Pokemon Sun and Moon Making Most of Festival Plaza

Pokemon Sun and Moon Making Most of Festival Plaza by Naskr

It seems that discussion regarding the Festival Plaza is pretty minimal. Discussion about it isn’t really done, people know all the tricks, or they don’t know any and have sort of written it off based on the impression they got of this feature a few weeks ago.

However, more discoveries have been made regarding its potential use, so I think it’s worth reviewing and discussing it, in this case i’m going to make a guide reviewing the best way to level up Festival Plaza, how to use it efficiently and what benefits it provides that are worth focusing on. This does not really take into account personal preferences of each player, but rather turning the Plaza into a tool that capitalizes on its most unique benefits – and the easiest, least tedious way to do it.

1) What is the Festival Plaza good for?

Obviously it’s the hub for online activities, we know that, but more specifically what shops/facilities are worthwhile? In my personal opinion, these are the most valuable facilities to use. Keep in mind that most facilities only unlock your true potential when you have become Champion and have reached level 30 in the plaza, so you need to do this – but this isn’t too hard if you know how to farm, which will be discussed below.

Rare Kitchen ★★★★★

You can level up pokemon manually, but past a certain level the scaling drops off and leveling up becomes a slog. Getting a pokemon to Level 100 was pretty meaningless in past games, but now with Super Training it’s actually very valuable for getting the best competitive value out of Shinies, Legendaries or your personal favorite pokemon. An upgraded Kitchen also makes leveling up those pseudo-legendaries a bit more convenient (looking at you, Hydreigon).

Rare Kitchens are pretty worthless at the beginning, and their level caps are dumb and expensive. For Rare Kitchens to be worthwhile you need to have Festival Plaza at Level 30, and have beaten the League, this unlocks the Rare Dinner which provides 7 level-ups for 100 FC (This is SUPER EFFICIENT VALUE, seriously, this is absurdly cheap). It also unlocks Rare Buffet, which is 300 FC for 9 levels – not quite as value as Rare Dinner, but has a higher level cap which is a huge boon for when you’re trying to boost all the way to Level 100.

The only downside is you can’t use Rare Kitchen to get all the way to 100 due to the level caps. Check out this guide for more in-depth information.

Rare Kitchen ★★★★

They’re cheaper to buy than Rare Kitchen 5-star, and if you’re a Moon player they’re unfortunately the highest Rare Kitchen you’ll get without buying one directly from another player. What makes them still worthwhile is they have the “Rare Dinner” option.

Dye Shop ★★★★★

This service is, in essence, unique to Festival Plaza, which makes it worthwhile if you’re into trainer customization. What colors are best is your personal preference, but keep in mind that at 5-stars you can get the “Dark” and “Pastel” versions of every other color using Berries. 5-stars also get the rarest “Bright” version, but only of the color the shop matches – so if you want to be the most fabulous you need Dye Shop Pink at 5-stars to get those bubblegum pink clothes.

Treasure Hunt ★★★★★

There are three different types of Lotteries, but this is by far the best because its grand prize is a Gold Bottlecap. In practice this isn’t that impressive because you get one-shot a day to actually get one, and it is quite rare. If you need to do Supertraining, you can actually use a more much reliable and efficient method for getting normal Bottlecaps.

Treasure Hunt ★ or ★★

“Wait, what?” I hear you say. As I mentioned above, there is a way to reliably get normal Bottlecaps, and this is how. Every time you get a new Lottery Shop in your festival plaza, you are guaranteed to get a normal Bottlecap as your first prize. New shops reset the daily timer, too. ★ and ★★ Treasure Hunt are cheap to buy, so you can keep buying this off a friend or other player and replacing your previous Treasure Hunt to get a new bottlecap each time. Buying shops does cost FC, which means in essence you are spending 150 or 200 FC for a Bottlecap, but it is at least consistent. Remember that duplicate shops cost more to buy, hence why you need to alternate between ★ and ★★ stars each time you want a new one.

General Store ★★★★★

Not my personal preference, but you can buy a PP-Up from here once a day for 200 FC. Not worth it in my opinion, but if you need as many PP-Ups as you can get and you have FC to spare, it’s useful.

Fortune Teller Tent ★★★★★

“Wait, aren’t these useless?” When the game was just out, most people wrote these off as not that useful – as it turns out, they provide buffs that increase your FC gain, making Festival Plaza grinding easier. They might also increase your luck in the Haunted House and Lottery. You can combine this knowledge with another exploit to make your Festival Plaza point grinding as painless as possible.

2) What is not really worthwhile in Festival Plaza?

• In short, everything other than what I just mentioned above. The shops provide items you can buy easily in game, Ball Shops you would think provide extra Apricorn balls, but nope, they don’t.
• The cafes that aren’t Rare Kitchen and the Bouncy Houses are expensive and less efficient ways of EV training considering you have both EV Chaining and Poke Pelago as an option. When it comes to reducing EVs/adding friendship, there are Berries that also do this and you can farm loads of them at Poke Pelago, they’re also free.
• The other Lottery Shops that aren’t Treasure Hunt aren’t worth it. If you want a Lottery, this Grand Prize is much better than the other top prizes which are just a Masterball and Big Nugget.
• Haunted Houses provide no useful prizes and they COST FC to use, whilst Lotteries are free. You can sometimes get free bottlecaps, but otherwise this is unreliable and not worth it.
• Pretty much anything that isn’t 3-5 stars is not worth your time, with the exception of Fortune Teller Tents which you will need as many of as possible if you want to grind.

