Breeding: a second game inside the same game
Beating the story takes a team that can hold its own. Battling a live opponent takes a team that's been built, with a specific nature, a specific IV spread, a specific Ability, and moves the species doesn't learn by leveling up. All four of those are decided during breeding, before the Pokémon even hatches from its Egg.
That's why breeding is sometimes called a second game. It has its own rules, its own items, and its own economy of time, and the only thing tying it to the rest is that the result ends up on the same team. This article walks through the mechanics in order, from the question of "who can breed with whom," through what the baby inherits, to the tricks that cut the whole process from weeks down to hours.
Who breeds with whom: Egg Groups
Two Pokémon will produce an Egg if they meet three conditions at once: they share an Egg Group, they're of opposite genders, and neither belongs to the "No Eggs Discovered" group. An Egg Group is a biological label that's invisible in the game, and a Pokémon can belong to one or two of them. In our database, 367 of 1350 species have two groups, which greatly widens their pool of partners.
Egg Groups have nothing to do with type. Charizard is Fire/Flying, but it breeds in the Monster and Dragon groups. Gyarados is Water/Flying, yet it sits in Water 2 and Dragon, which is why moves can be passed between it and Charizard even though at first glance they're completely different creatures. You'll find the full list with every species assigned in the Egg Groups section.
The largest group is Field (ground in our data) with 368 species. It's a catch-all category for four-legged land animals, and it's the one that most often saves the day when you're looking for a partner to pass on a move.
Who can't be bred at all
The database has 216 species in the "No Eggs Discovered" group, and that's a hard wall: you can't breed any of them, not even with Ditto. Three categories end up there:
- Legendary and Mythical Pokémon. Mewtwo, Rayquaza, Arceus: the series consistently defends the rule that a one-of-a-kind Pokémon stays one of a kind.
- Baby forms. Pichu, Igglybuff, and Riolu can't breed yet. To get a Pichu, you breed an adult Pikachu or Raichu.
- A few story exceptions, including Ultra Beasts and the Paradox forms from the ninth generation.
If you're building a team around a Legendary, breeding won't help. All that's left is hunting for the right one under the right conditions.
Ditto, the universal key
Ditto belongs to its own one-member Egg Group and has no gender. The rule is that it gets along with anyone who can breed at all, regardless of their group. That makes it the single most important tool in all of breeding.
Ditto is also the only way to breed genderless species. There are 241 of them in the database: Magnemite, Voltorb, Klink, the entire Golett line, and the rest of the constructs. Without Ditto, they have no one to breed with.
The practical lesson for anyone starting out: get a Ditto with good IVs before you breed anything else. A Ditto with six maxed IVs is a tool that will serve your whole team, and once caught it lasts for years.
Gender decides who hatches
The Egg hatches into the mother's species, in its lowest evolutionary stage. The father doesn't pass on the species; he passes on moves and some of the stats. When one of the parents is Ditto, the species comes from the other parent.
That's why gender ratios matter in practice, and they can be lopsided. In our database:
- 803 species have a 50/50 ratio, so there's no problem here,
- 166 species are 87.5% male, meaning a female turns up roughly once in eight (the entire starter lineup works this way),
- 34 species are male only, and 48 are female only,
- 241 species have no gender at all.
A male-only species, like Tauros or Hitmonlee, can't produce offspring of its own species without Ditto, because the mother will always be someone else. It's the most common trap people fall into the first time they try to breed a starter.
IVs, or what it's all for
Every Pokémon has six hidden values from 0 to 31, one for each stat. These are called IVs, and they're the reason two Charizard at the same level have different numbers. The IV mechanics themselves are covered in a separate article on IVs, EVs, and natures; here, all that matters is how they pass from parents to baby.
By default, the baby gets three IVs inherited at random from its parents, and the other three are rolled from scratch. Three out of six is too few to plan anything around, and that's exactly why there's an item that changes it.
Destiny Knot: the most important item in breeding
A parent holding a Destiny Knot makes the baby inherit five IVs instead of three, drawn from the pool of both parents' twelve values. Only one stays random.
That turns breeding from a lottery into a procedure. The standard approach looks like this: take the best parent you have, give it the Destiny Knot, and each new generation will statistically have more good IVs than the last. A baby better than its parent goes back into breeding in that parent's place. After a few rounds you reach five or six maxed values.
Power items: targeting a specific stat
The six items in the Power family (Weight, Bracer, Belt, Anklet, Lens, Band) guarantee the IV of one assigned stat gets passed on. Power Weight passes on HP, Power Bracer passes on Attack, Power Lens passes on Special Attack, and so on.
They work together with the Destiny Knot: a Power item on one parent locks in one stat, and the Destiny Knot on the other fills in the rest. It's how you secure that last missing value once everything else is right.
Watch out for a side effect: Power items slow a Pokémon down in battle and add EVs. That doesn't matter for breeding itself, but don't forget to take them off before you send anyone into battle.
