'Pokémon Go' datamining reveals all sorts of hidden details

Pokémon Go decoded: Data miners dig into Niantic's hot new app

pokemon go datamine decode — Image used with permission by copyright holder

If your only experience playing Pokémon was when you were a kid, and you beat the Elite Four with your favorite Pokémon, disregarding stats, and maybe even types, to play with creatures that over many hours became your friends — look away, now. The world of Pokémon has come a long way since then, and as the gamers grew older, they min-maxed everything, turning Pokémon into a game of numbers.

As you might expect, the same can now be said for Pokémon Go. Just a couple of weeks after the augmented-reality Pokémon game was released, digital wizards have managed to dig through its code base to find the numbers that power the game, giving us much greater insight into how to be the very best (like no one ever was) at the expense of a real loss of mystery.

Seriously, if you want to continue playing Pokémon Go as it was intended, with all of the mystery of discovery, the seemingly obfuscated stats, and many of its yet-to-be-discovered secrets, don’t read on, and certainly don’t head to PokemonFortress , which lists the findings in full.

With fair warning out of the way, get ready number crunchers, as this data dump is a doozy. Here’s a selection of some of the information that decoders have managed to discover:

Pokémon trainers have a level cap of 40, but you’ll need 20 million experience to get there.
Once trainers hit level 30h, the Pokémon you find won’t automatically have a higher CP.
Moves do have an accuracy and hit rate.
Same Type Attack Bonus (STAB) carries over from other Pokémon games and is present in Pokémon Go.
Legendary Pokémon like MewTwo, Zapdos, Articuno, and Moltres, are all in the game, as is Mew, but it’s Mythic rank.
There is a Master Ball in the game, but nobody has any idea where it might be.
Dragonite has the strongest base attack of all Pokémon, other than the legendary ones.

There’s a whole lot more that PokemonFortress claims to have discovered, so follow the link to see the full list if you want. However, we cannot confirm the accuracy of most of these claims, as they have yet to be tried and tested in the game. No doubt that will happen over the ensuing months, and it may be that some of the more mysterious content discovered in the dump is set to release in planned updates in the future.

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