Pokemon Sun and Moon Bottle Cap Farming Guide

Pokemon Sun and Moon Bottle Cap Farming Guide by rcs_

With the release of Sun and Moon, a new mechanic was introduced — Hyper Training. By using a Gold Bottle Cap or a regular Bottle Cap, you can max out the specified IV or all IV’s of your pokemon by visiting Mr. Hyper in the Hau’oli City Shopping Mall. Unfortunately, Bottle Caps are exceedingly rare items and are difficult to obtain, as they cannot be bought from shops. I was rather disappointed when I learned of this, so I searched for a consistent and fast way to obtain them. A common misconception that I’ve seen from both videos and guides on other websites is that Poke Pelago is the fastest way to obtain them. However, it isn’t, and I’ll be showing you why in this guide! You can find more about Hyper Training and the pros/cons of it here: http://www.serebii.net/sunmoon/hypertraining.shtml

By far, the speediest and most efficient way to farm Bottle Caps is via the Festival Plaza. You can find the Festival Plaza by accessing the menu in-game. The Festival Plaza features a variety of facilities and shops. We’re going to focus on the lottery aspect of these facilities. There are three haunted houses and three lottery shops. To see a list of the available prizes from these facilities, please look here: http://www.serebii.net/sunmoon/festivalplaza.shtml

The best facility to win Bottle Caps from is the lottery shop “Treasure Hunt.” Compared to the haunted houses which only have one Bottle Cap prize instead of two, the odds of winning Bottle Caps through Treasure Hunt are much higher. You’ll need to fill your Festival Plaza with multiple Treasure Hunts. However, even with the two highest prizes being Bottle Caps, your chances of winning these are still rather low, since the higher the prize, the lower your chances of winning it become. Furthermore, you can only use each facility once per day. But, fear not! There are 5 ranks of every facility. The higher your rank, the better the facility becomes. If you have a rank five Treasure Hunt, your chances of winning a top prize increase dramatically. You can have up to seven facilities in your Plaza. If five of these are rank 5 Treasure Hunts, chances are you’ll leave your plaza with 2-3 additional bottle caps daily.

To rank up your facilities, you’ll need to participate in missions and rank up your Plaza. Each time your Plaza ranks up, Sophocles will offer you a new facility for your Plaza. To rank up your Plaza, you’ll need to gain Festival Coins. The amount of Festival Coins you’ll need increases each time your Plaza ranks up. You’ll need to talk to guests in your Plaza to get to rank 4, as you cannot participate in missions until then. For more information on missions, please refer to this fine guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemon/comments/5ebt2t/festival_plaza_coins_facilities_and_missions/

Getting Started – Missions

Once you are able to participate in group missions, the first thing you’ll want to do is play the “Type matchup tests” and “Inverse type matchup tests” missions. You can win up to 50 FC on the former, and 60 on the latter. You can win 60 FC with “Show off Muscles” as well, but this approach is not optimal, as most people do not play this mission. There also appears to be an element of randomness involved here, so because of these two things getting consistently high results is less likely. Please note that to fill your Plaza with multiple highly-ranked Treasure Hunts, you’ll need to spend many hours participating in these missions. If you want the Bottle Caps as much as I, though, hopefully this time is well spent. You can also earn FC by chatting with guests in the Plaza and talking with guests after a trade, as they appear in the castle. However, you earn far less FC through the trade route.

When you reach Plaza rank 8, you’ll be able to purchase facilities from other players, which is a very important factor in this guide. Don’t spend your FC on other facilities, as you’ll want to save it for Treasure Hunt. Every few ranks, check your guest list and look for highly ranked Plazas, as the higher ranked they are, the more likely that they’ll have high ranked facilities. A rank of 25 and over should do. Simply interact with the guest and choose “Do you know any good facilities?” from the speech bubble. If you get lucky and encounter someone that has a rank 5 Treasure Hunt, immediately add this person to your VIP list so that you can buy it repeatedly and fill your Plaza when you have enough FC later on. You can do this by choosing “I’ll register you as my VIP!” from the speech bubble. Purchasing a rank 5 Treasure Hunt from a guest will cost 1500 FC, and this price will increase by 1500 more each time you purchase another one. Should you obtain a rank 5 Treasure Hunt, please place it in the first slot of your Plaza so other players can purchase it from you. You can do this by speaking to the construction worker in the Plaza castle.

