XP

For more Pokemon Go information, trading and discussion, check out our Forum XP or Experience Points are points that allow your character to level up.

First let’s talk leveling. Leveling in this game can get quite tedious since you have to accumulate more and more XP to level up (like in most games).

Luckily you get XP for a lot of things in this game. Visiting a pokestop, evolving pokemon, catching pokemon, hatching eggs, winning a battle against an enemy gym, etc. The only things that didn’t give me XP were increasing Pokemon's CP.

Still there are some other ways to increase the amount of XP you get. The simplest one is throwing a curveball when catching a pokemon. If you spin the ball in a circular motion and throw it diagonally at one of the edges of the screen it will curve towards a pokemon and you get 10XP ‘curve bonus’ if you manage to catch it that way. This also seems to work without spinning the ball and just throwing it diagonally towards one of the edges on the screen, at which the ball will curve towards the pokemon you’re trying to catch.

Another way of increasing the amount of XP you get while catching pokemon, is to throw the poke ball in the colored circle. The smaller the circle is, the higher the bonus. These bonuses are respectively Nice (10XP), Great (50XP) and Excellent (100XP). You only get them if you actually catch the pokemon with that throw and sometimes the game is a bit quirky in registering these bonuses. The last bonus that involves catching is a 500XP bonus for catching a pokemon that isn’t in your pokedex.

For visiting a pokestop you get 50XP, for winning a battle you get something along the lines of 20-30 XP (it seems to vary, but the trend is that you won’t get much) and the same is true for training at a gym your team controls.

Now the pro-tip. Use a Lucky Egg when you have one, but use it wisely. For every pokemon that you evolve you get 500XP and for every egg that hatches you get 1000XP (+500XP if the pokemon that came out of it isn’t in your pokedex yet).

So the tip is, activate your lucky egg (which is active for 30 min.) when you have three or more eggs on the brink of hatching. When they hatch you’ll get 2000XP per egg + 1000XP for every pokemon that isn’t in your pokedex (chances are that one of them isn’t in your pokedex since eggs are a great way to get pokemon that normall don’t spawn in your area).

When the eggs are hatched, evolve every pokemon you saved up for this moment and you will get 1000XP for every evolve.

With a bit of planning this will gain you at least 10000XP which is about the same amount that you need for leveling up around lvl12.

A rule of thumb concerning eggs is that eggs with a longer distance typically give you rare pokemon. Although the list isn’t 100% correct (I got a Magicarp out of a 2km and a 5km egg).