Pokémon Breeding: A Guide

Quick Jump: Egg Groups|Gender|Egg Moves|Natures|Abilities|Individual Values|Summary

Introduction

Breeding Pokémon is not simply a matter of putting a female and male in the Daycare and getting an egg. There is way more to it than that. It's an art. It requires time, effort, and lots of patience, but it can be incredibly rewarding when you get that perfect little baby Pokémon you've always wanted. Even more rewarding is when your carefully bred baby kicks the butts of your friends' Pokémon in battle!

There are many factors to consider when breeding a Pokémon. Egg groups, gender, egg moves, natures, abilities and Individual Values (IVs) must all be taken into account. For consistency, I will use a single example throughout this guide: we want a Blissey that knows Heal Bell. Below are Blissey's base stats - keep them in mind when reading the Nature and IV sections.

Egg Groups

 For two Pokémon to produce an egg, they must belong to the same egg group. They do not have to be the same species! The 15 egg groups are as follows: Monster, Field, Bug, Mineral, Fairy, Grass, Flying, Dragon, Amorphous, Human-like, Water 1, Water 2, Water 3, Gender Unknown, Undiscovered and Ditto. Any good online Pokédex should tell you which egg group a Pokémon is in so that you know what you can breed it with. Three of these groups deserve a special mention: Going back to our example now, let's say we caught a Chancey in the wild. To get our baby, we will have to breed her with another Pokémon from the Fairy egg group. This egg group includes some 38 Pokémon from Pikachu to Audino, so we have a large number of potential fathers to pick from.

Gender

 Most of the time it doesn't matter what gender the baby is (unless you have a strong preference one way or the other), but the gender of the parents matters very much. Even if they are in the same egg group, two Pokémon cannot produce an egg if they are both male or both female. But how do you know what species the baby will be if the parents are different species? The answer is always the female. Males pass on egg moves, while females pass on the breed:


Chancey are female 100% of the time – there is no such thing as a male Chancey. Therefore, we will have to find a male in her egg group (or a Ditto) to get an egg. But wait – what if we wanted to breed a Tauros, which are always male? The answer, if you haven't already guessed, is Ditto. Breed a Tauros with a Ditto and you get a baby Tauros. How do you get a baby Ditto, you ask? You can't. Ironically, while Ditto is the most versatile Pokémon when it comes to breeding, it cannot breed itself.

Egg Moves

 Egg moves are attacks that a Pokémon can only learn through breeding. I mentioned that the mother passes on species while the father passes on egg moves, but what exactly does this mean? There are three cases where a Pokémon can inherit moves from its parents:
  1. If both parents know one or more moves that the baby could learn on its own by level-up, the baby will have that move. Example: Mareep normally learns discharge at level 37. If we bred a female Ampharos and a male Manectric who both know Discharge, we would get a baby Mareep who knows Discharge.
  2. If the male knows a TM or HM move that the baby can learn, the baby will have that move. Example: If I breed a female Golduck with a male Blastoise who knows Surf, we would get a baby Psyduck who knows Surf.
  3. If the male knows a move that the baby can learn only by breeding (a true Egg Move), the baby will know that move. Example: if we breed a female Feraligatr with a male Dragonite who knows Dragon Dance, we will get a baby Totodile who knows Dragon Dance. This is the only way Totodile can learn Dragon Dance!
Once again, any good Pokédex should list egg moves, and you should always check for good egg moves before breeding a Pokémon. You wouldn't want to miss out on a great move that you can only get through breeding!

This section is the key to our Blissey with Heal Bell. Chancey and Blissey do not learn Heal Bell by levelling up – it is only obtained as an egg move. This greatly narrows our choice of fathers: we can only use a Pokémon in the Fairy egg group who knows Heal Bell. There is in fact only one such Pokémon that learns Heal Bell through level-up: Skitty. If we don't already happen to have a male Skitty or Delcatty with Heal Bell, then we need to catch and train one. Once that is done, congratulations, we have a set of parents!

Natures

 Natures increase one stat by 10%, and decrease another stat by the same amount, which makes a huge difference. When you check your Pokémon's stats in Heart Gold, Soul Silver, Black and White, the raised stat will have a red tint while the lowered stat will have a blue tint. There are five natures that are neutral, meaning it won't change your Pokémon's stats at all. An internet search will quickly find lists of natures and their effects, but I will not list them all here.

Always make sure your Pokémon has a nature that complements its strengths! If your Pokémon is a physical attacker (ex. Tyrannitar) you want a nature that lowers Special Attack (since it doesn't use that stat) and raises something useful – for example Attack or Speed.

What about our Blissey? Blissey is built to be a Special tank – her HP and Special Defense are through the roof! As for her attacks, we want them to be Special since her Special Attack is much higher than her Attack. Her biggest weakness is her Defense – it is one of the lowest in the game. Normally we would not waste our time with a stat that low, but Blissey is an exception because of her monstrous HP. If we make her Defense as high as we possibly can, combined with her huge HP she will be able to withstand one or two physical hits (and give us time to switch her out of battle rather than having her 1 hit-KOed). Therefore, we'll go for a nature that raises Defense and lowers Attack. If we do a bit of research, we'll find that the nature we're looking for is Bold. You should now be starting to understand the train of thought you want to have when planning your perfect Pokémon; you need to take many things into consideration to decide exactly how you want it to be.

