What to Know About Breeding in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet

linkSummary

Put only two Pokémon in your party and breed the same way you did in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, and for the love of Arceus, eat a sandwich.

linkWelcome to Paldean Pokémon Breeding

Picnics and Egg Power feel so much different than our old methods of tossing a couple Pokémon into the Nursery and wandering around for a bit! We can have lots of Pokémon in our party all breeding with each other. Sandwiches are an entirely new mechanic, and farming Herba Mystica isn’t for everyone. What happens with items and Destiny Knots? If you’re anything like me, you want to know how to optimize your breeding so you can get all those sweet, sweet shinies.

linkProposed Optimal Breeding

Put only two Pokémon into your party (with Destiny Knots as you see fit). Make sure your Pokémon have different OTs - if you’re trying to breed shinies, this should be the case anyways so that you can take advantage of the Masuda Method.

If you’re cheap and don’t feel like farming Herba Mystica, make yourself a Great Banana Sandwich (recipe 17) to get Egg Power 2 and use a foreign Ditto. Since you have a mid-compatibility pair, you won’t see an appreciable egg rate increase by eating a Level 3 sandwich.

If you’re loaded with Herba, find someone online to trade you a Pokémon of the species you want in a different language and the opposite gender from the one you’ve already got. If you’re trying to hatch starters, you’ll probably have better luck hatching your own female starter to use and trading for a male one. Put those two Pokémon - same species, opposite genders, different languages - into your party, eat an Egg Power 3 sandwich, and watch the eggs roll in.

linkResults

linkWhat doesn’t matter:

• Number of Pokémon in the party
• Species diversity
• Having multiple Dittos

linkWhat does matter:

• Compatibility
• Held Items
• Egg Power

linkCompatibility

As with past games, a breeding pair with the same OT and different species are considered “low” compatibility, a pair with different OT and same species are “high” compatibility, and a pair with the same OT and same species or different OT and different species are “mid” compatibility. You can read more on Bulbapedia.

linkHeld Items

If you only have one Pokémon holding a breeding item, all other Pokémon in the party will be forced to breed with it. You can use this to force a compatibility tier, but otherwise has no direct impact on egg rates.

If you have multiple Pokémon holding a breeding item, only those Pokémon holding items will be placed into the “pool” of potential pairs to generate eggs. Therefore, if you have three Dittos all holding Destiny Knots, and everyone else is empty-handed, you will get zero eggs. Don’t do this! It’s cursed!

linkEgg Power

First of all, don’t hatch hungry. If you don’t eat even a Level 1 sandwich, you’re going to get close to zero eggs every half hour, even with high-compatibility parents. But which level of sandwich should you make?

If you’re using low- or mid-compatibility parents, you’ll see the biggest jump in egg rates at Egg Power 2.

If you’re using high-compatibility parents, you might as well go for that awesome Egg Power 3 sandwich, but don’t beat yourself up if you’re using Egg Power 2.

linkTentative relative Breeding rates for different combinations of Compatibility and Egg Power

linkMethodology

All tests were conducted by booting into CFW and tracking Egg Generation directly using notZyro’s PokeViewer.NET tool over the local intranet. No writes were made to game data, except to delete unwanted eggs in boxes. A Banana Sandwich (recipe #17) was eaten, and a timer immediately started for 30 minutes. Every ten eggs, PokeViewer would fetch all ten and immediately delete them from boxes. This means there’s some variation in the amount of time spent in dialog boxes, which has been confirmed elsewhere to block egg generation. It should be roughly proportional to how many eggs are generated though. Notes were kept on whether or not a Pokémon had my Original Trainer (OT) designation, the species, the item, and the gender. Tests were made with a variety of party configurations.