We can finally confirm that a global spawn-point reshuffle happened yesterday, following a series of in-game glitches and Pokémon appearing and disappearing at random. Around Wednesday afternoon (PT), players started reporting new Pokémon GO spawns worldwide. After collecting more than 500 reports on Twitter, we can paint a bit clearer picture of what happened yesterday.
Pokémon GO spawn points have changed, but they were not simply “added” or “removed”. Please read A Comprehensive Guide to S2 Cells and Pokémon GO if you haven’t already, it’s helpful to understand spawn mechanics. Here’s everything we’ve learned in the past 12-or-so hours:
- Spawns have changed globally. We haven’t seen any confirmed reports that a specific area was skipped or ignored. It’s a sweeping change throughout the whole system.
- Spawn points were added to places with higher in-game and cellular activity than previously recorded, especially in parks and non-residential areas (many reports)
- Spawns were removed or reduced from areas where Pokémon were overpopulated in respect to the player count (multiple reports)
- Some spawn clusters were reduced, while others were doubled. We are not sure why this happened, but most new cluster spawns come in the shape of 4 (or multiples of 4) Pokémon
- It seems like S2 cell activity is still very much influential to the process of creating spawn points, but it’s hard to estimate how exactly that activity is calculated.
- We’ve observed a peculiar phenomena where new PokéStops “draw” spawns from neighboring residential areas closer to the PokéStop location. It’s far too early to confirm it, but we’ve heard anecdotal reports from other players as well
- Correlating spawns with Ingress Prime XM still works and proves to be the only “exact” visualization of potential spawn zones.
So far, neither Niantic or The Pokémon Company have shared any information on this change, and it’s not likely that it will be ever officially confirmed. The deep mystery of Pokémon GO’s underpinning spawn distribution remains a secret, but at the very least we can observe its effects on the day to day game play.
If you were affected by this massive spawn change, please let us know by replying to this Tweet:
We're getting reports of new spawn points being live! Help us verify, are you seeing new spawns around previous low spawn zones?
— Pokémon GO Hub (@PokemonGOHubNet) September 25, 2019
