Pokopia: Tips I Wish I'd Known & Endgame Walkthrough
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I've just run / cut / smash / glide / surf my way through Pokopia and wanted to give an overview of where my town ended up as well as provide some tips I wish I'd known coming in.
If you want a video walkthrough, I've created that as well:
My setup for end game
Each island at 5 comfort
Use nested modular houses for simple, effective, and efficient housing of mons
Don't worry ab aesthetics too much but do clean the place up
small automations for ores -> ingots, water + grow for vegetables, litter -> gather with community box
Use stairs judiciously to make going up frequently trafficked areas faster
Tips for new Playthroughs
Use nested modular houses - You can build modular 8x8 houses (6x6 interior) and then place 3 items (chair, toy, decoration) to allow 4 Pokemon to live there. You can go further by placing 4 tall grass habitats in the corners allowing 8 Pokemon to live there. And you can get creative to add more decoration / squeeze more habitats in there. This is very useful as a storage ground for all the mons you'll collect and costs little time / resources to build so you can keep moving mons away from their spawn and to the house to free up new mons to spawn there. It's also very flexible - while one house could be all nature with tall grass, another could be built with stone and covered to keep out light / water, or you can make a humid environment by building around a water feature or piping water underneath. IME these small tweaks get the mons up to at least nice environment and if you place roommates right can often get up to great / awesome with few modifications.
Keep your spawning habitats in one area - If you're using the nested houses then you'll have lots of room to gather mons. To do this effectively, it's useful to build all your spawning habitats in one area so you only have to monitor that one area for new ones then cycle them out to an appropriate house for them to free up the spawning habitat to attract new mons.
Don't worry about aesthetics til the end - You unlock a ton of abilities and items as you progress through the different areas. If you get too focused on building up one area, you may feel "finished" only to realize you missed entire gameplay mechanics that you'll then want to redo. Plus there are over 300 Pokemon so there's a lot more mons to house and roommates to figure out. Once you finish the game you'll have access to way more recipes, materials, and some special abilities that will make building your perfect land FAR easier and more effective. So take your time but don't try to be a perfectionist til you unlock everything.
Don't overoptimize who lives in what area, just spawn them where they come and let them stick. You can always move a mon from one area to the other but generally the ones that spawn there are fine and give you a decent variety of abilities to use.
Automation is limited - You can automate some stuff but not that much. Community boxes allow some production abilities (burn, recycle, crush) to pull items out and operate on them and gather mons will pick up stuff from litter mons and put them in the box. But this is kinda unwieldy and hard to get the mons to do deterministically. The best ones I've found is litter/gather/community box for collecting stuff in the box, housing a grow mon next to plants, housing burn mons next to smelters and having those stocked with raw materials, housing crush mons next to mixers and having them stocked with raw materials. Everything else is more manual.
Have a storage system - You'll collect a LOT of materials in the game and many will become useful later. You should come up with a storage system so you can reasonably find things later but again don't worry about coming up with a perfect one. For me I had one workbench I used as my main and put 3-4 storage boxes (upgrading to large ones when possible) and each had a theme - blocks, plants, building materials, key / special items. This kept me from guessing what was in each box / searching through everything and was simple to implement in each area. Now that I've finished the game I may invest in a "perfect" storage solution complete with frames and storage areas but not smth you need to do throughout most of your playthrough.
Farm vegetables early - Vegetables are one of the best sources of PP for your moves and they're infinitely renewable. So build a simple farm and start collecting those. They'll be useful for cooking later and needed for some quests. Plus they serve as decent trading materials when you unlock shops. I like to have rows of 2 width plants surrounded by irrigated water to keep them hydrated and then house a grow mon nearby to speed them up.
Use the favorite menu for crafting and the Handy Bag for building - Over the course of the game you're going to be doing a lot of crafting and building. The favorite menu lets you favorite recipes so they're easy to find - I had all the items I needed for modular houses (blocks, gate, stool, decoration, toy) as I needed to build those frequently to restock. The Handy Bag is absolutely necessary when you're building a lot. It helps you select different items to place with just the arrow buttons which is very useful when you're building many houses.
Hold ZL to snap to grid - You can hold ZL while building to snap to grid which will help when trying to lay down straight lines of things.
Start Large build projects at end of day - Large build projects take a whole day so it's likely you want to leave those til the end of the day so they don't tie up your mons. Poke centers and large houses and other large builds often take this long, this is one reason I recommend the modular nested houses instead of the prefabs - they hold more mons with better comfort for less time / resources.
Moving Pokemon - You can have up to 5 mons following you at one time and you can get them to do tasks for you by running over smth they can interact with. Like for grow pokemon, run over a growing plant. Or for burn mons, run over an unlit fire. You can also use this to get them to live in a new home by running to the new home and talking to them and selecting "Wanna live here?".
Improve environment by fixing the worst mons first - To improve the environment level of an area, you need to collect more mons and improve their environment. The most effective way to do this is to look at the mons having the worst time and trying to fix those - usually those without a house or in an environment that doesn't meet their base needs. You can find these by going to the Poke center PC and hitting - to open details which will show all mons and their comfort status. From there you can go to your Pokedex to see what they like / asking them directly what would improve their comfort and improving their home or giving them a new one. I typically like to move mons with similar wants (warm, humid, dry, etc) to homes that provide that then later split them further based on their secondary wants.
Every day cycle - Get a stamp at Poke center, go to each area and checkin on challenges, store unlocks, mon comfort, and habitat spawns. Go to the Dream island which has the resources you need most for your current project.
How I like to prioritize - The loop for me is basically main quest, side quests, improve comfort level / get new mons, gather + explore.
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So yeah had a good time with this game, will probably sink a lot more hours making pallet town my place.