Earning a Gold Gym Badge: Overview and Tips

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For some players, getting a gold gym badge on a large amount of gyms is a personal goal. Whether it is just to brag about the amount of gold gym badges, to get the few extra items per spin, or getting a bit on an edge on receiving an EX pass, players are always checking that meter to see how close they are to hitting that goal.

If you want to read up on Gym Badges, take a look at this guide, which is a part of our Pokémon Go Wiki, here!

But for this article, requested by EricssonSWAG on our Discord server, we are going to go over the fastest ways to get a gold gym badge! If you want to give us an idea for an article, head on over there!

How to Get A Gold Badge

Beware, this is going to be a really long ramble with a lot of numbers, but it will give you a great idea of how much work you need to put into getting a gold gym badge, and what you can do to get it done as fast as you can.

There are a few ways to get points toward your gym badge: Feed berries, place Pokémon in gyms, defend for long periods of time, fight an opposing color, and raid!

Raiding

Out of all these different methods, raiding is by far the fastest. Raiding at a gym, any level raid, gives you 1000 exp per raid, which can give you some serious progress on your badge.

To get from no badge to a gold badge, you need 30,000 exp, so, to get to gold on raids alone you would need to do 30 raids. However, that can take a while.

Placing in a Gym and Defending

If you are raiding at a gym, odds are you are fighting a gym (which is too ambiguous of a number to calculate) and placing a Pokémon in and defending. Let us say you put a Pokémon in 10 times, that will give you 100 exp for each placement for a total of 1000 exp knocking your raid count down to 29. And if you defend with all those Pokémon, say, 8 hours each time, that will give you 480 exp per Pokémon. Do that ten times and you have 4800 exp to work with. At that point you only need to do 25 raids to supplement. It takes about 21 days of straight defending to get a gold gym badge on defending alone. Mix that with raids and you have a pretty good chance of getting a gold gym badge within just a few weeks.

Feeding Berries

Feeding berries and fighting opposing teams are such minimal contributions to your gym badge, but feeding 10 berries to a Pokémon in your gym can get you 100 exp. Do that 6 times, 10 for each Pokémon in the gym, and you have 600 exp. Of course, you can only feed so many berries to a Pokémon at a time, and berries are not an infinite resource, so this method would take a while. However, just for fun, if you wanted to get a gym badge off of berries (without even placing your own Pokémon into the gym) it would take 3000 berries! THAT is a lot of berries.

2 weeks?

Ambitious? The specific question for this article was how to get a gold gym badge in as fast as 2 weeks. To get a gold gym badge in 2 weeks, you have a few options. The best option would be to…

  • Defend for at the least, 8 hours a day for all 14 days, that is 6720 minutes and therefore 6720 exp. 8 hours per day, 112 hours total, is doable if you are hardcore enough to go for a gold in 2 weeks, more than that is an amazing bonus.
  • Defending that many times means you put a Pokémon in a gym close to once per day, that’s 1400 exp. Bonus if you got knocked out and had to put in again. If you do not put a Pokémon in once per day, you are making up the net loss of 100 exp by getting much more defending time.
  • Feed at least 100 berries to Pokémon. Yes. That is a lot of berries for some people, but it will get you a whole 1000 exp.
  • All these suggestions put together gains you 9120 exp in total. That’s not a lot. In order to push this badge to gold, you need to do about 21 raids in 14 days to make up the extra 20880 exp. This is all at one gym. That would be ~about~ 2 raids at a gym per day, and most gyms usually, hopefully, do host raids at least 2 times per day. That will take some premium raid passes though.
  • The amount of raiding you need to do can be altered by
    • Defending longer, aim for 10 hours a day (140 hours)
    • Feed more berries. Dump those berries instead of trashing them, they give stardust too.
    • Fighting against the gym. Fighting Pokémon with more CP gives you more points at a rate of ‘Defender CP / 100 = exp’. This can bump up your score quite a bit, but the amount of exp you will get varies greatly.
  • Similarly, you can lower your defending and berry obligations by raiding more at the gym. Raiding 30 times in 2 weeks gets you a gold badge, good luck.

Final Words

This is one of the most ambitious things you can try to do (honestly it sounds a lot like that “As I was going to St. Ive’s” riddle), it would take a lot of work and maybe a little bit of obsessiveness to get a gym to gold in that little time. There are tons of different combinations of actions you can take to get the most exp you can, the more raids you can do, the better! If one gym gives you about five raids per day, you can take advantage of all that sweet, extra exp.

Really, there is no rush to get a gold gym badge, and you can spend as much time as time as you want or need slowly leveling up your favorite gym.

Do you have the time and dedication to get a gym badge as fast as you possibly can? I do not, that is for sure.

As an added note, there are a few interesting tools that some trainers use, not endorsed by the Hub, but useful, that will help you to see your progress on gyms and suggest things you can do to reach gold the fastest. Such tools are like this one here that can help you along with your journey. Good luck to everyone!

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Kristy
Kristy
Age 21, Nursing Student in the USA. Long time Pokemon Fan, I just love helping the community! I read comments because otherwise I won't know what typos I made :p

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