The Pokémon Type Chart: How Move Effectiveness Works

Why type decides a battle more than stats do

A Pokémon with 130 Attack can deal less damage than one with 80 Attack. All it takes is for the first to use a move the opponent is immune to while the second hits a weakness. This isn't some theoretical edge case; it happens in every battle. Stat differences between decent Pokémon rarely go beyond double, and even then the opponent's defenses soften them. A type chart multiplier can reach four times or drop to a quarter, and in the extreme case it takes damage down to exactly zero. No stat can do that.

That gives you a simple order of thinking for every move: first check what hits what, and only then work out who has the bigger number on their stat sheet. The type chart is an eighteen-by-eighteen grid, which makes 324 cells. That sounds like something to cram, but in practice you memorize rules, not cells. We keep the full breakdown in one place, the effectiveness chart for all 18 types, and below we explain how it actually works and what follows from it.

A move has one type. A Pokémon can have two

Half of all misunderstandings come from this distinction. Every move has exactly one type; there are no dual-type moves. Flamethrower is Fire and only Fire, Ice Beam is Ice and only Ice. A Pokémon, on the other hand, has one or two types. Charmander is pure Fire, but Charizard is Fire and Flying at the same time.

The consequence is arithmetic: a move's effectiveness is calculated separately against each of the defender's types, and the results are multiplied. If the move is super effective against both of the target's types, multipliers of 2 and 2 give 4. If it's not very effective against both, 0.5 times 0.5 gives 0.25. And if one type says "double" while the other says "half," 2 times 0.5 gives 1 and you get a regular hit.

The order of the types in a Pokémon's listing makes no difference to the math. The first and second type count exactly the same; they only affect a couple of minor things outside the damage mechanics.

Four values that everything is built from

• ×2: super effective. The game tells you "It's super effective!"
• ×0.5: not very effective. "It's not very effective..."
• ×0: no effect. The move doesn't work at all, no matter how strong it is.
• ×1: neutral. The most common case; the game doesn't comment on it.

With dual types, these four values produce two more: ×4 and ×0.25. There are no other possibilities; ×3 and ×0.75 don't exist. The full scale is: 0, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4.

STAB: the same-type bonus

Same Type Attack Bonus is a ×1.5 multiplier that a move gets when it matches either of its user's types. A Pikachu using Thunderbolt gets STAB because it's an Electric type itself. The same Thunderbolt used by a Water-type Pokémon (taught by TM, for example) hits a third weaker.

STAB is multiplied together with the type chart, not used instead of it. A Machamp hitting Tyranitar (Rock/Dark) with Close Combat lands on a double weakness, ×4, and because it's a Fighting type itself it adds ×1.5 on top. That's effectively ×6. It's why a seemingly ordinary move can take out a healthy opponent in one hit.

The practical takeaway is that two STAB moves with good coverage form the backbone of most movesets, and the remaining slots are there to patch holes. When you're picking those patches, the move database comes in handy, because a move's value depends not only on its power but also on who it can touch at all.

Zeros: walls you can't break

There aren't many full immunities, and they're all worth knowing by heart, because each one is a wasted turn:

• the Ghost type ignores Normal and Fighting moves,
• the Normal type ignores Ghost moves,
• Flying ignores Ground moves,
• Ground ignores Electric moves,
• Steel ignores Poison moves,
• Dark ignores Psychic moves,
• Fairy ignores Dragon moves.

Notice the symmetry in the first two points: Normal and Ghost both can't touch each other. A pure Normal type has no way to hurt a Ghost with its own STAB, and vice versa. Historically, moves of other types broke that stalemate; these days, changing type mid-battle does it more often.

Zeros also apply to some moves that don't deal damage. Thunder Wave won't work on a Ground-type Pokémon, even though damage isn't the point here. Only the move's type matters.

Offense: what hits the widest

Two types hit five others for double damage, and they lead the offensive pack:

• Ground: super effective against Fire, Electric, Poison, Rock, and Steel; its problem is that it does nothing at all to Flying types,
• Fighting: super effective against Normal, Ice, Rock, Dark, and Steel; Ghosts stop it cold, and types such as Flying, Psychic, and Fairy resist it.

