Pokemon Go Making Your Own Poke Tracker

Pokemon Go Making Your Own Poke Tracker by JTobcat

So below is my guide to how I made a spawn map of my entire neighborhood and how I use it to track any Pokemon that show up on my radar without having footsteps to follow. If you are looking for something that will find you that Snorlax 2 miles away, this isn’t it, but if you are looking for an eventual method to find that Snorlax that pops up on your nearby list in your neighborhood while the tracker is broken, this is it, assuming you put in some legwork ahead of time. Especially with the fall of all the Poke tracking websites I figured I’d share what I did below.

*Step 1: * Document all Poke spawns and spawn times in your neighborhood via the slow or fast method described below. This requires creating a Google My Map that you add markers to. For those of you not aware, Pokemon spawn points spawn one Pokemon at the exact same time every hour. So if you see a Pokemon appear at 12:18, another Pokemon will appear there at the :18 minute mark every hour, 24 hours a day. That is the info you are collecting.

Slow Method

This method I consider the method that I don’t believe violates the ToS as you aren’t illegally accessing anything. This involves wandering around your neighborhood and dropping a pin onto your Google My Map every time you see a Pokemon and the time you saw it. For speed I would recommend not wasting time catching the Pokemon unless you really need it, just drop a pin exactly on the map where the Pokemon is (not where your avatar is) and label the pin with the minute you found it (so if it’s 1:24, label the pin 24) and move on to find more Pokemon. I’d leave the pin red as a reminder that the spawn is still in the rough stages. I recommend doing this for a few hours, different days, taking different paths. I did this for 2 hours over two days and had about ~50 different spawn points located. The next step is to fine tune these spawn points and find out the exact spawn time. This involves going to any spawn point you previously found at least 15 minutes ahead of time and waiting for the Pokemon to show up. When the Pokemon pops up on your screen, he just spawned, so find that marker on your Google My Maps and update the time on it with the next exact time (to the seconds if you wish) and change the color to something saying you validated it (ie. green). Basically you repeat this process continually until you eventually end up with something like this (Ignore my color scheme as I color coded mine for trying to find rare Pokemon spawns). Obviously this is a very slow process, but if you plan to play this game for months, I’d estimate this wouldn’t take you more than a few hours over a few days to find a majority of your spawn points in your neighborhood.

Fast Method Obviously people are lazy and want a faster way, but this involves hoping Poke Scanner apps come back online which involves violating the ToS. I spent 2 days collecting 50 spawn locations the slow way before finding out about Pokevision, and it took one night of scanning my neighborhood to find every spawn point, and knowing the exact spawn time. So until a scanner app comes back, you are stuck with the slow method to document.

Step 2: Now that you collected all your spawn points, how do you use this to track Pokemon you ask? That involves making custom minute maps like this one. The map should be pretty self explanatory, but what it is showing, is if it is 2:35 right now and I look at this map, I know exactly where every Pokemon in my neighborhood is and how long until it despawns. I made them in 5 minute increments (so have 12 maps total) as I think that’s the best time window vs total number of maps. How I made the map above is pretty straight forward. First I decided what minute marker map I wanted to make first, in this case the :35 map. I duplicated my Google My Maps spawn map and deleted out all the points that didn’t fall between :20-:35 (since Pokemon only spawn for 15 minute increments, anything before the :20 mark is already gone), next I colored every dot black that fell between :20-:22, red for :22-:25, yellow for :25-:30 and green for :30-:35. I then added a clock marker in the corner, in this case :35. You then repeat this for every 5 minute increment until you have all 12 maps.

Step 3: This last step involves you creating a 200m radius ring TO SCALE that will act as your Pokemon range. How I did this is when I took a snapshot of the map in the above picture, I took a measurement of whatever the scale was in google maps in the bottom corner and extrapolated it to make a 200m radius (400m diameter circle) which is the current range of you Pokemon nearby. I also created a smaller 35m radius (70m diameter) circle in the center to represent my visible Pokemon range. I printed this out and traced it onto a transparency.

How to use Now that you have created your maps, I recommend printing each one out and carrying it with you along with your Pokemon range circle you made in step 3. When you are out walking around and a Charizard shows up on your radar, take a look at the time, pull out the corresponding map and lay your Pokemon circle on top of your current location and you know exactly where every Pokemon is that’s on your nearby list, so just run to each spot (black first, then red, yellow, green) until the Charizard pops up

Finally, if people find this beneficial and an app dev wants to take a stab at streamlining this with an app, they are more than welcome too. (ie, an app where in find mode you drop a pin and it auto records the time you dropped it and you can fine tune the time by clicking on it once you know it, and then in track mode it automatically creates the time map based off the current clock time and shows the 200m radius ring and locks it in place from your initial position so you can see where all the spawn points are. I would say each person maintains their own unique map rather than a giant crowd sourced map to avoid trolls, but maybe there is a way to added trusted pins from friends to your map so you can build your maps with friends. And maybe a way to log what Pokemon you find to possibly determine which are rare spawns.