A Little Look At Pokemon Spawns Near My Home

I’ve been doing some… experimenting lately. I’ve actually been leaving my game open in Pokemon Go for long periods of time. Originally, I was just trying to hatch eggs. Using something called GPS Drift, your avatar in Pokemon Go will wander around, even if you don’t move. But this movement isn’t pointless. With enough patience, you can use it to hatch eggs! And, if you have really shoddy GPS, you can also get the 50km walking milestone.

But as I had my game open, I noticed some things. Namely, how Pokemon spawn around me.

I have one spawn at my house that refreshes every hour.

To be precise, I have one single spawn. This spawn will appear on the 20th minute of every hour and refresh on the 21st minute. For example, at 11:21, a Tropius will spawn. At 12:20, that Tropius will disappear and another Pokemon will spawn at 12:21. Sometimes you get the same species of Pokemon spawn, but it’s always a different spawn after that 21st minute.

Now, if I go into the kitchen, I am just close enough to see another spawn across the road. This Pokemon follows the same pattern, but seems to spawn and despawn about five minutes later.

At the end of my road, there is a new Pokestop. While I don’t know the times for all the spawns, I know one of them. At 11:15, I watched an Audino disappear and be replaced with a Castform. I wanted that damn Audino.

Spawns will change for events on the hour.

The spawns don’t always change at exactly those times though. If an event is about to start, like a spotlight hour, all the spawns will change. And they will change exactly on the hour. For example, in the Spotlight hour for Bronzor, I saw a Turtwig turn into a Bronzor at exactly 6pm. At the end of the spotlight hour, at 7pm, the Bronzor turned into a Piplup, which turned into another Turtwig at 7:20pm.

This is pretty consistent across basically all events. Including big ones like the Throwback events. All those spawns disappeared on the hour with a normal spawn, then replaced with another normal spawn on the 20th of the hour.

Additional Spawns are weird.

Now, some events throw up new spawns all over the place. Most notable of these are Community Days, but Spotlight Hours also have increased spawns. This means you’ll get a few extra spawns at specific locations. None of which are directly at my home. Across the street, where that one other spawn is, sometimes you get one or two new spawns as well. But there’s not a single new spawn at my house during any of these events.

The Pokestop at the end of the road however will essentially get double spawns. Normally there are about 6-7 spawns, but these can increase to 12 spawns easily. In fact, the entire park area near my home will fill up with spawns. Even in the non-green areas will get a few more spawns. Everywhere except my house.

I don’t even know if my home spawn is permanent.

The sad thing is, I don’t know if my one single Pokemon spawn will remain forever. I moved into my new home days before the country locked down and restricted movement, and even before then, the stay-at-home measures added in Pokemon Go were already in place. When those measures go away, I might not have a spawn at all.

Oh well.

At least I have a Pokestop at the end of my road now. Only took 3 attempts to actually get it confirmed. Which is weird, because normally 4m tall statues of goddesses get accepted as waypoints pretty damn easily…