15 secret Pokemon Go tips and tricks that’ll take your game to the next level

Despite the fact that it launched nearly three months ago, there’s still plenty we don’t know about Pokemon Go. We don’t know where to find Ditto, we don’t know when Legendary Pokemon will be added to the game and we don’t know why everyone in the world seems to have a Dragonite other than us.

Thankfully, members of The Silph Road community on Reddit have banded together to eliminate our ignorance with a list of mechanics that aren’t made obvious in the game, but will make your playing experience much smoother.

Here’s the complete list,

1. You can tap the “Oh?” screen with two fingers to skip the hatch animation 
2. Tapping on the “transfer succeeded” banner dismisses it
3. Clicking on the compass aligns the view with north, clicking again dynamically moves the view to align with where your phone is facing
4. Swiping up during a gym battle brings up the switch ‘mon screen
5. There is a slider at the side of the pokemon screen that allows you to scroll through the entire list without dragging up multiple times 
6. Press and hold the pokeball menu button then drag and release on whichever thing you want to open, saving an extra tap 
7. If you tap to the left or right of a Pokemon’s CP number when looking at its details, you will navigate to the previous or next Pokemon in the list 
8. Tapping multiple Pokemon at once in the heal/revive screens heals/revives every Pokemon tapped, so you don’t have to heal/revive individually 
9. If you tap the appraisal screen with 1,2, or 3 fingers, it’ll skip that many screens. 
10. Evolving a Pokemon awards you with one candy. So if you have a Squirtle and 124 candy, you’ll have the 100 for a Blastoise after evolving to Wartortle. 
11. On the map screen tap once then quickly press and hold to zoom in and out by moving your finger up and down (during the hold), an alternative to pinch to zoom. 
12. Clicking the Candy icon in the buddy screen allows you to see your buddy’s CP/Moves/Total Candy Count. 
13. When you delete a Pokémon’s name a press “OK” it will revert to its default name 
14. You can swipe through gym defenders while your team roster is up. 
15. You don’t need to click “OK” on the Pokemon captured dialog, just click somewhere on the screen. This allows you to get out of the post capture screens quickly by tapping twice where the checkbox is on the stats screen. 

It’s frustrating that none of these mechanics are explained by the game itself, but it does give dedicated trainers a reason to go online and interact with the rest of the Pokemon Go community. Maybe that’s the point? If so, very clever, Niantic.

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