"A Better Way to Biome - What I Learned from Manually Tracking 2700+ Spawns"

#PokemonGO: Introduction Inspired by this post from /u/Nimleth, I began tracking some individual spawn points near my house and workplace to see if I could identify what biome(s) is attached to each point.In that post, he posits that “biome” in Pokemon Go is better understood as a property of a specific spawn point that determines what Pokemon are generated, rather than a large area in which certain Pokemon are more likely to spawn. This made a lot of sense to me, and based on my playing experience previously, I suspected the biomes around my home and work were different than the biomes he had identified.2700+ individual spawns later, here’s what I found. Findings We can determine the biome of a spawn point based on the rates of which Pokemon spawn. I tracked 14 spawn points in total - 3 within the spawn radius of my home and 11 within a short walk from my office.As I tracked the pokemon that spawned - over 350 per point at my home and 100-120 per point at work - it became clear that the spawn points had three separate biomes attached to them.The three points at my house all shared a biome (I’m calling it Damp Forest since it’s similar to the common Pidgey-Rattata-Spearow biome with a whole lot of Paras instead of Spearow) that spawned pokemon according to the following percentages:TypePercentageParas18%Pidgey17%Rattata15%Eevee7%Venonat7%Nidoran M4%Nidoran F4%Rhyhorn3%Mankey3%Pikachu2%Diglett2%Abra2%Cubone2%I assumed that the spawns near my work all shared a biome, but as I started getting a larger dataset, it was clear there were two distinct biomes at work. Both were heavy on Ground, Rock, Fighting and Fire types with Geodude as the most common spawn in both, but there are some significant differences. The first (I’m calling it Desert 1, because I have no idea what it’s really called, but “desert” seems to be generally accepted for this type) spawns a significant percentage of Paras, Pidgey, Ponyta and Rattata.TypePercentageParas14%Geodude13%Ponyta13%Pidgey12%Rattata11%Venonat6%Eevee5%Mankey5%Abra4%Rhyhorn4%Vulpix2%The second (Desert 2) spawns far more Eevees, far fewer Paras and Pidgey, and no Rattatas (well, almost no Rattatas...I’ll explain later in the post).TypePercentageGeodude22%Eevee11%Ponyta8%Mankey5%Paras5%Growlithe5%Rhyhorn4%Pidgey4%Nidoran F4%Nidoran M4%Diglett4%Venonat2%Meowth2%Cubone2%Clefairy2%Zubat2%The rates were very consistent regardless of when the data was collected. A pokemon spawning at one of the three points by my house has a 18% of being a Paras any day, any time. There’s been speculation that time of day might affect spawn rates, but I found no evidence of this in my data.I think this is the key to any effort of properly and effectively defining biomes - it’s going to take a bunch of people counting specific spawn points to identify the percentages attached to them. Anything less than defined percentages is too general to be truly useful. Biomes can be defined not only by what Pokemon spawn, but by what Pokemon do not spawn. There are quite a few indicators that I’d tracked two distinct biomes, but the Rattata marker was the most obvious. The Desert 1 spawns put out Rattata at a consistent 10%, but in over 1100 Desert 2 spawns, there was only a single Rattata found.There were also a few less obvious examples: Clefairy would appear about 2% and Sandshrew and Ekans at 1% of the time in the Desert 2 spawns but never in the Desert 1 spawns. The percentage of pokemon that are assigned for a biome appears to be related to Families, not individual pokemon. When I started tracking the spawns near my home, it was pretty clear from the beginning that they were the same biome - lots of Paras, Rattata, Eevee and Venonat. But while two of the spawns were pumping out a lot of Pidgeys as well, the third spot had distinctly less...but it was pumping out a lot of Pidgeottos. I found that when I added the Pidgeottos to the Pidgeys and treated them like families, the numbers of spawns across each point were pretty close to even. And eventually, as I passed 300 spawns per point, the numbers continued to even out.Additionally, the evolved pokemon that appeared in my data all seemed to be correlated to how often their un-evolved forms appeared. Graveler and Golem appeared with much greater frequency in the Work spawns where Geodudes spawn at 13-20% than at my Home spawns where they only appear about 1% of the time.Other people have made this connection - /u/saintmagician made a similar speculation after doing his own study trying to identify rates of rare and evolved Pokemon. His study concluded that first evolutions appear roughly 6% of the time and second evolutions appear >1%.My rate was lower, with any evolution (first and second) appearing at a rate of 3.5% at my home spawns and about 2.5% at the work spawns. I also found the rate that evolved Pokemon appear isn’t consistent across species - from my data, it’s pretty clear that Pidgeotto and Pidgeot appear with far greater frequency than others.I was hoping this data tracking would help me better understand how evolved Pokemon appear, but frankly I just have more questions.