Good Luck Getting Dusk Form Rockruff

Did you know that you can now get Dusk Form Rockruff? No? Well it was released rather unceremoniously during an event which kinda had nothing to do with Rockruff. All the event spawns didn’t seem to fit. Like, why was Gastly spawning, and why was it the only Pokemon that seemed to be spawning in obvious numbers? In reality, the event was an egg-hatching event, but without any sort of discount on incubators or a reduced hatching distance.

Dusk Form Rockruff was introduced kinda at a whim. It had a chance to appear in event eggs, event research and raids, alongside normal Rockruff. And, of course, being a new, shiny thing, the chances of getting a Dusk Form Rockruff were low. In the event eggs, both 2km and 7km, Dusk Form Rockruff was marked as ultra rare, while normal Rock Ruff was in the common tier. And they weren’t alone, there was tons of other stuff in the egg pools as well. The research didn’t help either. There was only one research task, Hatch 3 Eggs, but it was kinda mixed up with similar tasks to hatch 1 and 2 eggs.

Sure, we did get a Rockruff from the seasonal special research, but that wasn’t guaranteed to be a Dusk Form Rockruff either.

There WAS technically a trick to find a Dusk Form Rockruff, but that involved doing a normal Rockruff raid. At the start of the event, because the Pokemon was technically split into two identical forms, even if you caught a Rockruff, it’d appear as a silhouette on your Raids tab. The Dusk Form would appear as a silhouette as well, even after you’d caught a normal Rockruff. But Rockruff raids weren’t that common, and there was a lot of other junk in the raid pool.

Really though, the only reliable way of farming a Dusk Form Rockruff was to use Campfire. Campfire is a secondary app that Niantic made that allows you to see nearby points of interest, routes, gyms and raids, as well as a more detailed map. It shows all nearby raids, and you can zoom out pretty far, allowing you to see much larger areas than you can in Pokemon GO. Campfire also has a few other features, like a ‘flare’ that shows that people are interested in a specific raid, and a feature which shows where a Pokemon was recently caught. However, the biggest boon is being able to see raids, and, well, Dusk Form Rockruff had a small glitch which made it easily identifiable. Both normal and Dusk Form Rockruff would appear in Pokemon GO as identical Rockruffs, but in Campfire, Dusk Form Rockruff lacked a proper icon, instead showing the generic Rhydon raid symbol, so you could easily identify which raids had Dusk Form Rockruff and which didn’t.

Assuming you were lucky though. They made the Dusk Form rarer as the event went on, and I didn’t know about the Campfire trick until the end of the event. So despite me knowing this trick, I never actually SAW a Dusk Form Rockruff raid to even do. I’d regularly check Campfire, while also hatching eggs and doing the research tasks. I suppose I was lucky I had extra incubators from winning a handful of showcases, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do nearly as many research tasks.

And now the event is over, your only option is hoping you get lucky in eggs. Except, well, you can’t. Because while normal Rockruff can appear in the 10km Adventure Sync egg pool, the Dusk Form seems to be missing. Meaning that it’s basically unobtainable, now that its event is over. We’ll have to wait a long, long time to be able to get it again.

A shame, really, because Dusk Form Lycanroc is my favourite form, but I failed to get one in time. Oh well.