But how can we breed natures? If a Pokémon is holding an Everstone when placed in the Daycare, it has a 50% chance of passing its nature to its offspring. So if our Chancey or Delcatty/Skitty happens to have a Bold nature, we can give it an Everstone and half the babies will be Bold as well! If neither parent is holding an Everstone, the baby's nature will be determined at random.

Abilities

 Abilities are another extremely important aspect of breeding. Most Pokémon have one or two possible abilities, and sadly these abilities are not inheritable – it is determined at random. Therefore, when your baby hatches, not only will you have to make sure it has the correct nature, but the correct ability as well. Blissey has two possible abilities: Serene Grace is kind of fun. For example, Water Pulse would have a 40% chance of confusing the foe instead of 20%. But it is easy to see that Natural Cure is definitely more useful for a defensive tank like Blissey, so it is the one we want. A common tactic for taking care of tanks is to poison or burn them to wear down their HP, but if that happens to our Blissey we can just switch her out and she will be cured!

Individual Values

 Alright, here's the big one, and the one most people don't even know about. This is only for the most devoted of trainers; you will save yourself a lot of time and grief if you skip this section altogether. But if you truly want to be a Pokémon Master, read on!

Ever notice how some Pokémon just have better stats than others? Say you and your friend each have a Seviper. Your Sevipers are both at level 50, they have the same nature, and they have been EV trained identically, yet for some reason their stats are different. Why?

Each and every Pokémon is assigned an individual value from 0-31 for each stat, and these values determine how good the stat will be. If your Seviper has an Attack IV of 3, and your friend's has an Attack IV of 28, your friend's Seviper will have a much higher Attack stat than yours even if they have been EV trained in the same way. Yours was just born weaker. So how do we avoid that?

IVs, like EVs, are hidden values, but unlike EVs, you cannot keep track of them. They just are. Because of this, checking your Pokémon's IVs requires complex mathematical formulas that most of us aren't prepared to do. There are many IV calculators on the internet that will do the math for you, but in this guide I will offer a simpler way to get a general idea of your Pokémon's IVs.

In every game from D/P/Pt onward there is a person who will judge your Pokémon's "potential". Maybe some of you have come across him at one point and wondered what the heck that meant. Well now you know the answer: he is actually rating their IVs. In D/P/Pt/HG/SS, the Judge is near the PC in the Battle Frontier's Battle Tower. In Black/White, he is the blue-haired guy in the Battle Subway. The Judge will rate your Pokémon's overall potential, and then tell you which stat is the highest. His ratings go something like this:

This Pokémon's potential is ___(1)___. Incidentally, I would say the best potential lies in its __(2)__ stat. It's ___(3)___ in that regard. That's how I judged it.

The choices for number 1 are as follows: The choices for number 2 are one of your Pokémon's six stats: HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense or Speed. And the choices for number 3 are the following: If your Pokémon is deemed "decent" or even "above average", I would recommend discarding it. As for the best stat, it goes without saying that it should be one that your Pokémon will be using a lot. For our Blissey, we want to hear that her Defense, Special Defense or HP is "fantastic" or "can't be better". But again, how can we ensure that our baby will have good IVs? To answer that, let me explain how IVs are inherited: Furthermore, there are items that, when held, ensure that one IV from one parent will be passed to the offspring. You may recognize these from the EV training guide: In light of this, it goes without saying that having parents with good IVs will increase the chance of having a baby with good IVs. As for what exactly a "good IV" is, that is up to you. Personally I like my Pokémon to have upwards of 25 in their most important stat, and upwards of 20 in most everything else. Our Blissey's most important stats are her defences, so we want them to be very high. Her Special Attack is not that important since she is mainly there to stall opposing teams and heal her allies with Heal Bell rather than to dish out damage. Similarly, her Speed is not very important since her defences are so high; she can take a hit, so it isn't crucial for her to hit first. As for her Attack, it could be zero for all we care.

But how do we get parents with good IVs, you may be asking? Well, initially the only way is to get lucky when you catch/breed them. It pays to catch an army of Ditto to find one or two with outstanding IVs, since you can then use it for all your breeding purposes. In this case we cannot use a Ditto since all our Chanceys are female and thus require Skitty to get Heal Bell, so we could breed or catch several Skitties and Chanceys until we get some with good IVs to use as parents.

Summary

 To close, here is a summary of the breeding process. Again, you can choose to ignore the parts about IVs if you're not prepared to go that in-depth. Our Blissey example was a strange one because all Chancey and Blissey are female, but keep in mind that with most Pokémon, you can use male offspring to replace the father if they have a better nature or IVs than the original father, and you can do this with the mother too (inbreeding isn't an issue in Pokémon ^_^;).
  1. Make sure the parents are in the same egg group, are different genders, and the father has any required egg moves.
  2. Make sure at least one of the parents has good IVs. If needed, catch or breed another parent. This step can be repeated at any time during the breeding process if you hatch a baby that has better IVs than the parent of its gender.
  3. Check if either parent has the correct nature. If so, give the parent an Everstone. If not, hatch eggs until you get a baby with the correct nature, give it an Everstone, and replace the mother or father with this offspring
  4. If the non-Everstone-holding parent has an IV that you particularly want, give it one of the Power items to pass down the IV. Remember, step 2 can be repeated here if you like.
  5. Hatch as many eggs as you need until you get a baby with good IVs, the correct Nature and the correct Ability.
  6. Congratulations, you can now raise your new Pokémon!





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