Pokémon Breeder Guide

In Pokémon Wisteria Online, the players are always at the center of shaping the world around them. Players who choose to become Pokémon Breeders play a crucial role in bringing new Pokémon into the region as well as increasing their populations. This guide will provide a comprehensive explanation of how Pokémon breeding works in Pokémon Wisteria Online.

Important Concepts
Before discussing the more technical components of Pokémon Breeding, we need to cover a few basics surrounding the unique and dynamic way PWO approaches creating Pokémon spawns in the world. We will also discuss exactly what Pokémon Breeders are, and why their work is so important.

Pokémon Spawn Tables
In the mainstream Pokémon games, catching Pokémon is as simple as going to a particular location/route and roaming through grass, through a cave, or through the water. Each "Route" has a specific spawn table of Pokémon that can vary based on the time of the day (day or night). PWO is largely the same in this sense. There are what are known as "Spawn Routes", which are essentially the Pokémon spawn table for that area of grass/cave/etc. PWO, however, has one major difference when it comes to spawn tables: besides common Pokémon that are associated with the habitat of the route (such as Pidgey, Rattata, or Zubat) there are NO other Pokémon in these spawn tables unless they are introduced by Breeders (more info on this later).

This dynamic breeding system allows for players to shape the world around them in regards to spawns in ways different than the main games. Normally, in the routes near pallet, you would only expect some common Pokémon. With breeding in PWO, however, theoretically you could have Kanghaskan spawning right outside of Pallet Town. The possibilities are endless!

Wild Pokémon Population in Spawns
In the mainstream games, Pokémon populations in Routes are infinite with only their encounter rates being different. PWO, however, takes a more realistic approach to wild Pokémon populations. Within spawn routes, individual species of Pokémon actually have population totals within the route. Certain player actions can cause these population amounts to increase or decrease. This means while you can increase the frequency of encounters with a certain Pokémon by increasing its population. Inversely, however, it is possible to make a Pokémon population go extinct in the area depending on your actions. This guide will cover more on how players can affect Pokémon populations later on.

Wild Friendship
Wild Friendship is an extremely important game mechanic for aspiring Pokémon Breeders to consider. Wild Friendship is a hidden stat that represents your character's bond/skill in working with a particular species of Pokémon. The higher your wild friendship with a particular species of Pokemon, the easier it is to calm them by using Rations (this will be further explained later in the guide). You can increase Wild Friendship by successfully calming pokemon and then using skills such as Pet or Play to return it to the wild. In the Breeding Process/Cycle portion of the guide, we will discuss different ways to increase Wild Friendship and why it is so important.

Note: Wild Friendship amounts are specific to THAT species of Pokemon and doesn't increase Wild Friendship with their Evolved or Pre-Evolved Forms (e.g. Increasing my Wild Friendship with Charmander won't raise my friendship with Charmeleon or Charizard). CAUTION: If you catch a Pokemon it will completely reset your Wild Friendship with that species.

Role of Pokémon Breeders
Pokémon Breeders serve an essential role in PWO. While players can theoretically introduce new Pokémon into a Spawn Route by releasing a Pokémon they get from a Capsule Shop Egg, Breeders are the only class who can calm wild Pokémon and return them to the wild with the chance of having them hatch an egg (which could introduce a new Pokémon). In this next section of this guide, we are going to get into the common process/rotation that Breeders do in their work.

Getting the Newbie Breeder Perk
An essential part of being a Pokémon Breeder...is...well...becoming a Breeder! You can obtain the Newbie Breeder perk by going to a PokeMart and working there. You can do so by interacting with the shopkeeper (by hitting Space) and then selecting the "Job" button. After completing the job, you will obtain both the Newbie Breeder Perk and a Starter Ball containing a Pokémon. Note: If you already have a Newbie Perk, you will need to obtain your second one by talking with someone in-game who has the Rank of Professor or Music Master.

Once you have obtained the Newbie Breeder Perk, you are now able to learn the Skills Pet and Feed Rations. You can learn both of these skills (once you have the perk) by studying from the books at any school. You will also gain the ability to harvest berries from berry trees!