Sophocles will offer you better facilities as you continue to climb the ranks. He’s offered me a rank 4 Treasure Hunt in the mid 60’s, and I’ve heard that five star facilities are offered once you reach level 80/90. To completely fill your plaza with Treasure Hunts, you’ll need to continue playing until then. Each time you rank up, please speak to Sophocles before you rank up again, as you will skip the reward you would have gained from ranking up the first time should you rank up once more.

When you’ve filled your Plaza with Treasure Hunts, it may also be wise to include a Fortune Teller among them, as it supposedly increases your chances of winning a top prize should you follow its directions. I have yet to confirm this for myself, though.

Once you finally have your highly ranked Plaza filled with these, you should be finished! If you want to obtain even more Bottle Caps daily, there are two more ways: Poke Pelago and fishing. Fishing can work if you grind for long lengths of time and only want a small amount of caps, but in the long run it is unreliable. The next best way to obtain them is through Poke Pelago, although my method is different than that I’ve seen from several people.

Poke Pelago

Start by ranking up Isle Abeens, as this is the most important Isle which will allow you to rank up your other Isles faster. Once you’ve finished ranking this up, move on to Isle Aphun, which is where you’ll send your pokemon on 24 hour long missions to collect items. Most sources believe that sending them on the “Odd-Shard Hunting” mission is best, as when you collect 30 shards you can trade them for Bottle Caps through the man in the Festival Plaza castle. However, you can only obtain 4-6 shards per trip, and you need 30 shards of each color to trade for only a single bottle cap. It will take up to 5 days to get 30 shards if you’re lucky, but you’ll need to get 30 of each color before you can trade them, so you’d need another week to complete this task. I believe Rare-Treasure Hunting is the better option over Odd-Shard Hunting, as one of the prizes is a Gold Bottle Cap. See for yourself here: http://www.serebii.net/sunmoon/pokepelago.shtml

There should be a 40-50% chance of winning a Gold Bottle Cap per trip. You can shorten the length of these 24-hour trips by placing beans in the crate. With enough beans, the speed of the trip is doubled, so you should be able to send your pokemon on two Rare-Treasure Hunting missions per day.

I’d like to add that if you change the time on your 3DS, you won’t be able to use the facilities for 48 hours. This is Nintendo’s way of keeping players from manipulating facilities, but some warning on their part would’ve been appreciated…

Good luck, and happy Bottle Cap hunting!

Edit: Recently, a way has been found to farm Bottle Caps for the price of 150-200 FC each. Please try this out for yourself!

As most of you know you can get bottle caps from the festival plaza lottery. What you probably don’t know, is that you can get guaranteed bottle caps if you know what you are doing. Here’s how to do it.

Requirements: Festival Plaza Rank 8

Step 1: Find someone in your plaza that can give an introduction to the Treasure Hunt (2 stars) facility.

Step 2: Add that person to your VIP list.

Step 3: Get the facility.

Step 3.5: Go to the new facility immediately after to get your first guaranteed bottle cap.

Step 4: Make sure it is the only Treasure Hunt (2 stars) facility in your plaza (this will make farming bottle cops alot cheaper).

Step 5: Go to your castle and page that person you just added to your VIP list.

Step 6: Ask that person to add the same facility to your plaza, and replace it with the old one (will cost 200FC).

Step 7: Immediately go to the Treasure Hunt (2 stars) facility and get your guaranteed bottle cap.

Step 8: Repeat steps 5-7 and you will get guaranteed bottle caps for the effective price of 200FC each.

Edit: You can get bottle caps for 150FC each if you switch bewteen replacing 1 star facilities and the Treasure Hunt 2 stars.