On Thursday, July 22, 2016, the Pokémon website Pokémon Fortress made a post to their website, informing their readers that the popular Niantic application Pokémon GO had been data mined. While that sounds concerning to the average layperson, data mining is simply a fancy way of saying "decoding", and is a way of gathering new information on a game by looking at the code itself. This is a fairly common practice in the Pokémon community and has been instrumental in finding event-exclusive Pokémon and event locations in previous main series game titles.
So, what did the Pokémon Go data mining turn up? Quite a lot of things, really; we'll start with Trainer Levels, which cap off at forty. To get from Trainer Level One to Trainer Level Forty requires twenty million experience points, and to get from Trainer Level Thirty-Nine to Trainer Level Forty requires five million experience points. It's pretty easy to say that even for the most active of players, getting to Level Forty will take quite a long time. Additionally, as the player continues to level up, Pokémon become harder to catch.
Eggs cap off at Level Twenty. Finding an Egg at a higher Level than Twenty doesn't impact the quality of the Egg; it will have the same quality at Level Thirty that it would have at Level Twenty. There also may be variations of Incubators (the in-game device that hatches Eggs as you walk) that reduce the number of required kilometers walked to hatch specific Eggs.
Wild Pokémon will also hit their Combat Power (CP) caps once the Trainer hits Level Thirty. At this point, Trainers will have to use Stardust and Candy to further upgrade that Pokémons CP. Each Pokémon has its own Capture and Flee rates, just like in the main series, and Curveballs and Accurate throws have been confirmed to increase the Capture rate of wild Pokémon. Additionally, Pokémon have base Attack, Defense, and Stamina (HP) stats like in the main series game titles, but there are no stats for Special Attack or Special Defense, so there are some differences.
Most importantly, the Legendary Pokémon Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Mewtwo, and Mew are present in the game, but oddly enough do not have Capture rates - only Spawn rates. As code has also been found for the Master Ball, it may be that the only way to catch these Pokémon is with the Master Ball item, hearkening back to the difficulties in capturing the Legendary Pokémon in the original titles. The only problem is that the data miners have no idea what players can find the Master Ball in-game. Aritcuno, Zapdos, Moltres, and Mewtwo have the Legendary tier of rarity, while Mew has the Mythic tier of rarity. The data miners have also confirmed that Farfetch'd and Ditto are in the game.
Pokémon Fortress promises that the information on their website is just the early highlights of what has been data mined, and reminds players that while this information is in the code, it isn't one hundred percent guaranteed to be in the playable game - players can probably remember similar occurrences with event-exclusive locations from previous game titles (such as the Hall of Origin in Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum).
Stay tuned to TechRaptor for further information on Pokémon GO.
What are your thoughts on this data mined information? Let us know in the comment section below.
