Six million spawns later: conclusions and confirmations

As our regular readers know, we’ve been in possession of a database containing 1.8 million recorded Pokémon encounters, which we’ve been heavily using in our previous research articles: Researching Nocturnal specie in Pokémon GO (Generation 1 and 2) and Analysis of how time of day influences different Pokemon Type spawns.

Today we’ve came across some additional resources, adding more than 4.2 million spawns to the initial data set. This article is the initial exploration of that data set focusing on following topics:

• confirming which Pokémon species do not spawn in the wild,
• confirming unobtainable Pokémon species and
• identifying the rarest Pokémon GO specie(s)

The 4.2m data set is available for download here and the original 1.8m data set is available here.

Pokémon Species that do not spawn in the wild

After extracting the data set and running some queries, we’ve confirmed that several Pokémon species do not spawn in the wild, as observed by multiple trainers before:

• Legendary Pokémon
• Baby Pokémon
• Pokémon that require evolution items
• Unreleased Pokémon
  • Delibird
  • Smeargle

This comes as no surprise, but as there has been a fair amount of confusion in regards to Pokémon that require evolution items, we find it important to highlight these results. There were no sightings these Pokémon in 6 million observed encounters.

Interestingly, Pokémon that gained new evolutions in Generation II and whose evolutions do not require evolution items were observed to spawn in the wild:

• Crobat
• Hitmontop
• Blissey

Unown: the needle in the haystack

Up to this research, we’ve observed some indications that Unown is the rarest Generation II spawn, but we were not able to confirm it. Finally, we are able to state the following:

Out of 6 million recorded Pokémon sightings, Unown was only spotted once (1).

For comparison, Larvitar was observed 382 times, Tyranitar 3 times and Miltank 17 times. The following implies that Unown is the rarest specie in Pokémon GO, aside from regionals and unobtainable Pokémon.

According to a post written by RobbieD85 of TheSilphRoad fame, it would take on average 100 wild Unown catches to collect all of the 26 released variants. Consider the following:

• You might feel like you’re halfway there once you’ve caught 13 out of 26 Unown forms. But you’d be grossly mistaken. The likelihood of duplicates increases exponentially as you catch more, such that by the time you have 13 different letters, you’d only be about 17% of the way there!
• The true halfway point is once you’ve caught 23 unique Unowns! The last three will likely take you just as long to find as the first 23.

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