Pokemon GO guides
The decisions the tables cannot make for you: what to spend Stardust on, how many trainers a raid really needs, which IVs matter. Every guide carries the date its facts were last checked.
Getting started
Resources
Where to Spend Stardust: A Priority Order with Worked Budgets
Level 20 to 30 costs 75,000 Stardust for 22% more stats; level 40 to 50 costs 250,000 for 6%. Almost every Stardust decision follows from those two numbers.
Level 40 to 50: Is XL Candy Worth It?
Ten levels cost 250,000 Stardust and 296 XL Candy and raise every stat by 6.3% — decisive in Master League and short-manned raids, invisible almost everywhere else.
Elite TMs: Who Deserves One and When to Wait
You get a handful of Elite TMs a year and dozens of Pokemon want one. Spend them on moves that change what a Pokemon is, and never on a move an evolve window will hand you free.
Raids
How Many Trainers Does a Raid Need? Estimating Group Size
A raid is a division problem: boss HP over the damage each trainer deals before the timer runs out. Here is how to do it for any boss instead of trusting a number someone typed once.
How to Read a Raid Counters List: DPS, TDO and Picking Your Six
A counters list answers "what deals the most damage to this boss". Picking your six means knowing what the columns measure, what they leave out, and which rows you can actually field.
Shadow, Purified or Regular? How to Decide
Purifying is a one-way door: it trades a permanent 20% damage bonus for +2 IVs and a discount. Decide by what the Pokemon is for, not by how the button looks.
PvP
Collection
The Storage Clean-Up Routine: Tag First, Transfer Last
Full storage is a sorting problem, not a space problem: protect and tag what matters first, and the transfer search that is left over becomes safe to empty.
Trading Smart: Lucky Trades, Special Trade Costs and Forever Friends
A trade rerolls the IVs once and for ever, so the friendship level you trade at decides both the IV floor and whether a shiny costs 1,000,000 Stardust or 40,000.
How these guides are kept honest
Pokemon GO changes under your feet: the level cap moved to 80 in October 2025, Mega Evolution was reworked in February 2026 and GO Battle League combat was rebuilt that June. A guide that was right a year ago can now be wrong in every paragraph.
So each guide here states the date its facts were last verified against Niantic's announcements and the help centre, lists what changed recently, and sends you to the live tools for anything that moves with the meta instead of freezing a tier list into the text. Tell us if you catch something out of date.