In case you haven’t heard, Pokémon Go is all the rage right now. Yes, seriously. It’s actually a pretty fun game, once you figure out what the heck you’re doing.
You can collect coins three ways as of the time of this writing. Pay attention to get the most bang for your buck.
Get Coins
Spend Real Money
- You can spend your own hard-earned cash and purchase coins, though we’d rather not get coins that way.
Go to a Pokestop
- Visit a Pokestop. What’s a Pokestop? We’re glad you asked. Pokestops can be located in public places where many people frequent. One was spotted on my map today at a community center. (By the way, major Pokémon Go Fail! Once I got to the Pokestop, the server had issues. ☹) You can get rewards and wild Pokémon at these Pokestop locations. Once you’ve arrived at a Pokestop, you spin the image on your screen with the touchpad. As it’s spinning, items appear on your mobile display. Then, you just tap the items that appear to add them to your inventory. You can re-visit a Pokestop every ten to twelve minutes when they refresh, and get loaded with goods rather quickly. So, this is a good way to earn coins, freely, without your own real-world earnings coming into the picture.
Capture Gyms
- The third way you can earn coins is by capturing gyms. This is also the most complex of the three ways to earn coinage. Since we’re still learning about all the goodness of Pokémon Go, here’s what we know about gyms so far.
- You’ve got to be a dedicated Pokémon trainer.
- You’ll need to capture a gym and place some Pokémon there to defend it.
- You don’t have to be the gym leader; you just need to defend a friendly gym and you’ll get coins for your efforts.
- By assigning a Pokémon to your team’s gym, you’ll get what’s called a defense bonus.
- Every Pokémon stationed at a gym gets 10 gold and 500 stardust on a daily basis.
- You’ll earn this daily bonus even if you’re not a gym leader.
- You can earn a bonus for a limit of up to ten Pokémon assigned to one gym—that’s a daily bonus of up to 1,000 gold and 5,000 stardust! Assigning more than ten Pokémon is a waste of your resources and you won’t earn anything more than those daily allotments.
- In order to collect your bonus, go to the shop and tap on the shield icon.
- Rewards get recharged every twenty hours.
To find a friendly gym, look for one with the same team color as yours and start putting your Pokémon there for defense. If there aren’t any gyms that are the color of your team in the area, attack a gym with your Pokémon of similar or higher CP value. You’ll have to keep attacking until the gym’s prestige level is zero and grayed out, which means it’s neutral—then, swoop in and overtake it.
There you have it—that’s what we know about collecting coins in Pokémon Go. Now get out there and catch ’em all!