Right behind them are Ice (great against Dragon, Flying, Ground, and Grass, but blocked by Steel and Water) and Fire, which deals with Grass, Ice, Bug, and Steel. Fairy has a narrower reach, but it hits exactly where it hurts most: Dragon, Dark, and Fighting, the types that have traditionally been hard to crack.

Remember that "good on offense" doesn't mean "super effective against lots of types." It means "super effective against the types you actually run into." Ground hits Steel and Rock, the two most heavily armored types in the game, and that raises its value more than the raw number of cells in the chart.

Defense: who takes the most punishment

The Steel type is in a league of its own here. It resists ten types and is completely immune to Poison, and its weaknesses are limited to Fire, Fighting, and Ground. That's why Steel shows up so often as a secondary type: it adds resistances at almost no cost.

The Water type holds up well too (it resists Fire, Water, Ice, and Steel, and is weak to only two types), and so does the Ghost type, which adds resistances to Poison and Bug on top of its two full immunities.

At the other end sits Ice: it resists nothing but its own type, and as many as four types break it: Fire, Fighting, Rock, and Steel. Great on offense, fragile on defense. Rock is similar; despite its "armored" reputation, it has five weaknesses.

Dual types push these ratings in both directions. Grass/Steel is a mountain of resistances paid for with a quadruple weakness to Fire. Bug/Steel, like Scizor, works the same way: lots of walls, and one Flamethrower that ends the story. When you're building a team, this is easier to judge by putting candidates side by side in the Pokémon comparison tool.

Traps most players fall into

• Earthquake doesn't hit Flying types. It's the most commonly wasted move in the game. The same goes for Pokémon with Levitate, even though they aren't Flying types.
• A double weakness hurts more than a double resistance protects. Shrugging off three quarters of the damage is nice, but quadruple damage usually just ends the fight.
• Neutral doesn't mean weak. A strong STAB move with no multiplier often does more than a feeble move aimed at a weakness.
• Poison breaks almost nothing. It's super effective only against Grass and Fairy, and Steel ignores it completely.
• Dragon is super effective only against Dragon, and since Generation VI it's completely helpless against Fairy.
• Two types aren't always an advantage. A second type adds resistances, but it adds weaknesses too. Combinations like Grass/Psychic have seven of them.

How the chart has changed over the years

The first generation had fifteen types and a few rules that look odd today: Poison was super effective against Bug back then, and Psychic types had no real counter in practice.

The second generation added two types: Dark and Steel. Dark was created as a direct answer to Psychic: it's super effective against Psychic types and completely immune to their moves. Steel brought solid defense into the game and reined in Normal moves.

The sixth generation introduced Fairy, for similar reasons. The Dragon type had spent years as a premium type: super effective against itself, hard to punish, and assigned to Pokémon with high stats. Fairy is completely immune to Dragon moves, hits Dragons for double damage itself, and puts Dark and Fighting types in their place along the way. In the same update, Steel lost its resistances to Ghost and Dark.

The core of the chart hasn't changed since then. Eighteen types is still where things stand today.

Tera Types: Gen IX bends the rules

Scarlet and Violet added Terastallization: once per battle, a Pokémon can take on its Tera Type, which replaces its original types on defense. A Charizard with a Dragon Tera Type stops being four times weak to Rock, because it's no longer Fire or Flying. Moves of the Tera Type gain STAB, and if the Tera Type matches one of the original types, the bonus goes up from ×1.5 to ×2.

As a result, the type chart is no longer public information. You see a Pokémon and you know its types, but you don't know whether it's about to turn into something that ignores the counter you prepared. None of this cancels out anything above. If anything, it demands that you know the chart in both directions, because you have to predict not only what the opponent has, but also what it might turn into.

What to do with all this in practice

Don't learn 324 cells. Learn three things: the full set of immunities (there are seven), the weaknesses of the types you run into most often, and your own team, meaning what it's collectively vulnerable to. A team in which three Pokémon go down to Ground moves loses to a single Earthquake, no matter how great each of them is on its own.

You'll pick up the rest as you go. Keep the full type chart and the individual type profiles handy, and after a few dozen battles you'll start seeing most matchups without checking.