(Note: Dragonite, the eevee-lutions and possibly Gyrarados are exceptions to this “spawn according to families” rule, as the biomes associated to the evolutions are very different from the other members of its family - /u/saintmagician confirmed this in his study) Tauros (and, I suspect, all region-locked pokemon) spawn at a rate of 1%, regardless of Biome. Across each separate biome I identified and tracked, Tauros consistently spawned at a rate of about 1%. I’d assume this rate also applies to the other region-locked Pokemon, but I have no confirmation of that.There has been some anecdotal evidence that the spawn rate for region-locked Pokemon increased at some point, but at least since the Halloween event ended, it’s been very consistent at 1%.(Note: This comes with a huge disclaimer that while this 1% rate was consistent across each of the three biomes I’ve identified, it’s entirely possible that other biomes spawn region-locked Pokemon at a different rate. For instance, do water spawn points ever spawn Tauros? No idea. But it makes sense to me that spawning regionals would be biome agnostic.)(Edit: a few people have commented that they're finding very different spawning rates of region-specific Pokemon. Definitely more study is needed here.) Both Nidorans spawn at similar rates in the same biome. The rate at which male and female Nidorans spawn is distinct between biomes but more or less equal to each other in the three biomes I identified. While not exact, they are in the same ballpark - the variation was about a 1% difference either way. I suspect this is simply just a matter of small sample size, and that as a rule both types of Nidorans will spawn at the same rate in the same biome, but I can’t declare it with my data. The “Grab Bag” of random Pokemon that spawn seems to be at a rate of 4-8%. In his post I referenced at the top, Nimleth suggested that each biome has what he called a grab bag - that is, each point has a bunch of random pokemon that appeared in small numbers, and without a much larger sample size, it’d be hard to nail down exactly what rates they appear in.I suspect that each Grab Bag is specific to each biome with defined Pokemon in it, including so-called “rares” (Electabuzz, Hitmonchan, Onyx, etc), starters, and more common Pokemon.This is also where I suspect the odd single spawn of Rattata found in the Desert 2 spawn point came from. It’s pretty unlikely that this would be a Desert 1 point that normally spawns rattatas at a rate of 10% - it’s more likely that Rattata is included in the Grab Bag of pokemon that will occasionally spawn. It's also unlikely to be an error in counting, because I checked that screen shot multiple times just to be sure...that one stupid Rattata was messing up my perfect line of zeros!(Edit: /u/va_wanderer suggested that the stray Rattata could have actually been a Ditto in disguise. I didn't think of that, and because I didn't catch it, I can't say for certain.)Within the grab bag there also may be percentages at work - an Oddish, for example, appears more frequently than a Pinsir at my house, but neither appeared more than 5 times out of 1100+ spawns. That’s infrequent enough that I’m going to consider them both in the Grab Bag.Ultimately, when I collected all spawns that appeared below about 1% frequency in each spawn point, it worked out to about 4-8%. A Biome can be defined to specific percentages of Pokemon excluding the Grab Bag If the Grab Bag comprise about 5% of a spawn point, we should be able to pretty accurately define the other 95% of a biome beyond the obvious frequently spawned Pokemon.With that in mind, I've detailed the expected percentage of spawns in the three biomes I've identified here in the sheet called Estimated Biomes.A few big caveats: we obviously don’t know how the percentages are defined (whole numbers? .5? .1?), but for simplicity sake I’m going to round to half percentages. I’m doing this based on the spawns counted at my house. With 350+ spawns per point recorded, there does seem to be a distinct difference between random Grab Bag spawns and those that appear often enough to register at about 1% of the time.Obviously the larger datasets will hone in the percentages, and I think this is where the community can really help to massage out sample size variance. Summary I tracked 2700+ spawns from 14 spawn points and discovered and detailed 3 distinct biomes that can be described by the percentages of pokemon that spawn at that specific spot.I'd encourage you to do the same! Pick some spots and record what appears at the same time each hour for about 100 spawns to get a decent idea of what the biome is for each spawn.My data described here was collected between Nov 10-Dec 16 and Jan 8-Jan 23. I deliberately avoided collecting spawns during the Halloween, Christmas, and Starters events to try and keep the data as free of noise as possible. Comparing the rates of spawns between the two time periods suggest that the biomes remained consistent across both periods.Data during Nov-Dec was collected from screenshots only. In January, to increase my dataset quicker, I began using a mix of a tracker and screenshotsMy full data set can be found here.Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear anyone that has collected data for specific points and can provide the percentages that spawn there. Additionally, if you're looking at the data and think I missed something, please let me know! via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2jjD13Q