Turning A Wasteland into an Oasis in Pokemon Go

In March of 2020, I moved away from the city center towards the outskirts of the city. I use the term city quite loosely here, because where I live is still quite small and rural. But either way, Pokemon Go was not much of an option. From where my new apartment was, I could see one gym and four Pokestops (and one more just on the horizon). All of which were a ten minute walk away, but doable. The fact that we had a gym at all was incredibly impressive. But for a slightly-more-than-casual player, those Pokestops just weren’t enough.

And I had recently hit level 40, just a month prior.

I had to add more. A lot more.

So I got to work, with my limited data. I’d go out for walks. Long ones. Generally in the evening when things are much cooler. And if I saw anything of interest, I’d note it down.

At first, I tried to just submit things as I saw them, but that’s not very efficient. Sure, I wasn’t going to run into any duplicate nominations, but I didn’t take the time to take good pictures or have good supporting information. With some more research and the help of Google Maps, I managed to take better photos but also prove that these places existed. I even created photospheres for some of these locations.

Now, where I live, there are 5 gyms and 15 Pokestops, as well as two new points of interest only visible in Ingress.

Adding more though has slowed down.

The appearance of new stops comes in bursts. There’s long gaps between new eligible nominations. But they do seem to appear in groups. I had 3 confirmed in a day, and then nothing for 3 weeks.

The bigger issue though is that it’s kinda too hot to go out and stand in the sun taking pictures. Even in September, it’s easily 35C+ during the day and only starts cooling down when the sun sets. Except, once the sun is set, my photo quality drops off a cliff and I can’t submit new Pokestops. Because the most important thing you need on a submission is a great picture.

Eventually I will run out of things to nominate.

There’s only so much locally that could potentially become a point of interest. Off the top of my head though, there’s three or four places I could easily nominate, the only issue is getting there before the sun sets. And there’s even more stops that I’ve seen on Google Maps but need to visit myself and verify that they’re 1. accessible and 2. actually there. After that, I’ll start to expand. After all, while this part of town is filling up nicely, there are TONS of places that are still completely lacking.

What really holds me back though is the 20m rule. In Pokemon Go, any point of interest that is within 20m of another existing point of interest will not become a Pokestop. It might appear in Ingress, but it flat out won’t appear in other games. A lot of potential points of interest are close to each other, but if they don’t even have a chance of appearing, then there’s no point wasting one of my limited nominations on them.

This sadly doesn’t apply for most people.

I need to point out though that I live in a very unique area. Heck, Cyprus in general is quite unique. There’s a LOT of interesting things to be seen. You just need to go out on a walk and look for them.

But some places really just don’t have anything at all. Some places really have zero points of interest. At that point, you’ll just have to make some of your own…