Castform Community Day
Castforms! Castforms everywhere! Normal, stumpy little Castforms! Little teardrop-like, cloud-shaped bastards with little bollocks for feet! Castform was one of the first Pokemon I caught when I started playing Pokemon Go, so I have a slight fondness for the cute little bollock cloud, bollock sun, bollock raindrop and bollock snowflake. And yesterday’s Castform Community Day was a lot of fun!
Wait, what’s that? It wasn’t a Castform Community Day? It was a Lotad Community Research Day? Well I wouldn’t have guessed, considering how many Castforms were spawning and how many of them were shiny.
Unfortunately for Castform, only the normal version is shiny. The sunny, rainy and snowy versions don’t have shiny variants at all, even though they’re separate Pokemon in Pokemon Go and not different forms of the same Pokemon like they are in the games. That’s a shame, but there were lots of Castforms and frankly their shiny variants were pretty common. What’s also unusual though is that, despite the current weather conditions, the Castforms were always normal ones.
But yes, the 30th was supposed to be a Lotad Research Day. Between 11am and 8pm local time, all research will reward a Lotad, with a chance of it being shiny. Research consisted of tasks similar to that of the Feebas day, and mostly evolving making throws. The most common ones from what I saw were Make 5 Nice Throws, Make 3 Great Throws, Make 3 Nice Throws in a Row, Make 2 Great Throws in a Row and Make 5 Curve Throws, but I also saw Catch a Castform and Spin 2 Pokestops, but Catch 3/5 Pokemon with Weather Boost appeared quite a lot as well, almost as much as the throw research tasks. Battle in a Raid and Make a Super Effective Charge Attack in a Gym were the more annoying ones, especially since not everyone has a bunch of raid passes available to use.
The research was all doable – except for the Battle in a Raid one, which I saw 3 times – but it’s time consuming, mainly because there weren’t that many spawns and most of them were reliant on the weather. Castforms are only weather-boosted in Partly Cloudy weather, but that’s not much help to anyone when the weather is anything but. And the Weather Boost research was among the more common tasks. In comparison with the Clamperl event, the Lotad event was somewhat more tedious. The event required catching a lot of Pokemon but there weren’t enough Pokemon to catch. I found myself using multiple Incenses just so I could get enough Pokemon to catch.
It shouldn’t have been more tedious though. Since this event lasted much longer than the Clamperl and Feebas events. It lasted from 11am until 8pm, which is more than enough time to hit pretty much every single Pokestop in a small city. In fact, three of us (me, brother and sister) managed to do pretty much every Pokestop locally apart from 2 Battle in a Raid ones and Pokestops in inaccessible areas, with 5 accounts. We didn’t get many shinies though. Brother got most of them and, despite us catching over forty Lotads each, I only got one shiny (one of the last research tasks I completed) and sister didn’t get one at all.
The thing is, I don’t know if it was bad luck or if the shiny chances for Lotad were lower. The issue this time though isn’t running out of time, it’s running out of Pokestops. Where I live, there are a lot of Pokestops but a good 20 or 30 of them are in ruins or otherwise closed-off areas where we can’t get to them. Doing this event in a rural area though is next to impossible because you need plenty of Pokestops to give you research. At least with a Community Day, you just need somewhere for Pokemon to spawn.
On the plus side, it was better than the Feebas event. The Feebas event had too difficult tasks and not enough time. The Lotad event had probably too many tasks but plenty of time to do them.
The Castforms everywhere though did make things better. Even with shitty luck, it’s quite possible to get a shiny of some sort, even if you don’t get a shiny Lotad.
The Clamperl event was still better though.