Breeding 101: Setting the Mood
/Tonight is going to be perfect. Fresh out of the shower you don your favorite silk robe and slink downstairs to light a fire. The smell of scented candles fills the room as you pop open a bottle of wine. You put in your mom's favorite Barry White CD and the mood is set. It is time for some Pokémon breeding.
If you have ever caught two wild Pokémon of the same species, you have probably noticed that they have wildly varying stats, natures, and characteristics; even if caught at the same level. Your brand new Lapras might have a perfect Defense stat, but with below average HP and Special Defense, you are missing out on the full potential of your Pokémon. This is where the magic of breeding can help you!
Breeding Pokémon is as easy as finding a male and female Pokémon of the same egg group and dropping them off at the Pokémon Day Care. After a while the Day Care Man will tell you that your Pokémon was holding an egg. From here you just run around until it hatches. If you just want to pass moves or acquire a baby Pokémon, this is pretty much all you need to do! However, patience, a few special items, and a great deal of research may be needed in order to create a masterpiece of genetic perfection.
Where to Breed
In HeartGold and SoulSilver, you need to drop off your parent Pokémon with the Day Care Couple just South of Goldenrod City on Route 34.
In Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, you need need to go to the Day Care Couple in Solaceon Town.
Egg Groups
Unfortunately, some Pokémon are unable to breed with one another. This is usually due to incompatible egg groups. For example, Eevee is in the Ground egg group and will not breed with a Butterfree, who is in the Bug egg group. But Eevee will breed with a Pikachu, who belongs to the Ground group as well as the Fairy group. Pokémon like Pikachu who belong to multiple egg groups make chain breeding movesets possible. We will discuss this later in the series. If you want to know what egg group your Pokémon belong to, I suggest looking at Bulbapedia. You can find a complete egg group listing here.
Why Gender is Important
Gender is important when breeding for two reasons:
- The Pokémon that will hatch from the egg you get from breeding will always match the species of the female Pokémon (We will revise this later with some special cases, but for now it works).
- Moves are passed down from the male parent.
I will illustrate this importance with an example. Say you want a Lapras with the moves Rest and Sleep Talk, but you don't want to waste your only Sleep Talk TM. You currently have a female Lapras. You were also lucky and your friend has traded you a level 50 male Whismur who knows the moves Rest and Sleep Talk. Lapras is in the Water 1 and Monster egg groups, and Whismur is in the Monster and Ground egg groups. Therefore they can breed! The Whismur is male and will therefore pass any moves that Lapras can learn on to the baby.
The baby born from this exchange will be a Lapras - whom can be either male or female - because of rule number one above. The mother is a Lapras, and therefore the baby is a Lapras. The baby will also know Sleep Talk, a move called an "egg move," which is a move that can be passed down from father to child. The baby will also know Rest, since Lapras can learn Rest from a TM. So once the egg hatches you will have saved two TMs, and all it cost was the price of day care and a little time. You can look up egg moves and moves learnable by TM by looking up your Pokémon on Bulbapedia.
The Breeders Edge
You have now witnessed a simple scenario where breeding can come in handy; you can pass down moves which are otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain on to your baby Pokémon. But this is only the tip of the ice berg. In our next installment we will get into actual statistics, special breeding cases, and some general tips. You should probably go ahead and snuff out your candles and kill the Barry White as well if you followed that advice. Especially if your loved ones are in the house. We all love our Pokémon, but I fear that romancing a Nintendo DS might get one committed in a couple of states. Just a thought. Please don't kill me.