Getting the Needed Ingredients
Once you have those two skills, then you are ready to begin collecting the most necessary ingredient to your work as a Breeder: Berries! You can either buy berries from the store, or you can harvest them yourself from berry trees in the world. It also should be noted that, while you are harvesting berries from trees, you will get other ingredients as well that can be used by different Perks such as Chemist (so it may be useful to hold on to them if you can to possibly sell).Pro Tip: Certain Pokémon can help you with picking berries more quickly. It doesn't hurt to experiment by sending out Pokémon and hitting Space to see if they can pick berries!

Rations: A Breeder's Most Important Tool
Rations are the bread and butter of a Breeder's toolkit. Without them, they cannot do their work! Breeders can obtain Rations by either purchasing them from the PokeMart or creating the Rations themselves. Creating Rations requires two berries per Ration, and the rations are made through kitchens (as shown in the image to the right). Breeders can make these rations by hitting "Space" near one of these stations and selecting "Make Rations". Once you have rations in hand along with the necessary skills, you are ready to begin breeding!

The Breeding Process/Cycle
In order to begin breeding, you must go to an area where Pokémon spawn (recall the "Spawn Routes" I mentioned earlier in the guide). Once you get to one of these areas, run around until a wild Pokémon appears. Wild Pokémon are aggressive (as you all know from the games) and will attack on sight. Unlike Trainers, who battle the Pokémon and cause them to faint in order to calm them down, Breeders calm down aggressive Pokémon through the use of Rations and the Feed Rations skill.

Once the aforementioned skill is used, the Pokémon will eat the ration and either calm down or remain aggressive. The likelihood of a Pokémon being calmed by the use of a ration is based on your Wild Friendship with that species of Pokémon. It should be noted, however, that the higher a Pokémon is in level, the harder it is to calm them. Wild Friendship is important, because each time you fail to calm a pokemon, it gets to take a turn to attack your trainer directly. This makes breeding with low friendship very risky. For higher level Pokémon, you will need to have a higher amount of Wild Friendship to improve your chances of calming them in one try.

Ultimately, however, once you calm a Pokémon by using Feed Rations, you then finish the Breeding Cycle by using a positive interaction skill on it like Pet, Play, or Sing. Once you do that, the Pokémon will return to the wild happily and your Wild Friendship with that species of Pokémon will increase. The population of that Pokémon in the spawn route will increase depending on its Life/Death Matches with the "Habitat" types in that particular spawn.

Additionally, however, there is a chance that the Breeder will assist the Pokémon they caught in hatching an egg! These eggs can either hatch another Pokémon of the same species or a completely new Pokémon in the original Pokémon's Egg Group. This is the thrill of being a Pokémon Breeder, and the means by which new Pokémon species can be introduced!

With all the aforementioned topics covered, you should have a basic idea of how breeding works, but what if you wanted to take your skills to the next level? What if you want to actually RECEIVE eggs from Pokémon? What if you wanted to introduce a new Pokémon to a Spawn Route, but you aren't sure if it will survive? All this and more will be discussed in the Advanced Breeder Guide section.

Advanced Breeder Guide
In the prior sections we covered the basics of being a Pokémon Breeder, which will serve you well if you don't intend to dive any further into Pokémon Breeding beyond just going into grass, feeding wild Pokémon rations to calm them, and sending them back into the wild in hopes of new eggs being hatched in the Spawn Route to create a new Pokémon spawn. However, if you are wanting to dive deeper into the more complex and nuanced systems of Pokémon Breeding in PWO, then this guide is for you.

This guide will go over the Breeder Perk Farmer, which is the often the next step for dedicated Breeders. While discussing the aforementioned perk, we will go over some of the other more complex systems related to Pokémon Breeding. By the end of this guide, you should understand these systems and be extremely successful in the pursuit of breeding a particular species of Pokémon and picking Spawn Routes that will best allow those species to thrive.

How To Get the Farmer Perk
In order to become a Farmer, you need to have the perk Newbie Breeder. You will need to also have a TRPP score of 50 or more. You will then travel to Pallet Town and visit the Pallet Farm. Inside, you will speak to Mother Oak(NPC), who will have a list of options for interacting with her in the top left. Hit the button labled "More" and select "Milk Delivery". Click it until you are given the task to Milk Mimo, which is nearby Miltank.

