Returning player’s guide to Pokemon GO (June 2017)

• Sections
• Evolution Items
• Egg Chart changes
• New Regional and Special species
• Shiny Mechanics
• Misc. changes
• Comments

Recently, we’ve observed a large number of returning Pokemon GO players, coming back into the game to see what’s new.

This guide is created for Trainers who are unsure what has changed in Pokemon GO over the past several months, but know that Generation II was released.

Last updated: 18. June 2017, a day before Gyms are disabled for remodeling.

Evolution Items

Since Generation II was released, there are now a number of evolution items you can obtain by spinning PokeStops. There are two ways evolution items drop:

• a very low (0.2%) random chance on every PokeStop spin
• a guaranteed random evolution item on your 7th day streak spin

Item		User	Evolution	Candy Cost
	Dragon Scale	Seadra	Kingdra	100
	King’s Rock	Poliwhirl	Politoed	100
		Slowpoke	Slowking	50
	Metal Coat	Onix	Steelix	50
		Scyther	Scizor	50
	Sun Stone	Gloom	Bellossom	100
		Sunkern	Sunflora	50
	Upgrade	Porygon	Porygon2	50

As evolution items are fairly difficult to obtain, our community has written a series of guides on how to decide on which Pokemon to use your evolution item:

• Politoed vs Slowking (King’s Rock)
• Steelix vs Scizor (Metal Coat)
• Bellossom vs Sunflora (Sun Stone)

Egg Chart changes

Over the previous few months, there has been a lot of changes to Egg groups and hatch rarities. The following chart shows only the summary of possible hatches, for detailed information consult our official Egg Hatching Chart.

New Regional and Special species

With the initial release, Pokemon GO featured 4 region specific species: Tauros, Mr. Mime, Kangaskhan and Farfetch’d. Generation II brought two new species in the mix: Heracross and Corsola.

The following map shows regions where these Pokemon species can be found. The map was created by a Reddit user called oktimeforplanb.

As far as special species go, two Generation II species are still not released:

Smeargle	Delibird
normal	ice flying

Shiny Mechanics

There is currently only 1 confirmed Shiny Pokemon available: yellow Magikarp that later evolves into a red Gyarados. Shiny Pokemon were introduced in March 2017.

You can see all Shiny forms here: Pokémon GO Gen 1 and Gen 2 Shiny Pokémon Chart or in animated form on the GO Hub database.

This is what we know so far about Shiny Pokemon in Pokemon GO:

• They feature a different color palette from their normal counterparts
• They do not appear as shiny on the Nearby/Sightings tracker
• Whether a Pokemon is shiny is randomly determined for each Trainer, so a same Magikarp can be shiny for your friend, and normal to you

Misc. changes

In addition to everything mentioned above, a plethora of smaller changes has happened recently:

• Type-specific events are happening roughly every month. Check our Pokemon GO Events page for more information.
• Pokemon IV values in the wild are now randomized for every Trainer under Level 20
• Pokemon with different genders have been observed in the wild!
• Pokedex now features buttons to show Genders and Shiny variants if you caught them
• The Unown family has been released and a special medal is available for capturing them. It’s considered to be the most difficult medal to obtain
• A new shadow-banning mechanism has been deployed to fight GPS spoofers and bot accounts
• Niantic Customer Support accounts have joined Reddit
• A new Support Twitter account called NianticHelp has been created
• Promo Codes have appeared on Android
• A new loading screen is live, featuring Steelix