Pokémon Pokopia beginner's guide: Tips, tricks and first things to do

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, as despite its cutesy appearance, Pokémon Pokopia is a surprisingly deep game.

Once you're done with the game's quick tutorial, you're confronted with an enormous world that can be quite daunting at first. With so much to do, where do you even start?

That's why we've put together a little Pokopia beginner's guide to help you out, telling you what you should start out with, as well as some nifty tips and tricks to make exploring and revamping your island a breeze.

Let's get into it!

First things to do in Pokémon Pokopia

Across the first few hours, there's a lot you can do, but we reckon these five things are the most important to focus on to help get you started.

Collect Leppa Berries

Once you've finished the tutorial section in which you meet the three Kanto starters, Squirtle, Bulbasaur and Charmander, you should go and collect a few Leppa Berries.

Eating Leppa Berries restores your PP, which lets you use your moves. Use Water Gun to bring a few trees back to life, and then headbutt them by pressing A to knock the Berries off.

Unlock Cut and Rock Smash

Early on, there's not much point in exploring as you won't have the tools to do it, so just progress the main story for a bit until you meet both Scyther and Hitmonchan.

These two will teach you the moves Cut and Rock Smash respectively.

Cut lets you chop up bits of grass, vines and dead wood, the last of which can be refined into Lumber which is a very useful crafting material.

Rock Smash lets you, well, smash rocks. Beyond letting you access new sections of the map by breaking through nearby walls, you can also use it to free trapped springs – more on that later.

Increase your storage and backpack space

Once you can use Scyther to get some Lumber, you can use the Crafting Table to build Storage Boxes.

It's very worth your while to craft a few of these straight away, as it means you'll be able to dump all of your random bits and bobs inside before you head off exploring, keeping your materials a bit more organised.

For similar reasons, you should buy some backpack upgrades from the PC Shop. These 'Packing Tips' are marked by a backpack icon, and are worth buying as soon as they become available.

Find Drifloon

Once you've got Rock Smash unlocked, you can follow the path left from the Pokémon Center, break through the rocks and find Drifloon floating around.

They'll ask for a home, which you can build them by placing three campfires in a row and getting Charmander to light them.

Once they've moved in, you can show Drifloon a doll once a day to be transported to a Dream Island where you can gather a ton of resources very quickly, similar to Explorer's Shores in Dragon Quest Builders.

Find Drilbur and unlock Rototiller

Lastly, you can break the rocks just behind and to the right of the Pokémon Center to find an area with a little allotment where you can meet Drilbur.

Help Drilbur jazz up its home, and you'll be taught the move Rototiller, a very useful ability with two main applications.

First, you can use it to till the ground to make space to plant crops like beans and wheat.

Secondly, you can use it to pick up and move things like grass patches and flowers around without having to cut them up and replace them.

Pokémon Pokopia tips and tricks

Beyond these five steps you should focus on early on, we've also got a bunch of little tips and tricks to make your life a bit easier.

Inhaling items

Instead of just picking things up by manually pressing Y, you can hold down Y to inhale everything at once.

This is especially useful when you're harvesting materials, as many of them will often drop all at once.

Build some rivers

In some parts of the map, you'll see what looks like a trench or empty pond dug into the ground.

Near these locations, you'll find a block in the wall with water leaking out of it. Breaking these blocks with Rock Smash will free a trapped spring, which will flow down to make a river or pond.

This immediately brings the area back to life, saving you from having to Water Gun it all yourself, and increases the humidity a bit in the process.

Climbing Vines

Dotted around the world, you'll find Vines hanging from cave ceilings and down cliff walls.

While you can use Cut to get some materials from these, you can also use them to climb, helping you reach some otherwise inaccessible areas with ease.

Craft Wooden Steps and Bridge Planks

Before you go exploring, it's worth heading to your Crafting Table and creating a bunch of Wooden Steps and Bridge Planks.

Since the island is falling apart, you'll regularly come across bridges or stairs that have pieces missing, making them impossible to traverse.

Having some Steps and Planks in your inventory at all times means you can place them willy nilly and get where you need to go straight away.

Don't buy the Habitat Tips from the PC Shop (at least, not at first)

The PC Shop has some buyable tips that tell you how to build some hidden Habitats that you haven't discovered yet.

It can be tempting to buy these straight away and get to using them, but we don't think it's worth it until later down the line.

Early on, you really won't be struggling to find new Habitat Tips yourself while exploring, and within a few hours, you'll find that you already have too many to build at once anyway.

You're better off building slowly, improving the area for the Pokémon you already have, and picking up one or two new additions now and then, instead of trying to get as many as possible all in at the start.

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