You will interact with Mimo, and you will perform the Milk Mimo task/job. You will just need one successful completion of the task to meet the requirements of the job. Go back to Oak and select the same "Milk Delivery" option to turn in the job. Once the job is turned in, you have a '''chance of getting the Farmer Perk. It is RNG, so if you have the requirements and haven't gotten it yet, keep trying.'''

Farmer Perk Explained
The best way to describe the Farmer Perk is to compare it to the basic Newbie Breeder Perk. With Newbie Breeder, as discussed in "The Breeding Process/Cycle" guide, you use rations to calm wild pokemon, use Pet or Play on them, and then the pokemon returns to the wild. When they return to the wild, they increase their population in that spawn. Furthermore, they have a chance of hatching an egg for a pokemon in their egg group(s) (you can reference a pokemon's egg groups on Bulbapedia). There is a chance it will be a new pokemon or just the same pokemon as the "parent". Ultimately, however, both the newly hatched pokemon and the one the breeder calmed return to the wild.

Farmers, however, take this process a step farther. Not only do they have the chance of assisting pokemon they calm in hatching wild eggs, but they also have a chance of wild pokemon dropping eggs for them that they can actually take and hatch on their own.

There are a couple of things that affect whether an egg will drop for the pokemon that a Farmer has interacted with, which will be discussed in the following sections.

Egg Group Specializations
After getting the Farmer Perk, Farmers can go and study from books to learn two Egg Group Specializations (You can later obtain a third one after acquiring enough TRPP). Selecting a specialization in a particular Egg Group causes pokemon of that Egg Group to have a chance of dropping eggs of that type.

For example, let's say a Farmer decides to specialize in the "Monster" Egg Group, then they go out and decide to breed some Cubones in the wild. Cubones are part of the "Monster" Egg Group, so they will have a chance of dropping a Monster Egg upon successfully calming them and then using Pet or Play to send them back into the wild. There is a a high chance that the pokemon that will hatch from the egg will be a pokemon that is the same as the parent (about 80% or 90%), which in the case of the previous example would be a Cubone. There is a small chance, however, that the Monster Egg can hatch ANY pokemon in the Monster Egg Group. So when hatching a Monster Egg from a Cubone, you could potentially hatch a Larvitar, Charmander, or any other pokemon in the Monster Egg Group.

Wild Friendship and Farmer Cares
Earlier in this guide, we discussed the topic of Wild Friendship, and its importance for Pokemon Breeders (greater chance of successfully calming a wild pokemon using rations, higher chances of wild eggs being hatched, etc). For Farmers, Wild Friendship is equally as important if not more. In addition to the benefits just discussed, higher levels of Wild Friendship increase the chances of that species of pokemon dropping an egg for the Farmer (as long as they are part of one of the Farmer's selected Egg Group Specializations).

So normally, Breeders (who are not Farmers) have to increase wild friendship with target pokemon species by feeding them rations to calm them and petting them to send them back into the spawn. This would be awful for farmers, because it would mean you are at the mercy of RNG in the spawn, hoping you can have the correct pokemon spawn for you, so you can increase friendship with it and get eggs from your target egg groups. Luckily, Farmers have a great way to increase Wild Friendship in pokemon species of their choice: Farmer Cares.

Farmer Cares is a job that you can take from Mother Oak. You accept the job from her and then you can interact with any pokemon in the fenced in area behind the farm (that is not being interacted with). When you hit Space on an available pokemon, you can select the Farmer Cares job. This will start having you repeat the same task of "Farmer Cares" on that pokemon, and each time you complete the task you increase your Wild Friendship with that species of Pokemon. You can put your own Pokemon into the field to be interacted with by accessing the PC in the Pallet Farmhouse. You select the "Farms" option, and then you can click on any pokemon and select "Access Farm". Doing so will move that pokemon into the field, so it can be interacted with. You can dismiss your own pokemon from the field back into your box on the PC by interacting with them and hitting the "Dismiss" command.

Now that you understand how to increase your Wild Friendship using Farmer Cares, you are now ready to go out and actually breed your choice of pokemon in your choice of spawns/areas. You want to make sure you put pokemon in places, however, where they will thrive. So how do we do that? This is where "Habitat Tags" come in.

