Gotta Catch 'Em All - Living National Dex Progress

Last time on Pokémon Living Dex Adventures…

Our brave hero has set out to complete his first Pokémon Living National Dex. Having completed the Pokédex of Pokémon Shield, he now turns his sights back Home.

I have 150 Pokémon remaining to catch for my Living Dex. How do I know this? I made a spreadsheet:

Having only 150 left felt like a special achievement.

I imported the complete National Dex table from Bulbapedia (awesome resource!) and set it up so that I could just check off which monsters I had with a Y.

The Mess

Previously, I had transported all my Pokémon from versions Y, Moon, Ultra Sun, and Alpha Sapphire into Pokémon Home. It was a complete mess. I had over 1400 Pokémon scattered around in boxes without any rhyme or reason. However, my Living Dex from Shield was in order, so I started by taking them out in evolution groups and putting them in Home boxes I had pre-numbered with National Dex numbers.

This meant I quickly had added 395 out of the 890 I required. I opened up my spreadsheet and went through each box and added Y for each and every Pokémon I owned. I deleted all the extra forms (genders, Rotom machines etc) from the sheet for now though, I’ll talk about those later.

Missing were the Pokémon on my main team and also Xerneas, which I’d borrowed from a friend to complete my Pokédex and returned to him. This opens up my first headache:

Missing Legends

I’ve amassed a pretty big collection of Legendary and Mythical Pokémon over the last 2 decades and I’ve carried them from generation to generation. This means I have pretty much all the legendaries, and I’ve come across one or two mythical Pokémon over the years as well, mostly through trading. With Mystery Gift codes giving away more and more legendary Pokémon, I’ve now got many duplicates too.

However, I don’t have some of the mascot legendaries of more recent generations, and I won’t be dropping a load of cash to buy the other versions in order to collect them, so I’m going to have to be quite active on the GTS to find them. Specifically, I need Zacian, Poipole (I evolved mine), and a few others.

Getting Glastrier and Kubfu are going to be annoying, I might have to play the game again on another Switch account.

At the moment I’m going to dump my spare legendaries into generation-specific boxes (Kanto Legendaries, Johto Legendaries, etc). I might need some of them for trading, too.

Cleaning up the mess

Once the Galar Pokédex had been disseminated about my National Dex, it was time to go through the rest. Now, I was really, really hoping that by only viewing Pokémon Home boxes instead of Shield as well, I could have two boxes open side by side. That way I could have a National Dex box open while I crawled through my Mess boxes for stragglers.

It did not end up that way.

Instead, I looked at what I was missing from my current box, then opened the list of all Pokémon stored in Home and sorted it by Dex number. I’d find a few monsters that I was missing, remember the boxes they were in and then go find them in small batches before dragging them all to where I wanted them. It took hours.

76 spaces remaining

All that sorting got me to where I am now: 150 Pokémon away!

Now, in addition to missing some Legendaries, I’m missing some common Pokémon that I thought I would have many of. That’s where, this week, another Pokémon game steps in…

Pokémon Go

As I write, it’s been a few days since I reached 150 remaining Pokémon and I’ve been using that time to trawl through my Pokémon Go collection. I have spent all my teleporter energy on finally getting Meltan onto my Switch and transferring the basic Pokémon that I’ve been missing. For instance, I somehow have several Pidgey but no Pidgeotto or Pidgeot. You can’t import Pidgey into Shield, and I can’t send them back to an older game, so there’s no way of evolving them. I could go back to Alpha Sapphire or another game and hunt for them, or I can just move over the ones I’ve caught on Pokémon Go.

It’s been 4 years since Go came out, and while I’m not really an “active” player, I’ve played a little when meeting up with friends and done some of the time-limited events. This means I’ve built up a healthy collection of creatures that have essentially just been dormant for the last year or two. It turns out that many of them fill in the gaps in my Living Dex.

60 of them, actually.

This was a pretty big batch to move at once.

Form Boxes

I love collecting Pokémon, but with all the form differences now available, having 1 of everything isn’t neccesarily enough. I’ve set aside some boxes in Space 2 for multiples of different forms and I’m slowly filling those up too.

I didn’t even know there was a ! or ? Unown until I started this.

This means that with Pokémon like Unown, I have an example Unown in my living Dex, then another one of that form along with its brethren in their own box. Pretty neat to see them all!

820 Down, 76 To Go

I’ve filtered a list of the Pokémon I’m missing, and the hunt for them now begins. For the rarer ones, I’ll trade on the GTS and maybe check out Reddit if I get stuck. For the more common ones, I’ll be returning to Hoenn, Johto and the rest of the world to find them.