Pokemon Go Candy: The best ways to get more – A complete guide

Candy is a core consumable item in Pokemon Go and is vitally important, so what can you do to get yourself, even more, Pokemon Go candy?

There are a few ways you can improve the total amount of Candy you get in Pokemon Go, and I intend to cover all of them below, so make sure to read on.

Pokemon Go Candy

What is Candy used for in Pokemon Go?

Pokemon Go Candy is used alongside Stardust to power up your Pokemon. It’s an essential consumable item that’s used in large amounts, so demand for it is high. It’s also worth noting that Candy is Pokemon-Family Specific, so candy for Yanma only works for Yanma and its evolved form, Yanmega.

If you intend to use your Pokemon in PVP or raids, or even just to evolve things you capture, you’ll need more Candy in Pokemon Go at some stage.

And even if those reasons somehow aren’t enough, you need the candy to teach your Pokemon a Second Charged Attack and to purify Pokemon that have been made into Shadow Pokemon by Team Rocket – something required by quite a few Research tasks.

How do I get more Pokemon Go Candy?

Candy can be obtained through a wide variety of different methods, and most players will have realized a good number of these methods already – as Candy is an integral part of the game you are very unlikely to have avoided interacting with it entirely.

With that said, I’ll attempt to cover absolutely all you can do to find more Candy. Please simply ignore methods you are already aware of, as I will be covering literally every method I can find and some of them are quite obvious ones.

Primary Methods

This section is intended to focus on ways you can gain a large amount of Candy at a time or ones that are easily accessible. If you’ve exhausted all of these already and just need a few more candies for evolution or the like, check out the Secondary Methods section further down.

Catching Pokemon

This is the most obvious one and one that likely everyone knows already. Capturing a basic Pokemon such as Pidgey will net you 3 Pidgey Candy. The same applies to capturing pretty much everything else that hasn’t been pre-evolved, which we’ll touch on shortly.

Using Berries

Berries can be used to boost Candy gained upon capture as well. Both Pinap and Silver Pinap Berries have this effect, though they work with a slight difference between them.

Pinap berries double the Candy earned upon capture. This ties into our next point well, as Silver Pinap berries actually multiply the candy earned by 2.333* and provide a 1.8 times capture chance bonus.

Ultimately the candy earned difference between these berry types is at best 3 in an ideal scenario – but it’s worth knowing about regardless.

Evolved Wild Pokemon

If you have the luck of finding a previously evolved Pokemon in the wild, such as Feraligatr, capturing it would be worth more candy than the usual amount you’d earn if it was an unevolved Totodile.

In this scenario, it works as follows:

• Totodile (1st form) – 3 Candy unmodified
• Croconaw (2nd form) – 5 Candy unmodified
• Feraligatr (3rd form) – 10 Candy unmodified

This means that evolved Pokemon, particularly 3rd form ones, are worth far more candy if captured – and benefit more from the Pinap berry family, particularly from a Silver Pinap berry, – which would net you a total of 23 candy instead of 10.

Hatching Pokemon

Hatching Pokemon Eggs is a bit random and thus difficult to rely on, but opening up an egg will give an immediate lump sum of the relevant Pokemon candy, with amounts as follows:

• 2km Eggs – 5 to 15
• 5km and 7km Eggs – 10 to 21
• 10km and 12km Eggs – 16 to 32

Of course, again, all Egg-hatched Pokemon are determined randomly from a pool of possible options, so getting what you want from here specifically is difficult. Still, it can be useful to know that passively hatching eggs will build up a candy stockpile over time.

READ MORE: Pokemon Go: A complete Mysterious Module and Rocket Radar guide

Transferring Pokemon

Transferring is a very basic way of gaining candy, each Pokemon transferred nets you one candy apiece, regardless of stats, investment, and evolution level.

This can be very helpful on the likes of Spotlight hours or Community days though.

Walking your Buddy Pokemon

Walking with your buddy can net you some of their type of Candy based on their walk distance. This distance varies by the Pokemon though, and the likes of Mewtwo often have 20km walk distances required per candy, so it can take quite a while to get a significant amount.

It’s another slow burn method, but it can help out – particularly if you need to build up candy for Pokemon you don’t have the option for catching again easily.

Secondary Methods

Secondary methods are ones that players are less likely to know about, or are simply less useful overall than primary methods.

Using Rare Candy

Rare candy is an obvious one. It converts at a 1-to-1 ratio into a Pokemon Candy of your choice, provided you have the relevant Pokemon currently owned to select it and use the item on, anyway.

READ MORE: Pokemon Go: Let’s explore berries

Feeding Pokemon in Gyms

This one is quite obscure. Feeding any berry to a Pokemon in a Gym heals it and nets you 30 Stardust. You can typically do this ten times at once, so it’s a good way to dispose of some berries.

On rare occasions, however, you might get candy for the Pokemon you’re feeding. This can be great for Pokemon you desperately need more candy for, as it’s a fairly easy thing to try, and who doesn’t have Berries to waste? Also take note that this applies to any Pokemon in a Gym, including ones you do not own. Meltan chilling in the park? Potential Meltan candy if you have berries to waste.

Of course, the drop rate isn’t that generous, but it’s worth the swing whenever you have the berries to waste.

Trading Pokemon

Trading Pokemon earns candy based on the distance between the locations where each was caught, as follows:

• 10km apart or less – 1 Candy
• 10km – 100km apart or less – 2 Candies
• Above 100km apart – 3 Candies

A difficult one to take advantage of, but again worth noting down just in case.

Evolving Pokemon

Finally, Evolving Pokemon nets you precisely one candy for that Pokemon family. This is honestly perhaps the least useful here – and virtually useless – as evolving a Pokemon costs candy in the majority of circumstances anyway, so it’ll rarely help you get that last one you need.

Still, it’s a nice refund. Plus if you happen to have a Pokemon with a traded discount on its evolution, that does mean you’re up 1 candy in the end.

Is there anything else to be aware of?

Candy isn’t a particularly complex resource, but it’s quite important, so knowing everything you can about it is quite useful.

That said, most of the Candy gathering methods are well known to the majority of players, so it’s quite hard to break through with anything astounding here. Still, hopefully at least one of these was a surprise to you Trainers, even if it was simply the berrying Gym Pokemon method.

And as always, if you’d be interested, you can find more Pokemon Go articles, stories, and guides on The Click right here.

Pokemon Go is available to download now on Apple and Android Mobile devices