most gyms you’ll be able to hold at a given time, go in to the shop tab and on the top right click the green shield icon. You can only do this once every 21 hours though, so click wisely!This is the long form explanation of the DON’T WASTE STARDUST tip with an explanation. As you play, keep transferring things out. You can do this pretty safely without worrying about in-depth play for a long time. For example, if you have a cp 50 bellsprout and catch a cp 60 bellsprout, go ahead and transfer the cp 50 one. Otherwise they just fill up space in your inventory. Usually at the end of a long walk playing the game I’ll sit down and do all of my transferring at once to save time. Just keep in mind that bag space is precious and low cp pokemon don’t do you any good. So boil em down in to candy when you can until you’re ready to evolve. Do NOT evolve incrementally. That means, if you have 25 oddish candies and want vileplume, don’t evolve your best oddish in to gloom. Wait until you have all 125 candies. If you have a 200 oddish and make it a 370 gloom, it’s entirely possible it’ll take you 5 or 10 more levels to get the next 100 candies, and by then you’ll be catching 350 oddishes. "So what? I have a 370 gloom!" So... If you had waited until you had 125, you would have a 350 oddish that could become a 500+ gloom, then immediately a 1200 vileplume (I’m guessing here a bit, but close enough). You’ve effectively made your gloom worthless to you, and wasted your candies. Do this with every 3 tier pokemon. Always wait ‘til you can go all out. If this doesn’t make sense, think about the numbers. It took you until level 10 to collect the first 25 candies to evolve it once. It will take you 4 times as long to collect the next 100. That will be quite a few levels and quite a few much bigger base pokemon. This only stops being true in the mid to high 20’s, when it doesn’t matter all that much.Catch everything you can. You get experience and stardust which is important, but it also teaches you a lot about the pokemon in your area. By level 10 you’ll have an idea of which pokemon are common, uncommon, rare, and ultra rare. Don’t be afraid to evolve more common pokemon as you get the candies either, JUST ONCE THOUGH, TO GET THE POKEDEX ENTRY (more in tip 8). For the most part, if you’ve managed to get enough candies to evolve to its last stage by the time you’re level 15, you’ll probably be finding a ton more. So go ahead and evolve them to fill out your pokedex, just don’t waste stardust beefing them up because you’ll naturally find a bigger one anyway. (I’m still farming gastly, for example. A long time ago I caught a wild haunter and spent a bunch of candy and stardust on it in anticipation of having a nice big gengar. BIG mistake. I’m catching gastly that are higher cp than that haunter now. Wish I waited. So be patient.)The exception to stardust rules are ONLY for pokemon you can’t reasonably expect to find again for a very long time, and EVEN THEN, ONLY IF YOU PLAN TO USE THEM. For example, if you’re level 12 and you just hatched a snorlax, MAYBE go ahead and power it up if you’re desperate for lowbie gym action. But I’ll promise you this, if you hatch another snorlax at level 20, you’ll wish you saved all that stardust and candy (hatched 10 kms can come with 25+ candy, which is insanely valuable for higher level hatched pokemon). So do so with caution. And I’ll say this as well; if you message me saying you’re level 12 and you have a super-awesome-rare-pokemon and ask if it’s safe to power up, I will say you don’t need to. I don’t care what pokemon it is. At low levels, literally nothing is worth powering up in my opinion, and you’ll be happy at later levels when you still have all that stardust.The Power-Leveling trick or the pidgey/weedle trick... SAVE YOUR LUCKY EGGS! This is a big one. It’ll come in to play around levels 14-25 pretty heavily. As you play and follow the other tips, you’ll likely notice you’re getting a bus load of pidgeys/weedles/rattatas/whatever. By the time you’re level 14 or 15, there’s a good chance you’ll have saved up 200 or more of the candies for each of those, what with transferring and all (seriously…there’s tons of them). This is what you’re saving those lucky eggs for. Once you’ve accumulated 200+ candies for pidgey, weedle, and/or caterpie (and a bunch for rattata probably) you want to stockpile those pokemon as well. To take full advantage, you’ll want at least 20-25 pidgeys and weedles, and a handful of the others (about 60 in total of these super common pokemon). To evolve a pidgey or weedle in to pidgeotto or kakuna, you’ll need 12 candies. You get a candy for evolving, and another for transferring the pidgeotto and kakuna (don’t think about this part, it’s just extra info). When you have em all saved up, turn on your lucky egg by clicking it in your items menu then do the following as fast as possible. Click a pidgey/weedle, hit evolve, wait for the animation, close it out, repeat. DO NO EVOLVE ALL THE WAY TO PIDGEOT OR BEEDRILL UNLESS YOU NEED IT FOR YOUR POKEDEX! With the lucky egg on, you’ll get 1000 experience for each evolution. If