In our Pokedex 3D guide, we gave you a few tips on how to best make use of the free Pokemon collection - from how to download your daily quota of new Pokemon, to trading and taking pictures. But it didn't prepare us for when our 3DS' decided to stop downloading Pokemon one day, just like that - we tried everything to try to jog it into working again; the Update button in the menu of the application, turning the 3DS off and on again, turning SpotPass on and off in Pokedex 3D... but to no avail. Not content being diddled out of our daily dose of creatures, we started investigating...
Sometimes we only got 1 or 2 Pokemon a day...
Seeing as we're big now, we can probably count to at least 3 (double figures still prove a bit tricky though) - so we thought it was a bit odd that one day, we only seemed to download two Pokemon. Initially thinking we'd just miss-counted, we were doubly confused when a few days later we only got a single, solitary Ducklett. We can only assume that some of the 3 randomly chosen SpotPass critters were duplicates - and in Pokedex 3D's infinite wisdom, it decides to just not bother telling you...
It's all down to probabilities...
This is the first thing that occurred to us when we stopped getting SpotPass updates altogether - with each Pokemon entry you receive, you'll get closer and closer to the full 152 Pokemon entries you can obtain, so the probability of getting brand new beasties drops considerably. In fact, if you have a Pokedex of 100, your chance of getting a new one drops to about 34% - so out of your daily trio, only one is likely to be new. Fill your Pokedex up to 125 and that drops to about 18% - which is roughly 1 new Pokemon every 5.5 days. Putting it like that, the week or two hiatus I've had with my Pokedex of 133 doesn't seem too out of the ordinary - just a tad unlucky.
Increasing the likelihood of getting a certain Pokemon from SpotPass...
If you're down to the last 10 or 20 entries, and just can't seem to get the update you need, there is something you can do to try and tip the balance in your favour. Apparently, if you've scanned an AR Marker for a Pokemon you don't actually have the entry for (you'll be able to tell because you'll just see a silhouette of the Pokemon standing on the AR Marker), it should prioritise that Pokemon when it comes to the SpotPass downloads. Saying that, it hasn't helped me yet - but you might get lucky, you never know.
There are some forms of Pokemon you can only get by trading...
You may have noticed that some of the Pokemon have different forms - for example, Deerling's coat changes colour depending on the season, and there are 3 different elemental monkeys. Well, which of the forms of Deerlings, and which of the elemental monkeys you'll get varies from person to person. For example, I got Panpour and Simipour, whereas our Editor Ian only received Pansage and Simisage through SpotPass - it's actually impossible to get any more than one of the varieties through SpotPass for the following Pokemon:
A couple of other Pokemon do have multiple varieties - Basculin comes in both red and blue striped forms, and Darmanitan has it's normal and Zen versions - but for some odd reason, these Pokemon are exempt from the 'one version per save' rule, letting you get both from SpotPass.
There are a few Pokemon you can't get from SpotPass at all...
There are a total of 6 'legendary' Pokemon that you can only add to your Pokedex by scanning the AR Markers for them - in other words, you'll be waiting for a very long time if you're planning on downloading them from SpotPass. Because we're nice people, we've rounded up the AR Markers for the lot of them - simply use the AR Viewer in the Menu to snap a picture of them to add them to your Pokedex:
There isn't actually a maximum of 152 Pokemon at all...
Up till now we've assumed there's a maximum of 152 Pokemon you can obtain to complete your Pokedex - although this isn't strictly true. Including the different forms of some of them, there's a total of 164. And based on our calculations, the maximum number of Pokemon you'll be able to obtain from downloads is something like 145 - which is simply the total of 164 entries minus the 6 legendaries and the variational Pokemon like Deerling, where it's only possible to get one of the set.
So there you have it - if your Pokedex 3D is being as snooty as a Snivy about downloading new Pokemon, at least now you'll get an idea why, and what things you can do in the meantime - mostly tracking down other people with Pokedex 3D.
