“YOUR BAG IS FULL”

If there’s one thing that has haunted me more in Pokemon Go (except for all the shinies I never find), is the message “Your bag is full”. This message has haunted me ever since I started playing Pokemon Go on a regular basis. Basically, I never have any backpack space. Ever.

In fact, I run into the “Your bag is full” message in an almost daily basis. In comparison, I can avoid the error for having no more space for Pokemon pretty easily, because there’s always one or two Pokemon I can delete if I have to. It’s why I struggle to open up gifts, because I keep on getting my backpack filled up with potions. There are two really simple solutions to this problem of never having any backpack space, it’s just… they’re really a bit of a pain. I can either delete a bunch of items from my backpack or I can buy 50 more slots for my backpack.

The thing is, there are only so many things I can delete and only so many backpack slots I can afford.

Let’s start with the permanent solution: To buy 50 more slots for my backpack, I need 200 Pokecoins, or just under €2, if I were to buy the Pokecoins directly. To get those 200 Pokecoins the free way, I have to stick Pokemon in Gyms and hope they get kicked out at the proper times, i.e. one per day, giving me 50 coins. It takes 4 days minimum to get the 200 coins needed to buy a backpack expander.

That seems simple enough but getting coins isn’t always easy. Because I can’t guarantee that all my Pokemon will give me 50 coins. Sometimes I’ll be lucky and I’ll have my Pokemon return in a timely manner, but most of the time I’ll stick 1-4 Pokemon in gyms across the city and have them all come back to me at the same time. I once had Pokemon in EIGHT gyms across the city, placed in gyms at different times over the space of 3 days and all 8 of them came back at the same time just after midnight.

The 50 Pokecoins limit a day is a fucking piece of shit.

The other option is to delete some items that I have. But what items? What can I delete?

Well, potions are always a start. It’s only ever really worth keeping Hyper Potions and Max Potions, because the little 20 hp and 50hp ones are just so damn small. Most Pokemon you have rarely have more than 200hp needing to be healed after reviving anyway. The other things you can delete are berries, especially Nanabs. Ideally, you don’t want to delete these, you want to feed all your berries to Pokemon in Gyms for stardust and a tiny chance at candy. But you’ll want to keep Pinap berries and Golden Razzberries most of the time because they’re useful. Then there’s Pokeballs. Because you don’t really need 100 Pokeballs, do you? Well maybe, on Community Days or whatever.

But after that, what can you delete? You can’t really go and delete evolution items, can you? Or how about Incense? Or Lures? Or Lucky Eggs and Star Pieces? You don’t want to delete Raid Passes either, deleting Incubators is morally wrong and if you have ever transferred a Pokemon to a Nintendo Switch, then you’ll have a permanent box taking up space as well. Worst case scenario, you spend some Rare Candies to make more space.

I’ll admit, part of the issue here is my own fault. I hoard Rare Candies. I have 100 of them in my backpack, waiting to be used to potentially give a Legendary Pokemon a second move or something like that. Or I might decide to pump a bunch of candy into a Pokemon to power it up or something.

But it’s not just me who has this issue. If you don’t buy backpack space, you simply can’t hold all the items you might obtain as you play. Not just gym rewards and pokestop rewards but level-up rewards too. I had to delete half the rewards I got for reaching level 37 simply because, even with buying 50 slots, I still didn’t have enough space and I didn’t have any more coins to buy another 50 slots either. Thankfully, Pokemon Go is lenient and won’t automatically delete anything over your limit (I actually hit 560/450 slots from level 37 as I’d just done a raid as well) but that would mean I’d be locked out of pokestop spins and gifts until I deleted some items.

It’s pretty standard microtransaction stuff though. Space, no matter what it is, is always limited in F2P games. Here it’s space for items and Pokemon. In Warframe it’s slots for Warframes and weapons and stuff. In TF2 it’s your initial backpack space, which is limited to 50 slots for F2Pers.

So, at the end of the day, all I can say is to not be a hoarder and be very, very vigilant with your backpack space.