Nature and Everstone
A nature changes two stats by 10%, one up and one down, and it's one of the first things you need to settle when building a Pokémon. Without intervention, the baby rolls one of 25 natures, which gives it a 4% chance of getting the one you want.
A parent holding an Everstone passes its nature on to the offspring. In newer generations this works every time, and it doesn't matter whether the mother or the father holds it. In practice, that means you set the nature once and then stop thinking about it.
The Everstone has a second, unrelated use: held by a Pokémon in your party, it blocks that Pokémon's evolution. Same name, same item, completely different function, and it's easy to mix the two up when reading guides.
Abilities, including Hidden Abilities
The baby usually inherits its Ability from the mother (or, when paired with Ditto, from the parent that isn't Ditto). Species with two regular Abilities pass theirs on with a high probability, but not with 100% certainty, so sometimes you have to try again.
A Hidden Ability is a separate matter and the most common reason anyone starts breeding in the first place. A parent with a Hidden Ability passes it on in roughly three cases out of five, so statistically a few Eggs are enough, but you should know it isn't guaranteed. The key point: you need to get the Hidden Ability from somewhere to begin with. Breeding copies it but doesn't create it from nothing; the source is specific in-game encounters, Raids, or trades.
Egg Moves
Some moves don't appear on the level-up list of any version of a given species. You can only get them by breeding from a parent that knows them. These are Egg Moves, and sometimes they're the whole reason a particular set works at all.
In older games only the father could pass on a move; in newer ones both parents can. That's where all the gymnastics with breeding chains come from: to pass a move to species A, you find a species B that shares an Egg Group and knows the move, breed through it, and only then come back to A. The shared Egg Groups in our section exist precisely so you can plan a chain like that instead of guessing.
Newer games in the series have simplified this: there are now ways to pass on a move without a full breeding cycle, and some games let you relearn an Egg Move for a fee. Before you lay out a four-generation chain, check whether your version has a shortcut.
Shinies with the Masuda method
The default chance of a shiny variant is roughly one in four thousand. The Masuda method involves breeding two Pokémon that come from games in different languages. The game checks where that particular Pokémon originally comes from, not the console settings. With a pair like that, the odds go up several times over and drop to around one in six-hundred-something.
The Shiny Charm, awarded for completing the Pokédex, multiplies the effect once more. Combining the two is standard for anyone hunting shinies from Eggs, and it can still eat up an evening, so it's worth doing with something else going on in the background.
A practical note: a foreign-language Ditto is the most valuable piece of this setup, because it works with every species at once. That's the second reason it pays to get a good Ditto early.
Hatching
An Egg hatches after you walk a certain number of steps, which differs for each species, from very short for common creatures to very long for rare and powerful ones. We list it for every species, in the breeding section of its page: Pikachu needs 10 cycles, Dragonite 40.
Mind the unit. The game counts cycles, not steps, and the cycle count is the fact about the species. How many steps make up one cycle depends on the specific game: in the third and fourth generations it was about 255, in the fifth and later a bit more, and Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet cut the wait noticeably. That's why the step count on the page is rounded and labeled as an approximation: the same value in a different game can be off by several hundred.
The time is cut in half if your party includes a Pokémon with the Ability Flame Body or Magma Armor. It doesn't have to be in the first slot or take part in battles; it just has to be in your party. It's the simplest optimization in all of breeding, and there's no reason not to use it.
Quirks you need to know about
- Nidoran. The male and female are separate species in the game, with separate evolution lines. Either one can hatch from the female's Egg.
- Volbeat and Illumise. The same setup: two separate species where only one lays the Egg. Illumise is female only, Volbeat is male only, and either one can hatch from an Illumise Egg.
- Manaphy and Phione. Manaphy is Mythical, but, unusually for a Mythical, it can produce an Egg, and that Egg hatches into Phione. Phione doesn't evolve into Manaphy and never will. It's the only exception of its kind in the series.
- Poké Ball inheritance. In newer generations the baby can inherit its ball from a parent. It's purely cosmetic, but for some players it's the main reason to breed. The Master Ball and Cherish Ball aren't passed on.
- Regional forms. Breeding usually gives you the form that matches the mother, not the region you happen to be playing in. It's a frequent source of confusion with Alolan and Galarian variants.
How to put it all together
The order that saves the most time looks like this:
- Get a good Ditto, ideally foreign-language and with maxed IVs. It'll handle everything you do afterward.
- Set the nature and lock it in with an Everstone. From that point on, it stops being a variable.
- Give the Destiny Knot to the other parent and breed generation after generation, swapping out the parent every time a baby comes out better.
- Fill in the missing stat with the right Power item once only one is left.
- Egg Moves come last: only once the parent has the right IVs and nature should you look for a partner with the move you need.
- Keep Flame Body in your party for the whole session.
You can check the results of this procedure right away: enter the calculated stats into the IV calculator to confirm what you hatched, then use the damage calculator to see whether the set you built actually does what you wanted. Without that last step, breeding can turn into perfectly executed work on a Pokémon that still doesn't beat what you had before.