you go fast enough, you’ll get between 50,000-60,000 experience for each evolution. Evolving all the way to pidgeot will waste 50 candies, you want to only do the first stage so you can evolve the most amount of pokemon to take advantage of the trick. When you run out of weedles and pidgeys, move on to caterpies (also 12 for the first evolution) and rattatas (25 per evolution). Do this until your half hour is up, and you’ll likely have boosted yourself 2 or 3 levels in just 30 minutes. Pretty awesome right? Save your lucky eggs to do this whenever you get enough candies to take up the full 30 minutes.Just a quick one: When attacking gyms, the game will give you what it thinks is a good roster. It isn’t always. You can click individual pokemon in that roster to change em out with better ones, and adjust the fighting order. I think it matches type before power. I.e. it’ll play my 900 electabuzz against a 1000 vaporeon before playing my 1450 vaporeon even though my vaporeon runs through everything. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t matter. You’ll figure out your best rosters with experience, and there are more advanced techniques for matchups and battling, but don’t worry about that too much for a long while.Don’t put garbage in gyms to train against. Please. You’re only hurting your team. Some people say to put a low cp magikarp in there and beat it with a lower cp electric or grass type, but it doesn’t help anything, and you can’t get that magikarp out until it gets beat. To me, a better strategy is to put a good cp fire type so it at least helps defend the gym a little bit, as opposed to wasting a slot with a magikarp. Also, in order to boost a gyms prestige (which raises its level, opening up more slots for pokemon) you only need to beat 1 pokemon, not the whole roster. Usually this means you can train against the first pokemon and run away, saving time and sometimes saving potions.ALWAYS have an egg in your incubator. Hatching eggs gives a good chunk of stardust, a fair amount of experience, and it also lets you get those pokemon you’re probably not seeing in the wild. Also, don’t waste your limited-use incubators on 2km eggs. Save them for 5km or 10km eggs, and use the infinity incubator on the 2km eggs. If you don’t know already, the starters come from 2km eggs (albeit rarely), so make sure you work through them.You’ve likely heard some higher level players talking about IV’s. You can ignore this for quite a while. It really only matters for higher level play and doesn’t make much difference until AT LEAST level 25, if not much higher, so don’t concern yourself too much. By the time it matters, you’ll likely have learned about them naturally through other players anyway, so it’s not worth spending hours digging through forums trying to figure it out or freaking out over a getting ONLY a 50% snorlax. Just catch stuff and hit stuff for a while. Super simple.Learn to curve ball early. You get a bonus 10 experience for a catch with a curveball. What’s more, if you get a “Nice!” “Great!” or “Excellent!” shot, the experience bonus stacks. I know it doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but it adds up. It also helps with catch rate as well, so get good at it as soon as you can, you’ll level faster for a few reasons.This is going to sound cheesy, but always remember ITS JUST A GAME! Have fun with it! Don’t concern yourself with people you think are cheating. I used to hate people who drove their car everywhere, especially because where I play there are more pokestops than I can count. I thought “What the hell? That’s cheating! They’re not playing the game right!” But then I realized it doesn’t matter. While you’re out walking or riding your bike playing pokemon, you’re getting all the advantages the game was designed around. You have the opportunity to meet new people and make new friends (seriously, I’ve met tons of people playing). And you get the exercise! I lost about 15 pounds in the first 2-3 weeks the game was out, got a tan, and walked over 200 miles (to date). There’s all kinds of great things that come with being a traditionalist. But if you wanna avoid all that to drive around in a car, go ahead, do that too (just to let you know, though, pokemon handheld games have been out for... a while….so if you wanna play pokemon while sitting down, those won’t cost gas money). Everyone will play the game differently, so just have fun with it, and decide what you want to get out of it.The items in this guide are in no particular order. All of the information is stuff I’ve learned playing myself, or from reading on forums. If anything is incorrect, please let me know. If you have any questions, feel free to leave comments and I’ll try to get to them, or maybe the mods of whatever blog hosts this article will be able to help as well. On that note, this article/guide may be used and distributed with my permission (I originally rewrote it as a request for a couple bloggers, that's why this sentence is here), which I will happily give, I just want to know where its going. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2bqGRq1