What Are Habitat Tags?
As discussed earlier in this guide, there are Spawn "Routes" in the game that essentially are Spawn Tables for pokemon in a given area. Every Spawn Route is unique and has hidden values called Habitat Tags that are assigned to them based on the area they are in. These tags generally are based on the surroundings (for example, if you were to have a Spawn Route located in a cave, it would most likely have Habitat Tags "cave" and possibly other things depending on other features in the area, such as "ice" if it is a snowy cave). You can also have tags in a particular Spawn Route that come about from IC Events in an area, and are added at runtime (a toxic waste spill in a lake or ocean Spawn Route for example). Essentially, Habitat Tags are meant to represent the traits or qualities of particular Spawn Area. They are extremely important, because these Habitat Tags interact either positively or negatively with Pokemon in that particular spawn, and can affect your success in breeding a pokemon. This is where Good/Death Matches along with the Knowledge, Check Habitat, come into play.

Good/Death Matches and Check Habitat
As discussed in the previous sections, every Spawn Route has hidden habitat tags based on its qualities, such as "ocean", "lake", "denseforest", etc. These are important for Breeders to consider, because every pokemon has specific "Good" Habitat Tag Matches and Specific "Death" Habitat Tag Matches. Good matches increase a pokemon's chances of survival in a habitat, and Death matches increase a pokemon's chances of dying in a habitat. The way the game determines how a pokemon will do in a habitat by comparing the amount of Good/Death Match tags and putting them together to get a final value that will determine how likely a pokemon is to survive or perish in that habitat (more on this a little later). Like previously stated, however, Habitat Tags are hidden values in the Spawn Routes, so players don't know what tags are in the area. Also, we can't see the specific habitats that are Good or Death Matches for a pokemon. So how do Breeders ensure they only put Pokemon in areas that are going to be good for them? This is where the Knowledge, Check Habitat, comes in.

Check Habitat is a Knowledge that is acquired from those who have the Genius Perk and have a large amount of Pokémon Info. This knowledge gives the player who has it the ability to see a Pokémon's Good and Death Habitat matches in a given spawn route/area. The player with the Check Habitat knowledge only has to face a pokemon, use the knowledge, and then they will receive the results of comparing the pokemon to the Habitat Tags in the area, WHILE taking into consideration the pokemon's specific Good/Death matches. '''Note: This skill will NOT tell you all the pokemon's coded in Good/Death matches. Rather, it just shows you if any Good/Death Matches are present amongst the Spawn Route's Habitat Tags. Habitat Tags can also be neither Good nor Death Matches for a Pokemon and instead be "Neutral". These will NOT show up in Check Habitat.'''

So, let's return to our previous discussion on how you can calculate roughly the chances of a pokemon's survival in Spawn Route based on Life/Death matches. Basically, you just take the number of Life Matches and subtract the number of Death Matches to get a value. If you get a value that is greater than or equal to zero, then the pokemon's will survive in the habitat. Depending on how large the positive value is, that will determine how quickly/easily that pokemon will grow in population to fill the habitat. However, if you get a value that is LESS than 0, then that represents a habitat where that pokemon will likely go extinct. Pokemon who are in a habitat that has a "negative" life/death score will slowly have their Death Risk Percentage grow over time. Eventually, these species of pokemon will reach 100% Death Risk and then die. Over time, they will go extinct. The farther below 0 the Life/Death Match score gets, the more quickly pokemon of that species will die in a given spawn.

Now that you have a general idea of Good/Death Matches and Check Habitat, let's give an example.

Let's say you took a Charmander to a nearby beach just outside of a town and you intended to release Charmander in that area. In that area, the Spawn Route has the tags: "beach", "ocean", "grassland", and "urban". You pull out Charmander and use Check Habitat. The readout tells you that you have 1 Good Matches (Urban) and Two Death Matches (Beach and Ocean). Grassland is not listed, because it is a Neutral tag for Charmander. You would minus the number of Good Matches (1) by the number of Death Matches (2), which would give you a final value of -1. Thus, you can conclude that this habitat would NOT be a good place to put Charmander, as it would slowly die in the habitat, and/or it would die the moment you put it into the spawn.