Of course this is all personal preference. If you really want to use FC on minerals or pokeballs, or you want a bunch of Bouncy Houses and Friendship Cafes to make EV training even easier, there’s nothing stopping you. Festival Plaza provides facilities for every way you like to play Pokemon, not just one.

3) How to get FC fast.

Remember that Inverse Type Match-up is the best mission to farm points on, provides the most points per time and is easy when you get used to it. Remember to join in on other missions and only use your own tickets when necessary. Make sure also to talk to people who’s names are Red when you walk past them, sometimes they can give you some points for little effort.

To really increase your FC gain, stack Fortune Tents.

it’s quite simple – get Fortune Teller tents. Their “fortune” is often simply a buff placed on your Festival Plaza, which will increase FC gains on Missions, the people you talk to, and also points earned after GTS and Wonder Trades. The more you have, and the higher level you have, the better chance of getting good buffs.

Fill your festival plaza, and hope for the best buffs. Your most desired situation is to get a “Very Good” buff for Festival Plaza activities, and a “Very Good” buff for Wonder Trades. The buffs stack, meaning you can potentially get 32 points every time you do a wonder trade. Once you have this buff, you can basically just keep WTing over and over again and getting 32 points every minute, which is easily the quickest way to level up and amass points.

If you have get the GTS buff with the Festival Plaza buff you can get 64 points for a GTS trade, which if you have a friend to trade with means an even faster method of farming FC. If you’re alone you can often trade exclusives for exclusives, or more reliably trade an evolved pokemon with a hold item for its pre-volution (i.e. Trade your Magmortar for their Magmar with Magmariser)

You can also get other things like buffs which increase Mission points by 1.5x, and remember that Festival Plaza buffs yield lots of points from the people you can talk to (up to 120 points just by telling someone to go to a shop)

4) How to get the Facilities you want.

More specifically, learn this exploit to make your plaza more useful, faster.

Facilities are assigned on a random basis every time you level up, or you can buy them from friends. Some facilities, particularly the 5-star ones are pretty expensive (costing 1500 FC) just to get them in your game, and duplicates cost double. However, you can exploit this level up process to keep re-rolling until you get one you want. In particular if you’re looking to gather Fortune Telling tents, or get a specific facility then this is easier then leveling up each time, and cheaper than buying one.

The game will try to stop you from savescumming festival plaza too much, but you can get round this when it comes to getting the new facilities on level-up.

In essence, what you need to do is:

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• 1) Get enough FC to level up Festival Plaza
• 2) Wait for the announcement (with the confetti) that tells you to come inside.
• 3) Once this has happened, DO NOT enter the castle. Stay outside.
• 4) Keep farming FC outside the castle (i.e. do missions, talk to people)
• 5) Try to get enough FC so that you are close to leveling up again – you want to be 2 or 4 points off leveling up again.
• 6) Once you are 2 or 4 points off the next level-up, go on to the GTS or Wonder Trade and perform a trade, depending on what your gap is (GTS gives 4 points, WT gives 2 points)
• 7) Now go offline, quit the plaza, save your game

This is the point you reload from if you don’t get your desired result

• 8) Go inside the castle, Sophocles will give you a new facility. This will ALWAYS be the same. Whether you choose to keep it or not doesn’t matter.
• 9) NOW, talk to the person to the right of you next to the table, they will give you the bonus for doing a trade
• 10) This now levels up your castle again and Sophocles gives you a new facility.
• 11) THIS facility is random, and will change every time you reload. If you like it, keep it, otherwise reload and do the process again. It’s somewhat tedious but it doesn’t take too long.

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In essence, when Sophocles offers you a facility, the game then rolls for the facility you will then get afterwards, so you can simply get two facilities back to back and control the outcome of the second one.

Keep in mind this trick won’t work for the “scripted” events or the facility you get following them, i.e Level 20 is guaranteed to always be Sophocles saying you can change your name and 21’s facility was rolled at level 19, so it won’t change. Only do this trick for levels #2-#8 or past Level 100.

Keep in mind that the higher your plaza level, the better chance of getting the 5-star facilities, so at low levels you should use this to get 1-3 star Fortune Teller tents, then aim for things like Rare Kitchen and 5-star fortune tents when you’re at a much higher level and are far more likely to get it.

5) Other misc information

Other semi-related stuff I couldn’t fit in above:

• You can re-order your Plaza and put your facilities in different places. This is not just cosmetic – you can buy facilities from other players, but only the one they have chosen to put in the first slot. If you have a good facility people might want, put it first!
• Check the Purple Person icon in the bottom-middle of the screen to get an overview of your Festival Plaza progress including a display showing exactly how many points you need to level up.
• Type Matchup gives 5 points per star. You four correct answers = 1 star in your challenge. This is a nice even number that makes getting your total just right easier.
• Make sure to be offline when using missions to get your FC amount exact, or other players might mess it up with a group star,
• Inverse Type Matchup gives 6 points per star. Same answer = star ratio as above. This is the best mission available, you really shouldn’t bother to do any others.
• For Inverse Type matchup, it can be hard to get used to getting answers right. Remember that immunities are considered resistances in Inverse battles. Practice makes perfect.
• Always talk to people in the plaza when you have 4x Festival Plaza buff, some of them can give up to 120 FC if you let them meet the right person. It takes some people time to be loaded in, so don’t run around too quickly.
• Save before getting fortunes from the tents. You can’t reload their results, but you can remember which tents give which buff and reload to avoid spending FC on identical or overwritten buffs.
• Fortune Telling Tents always give you 2x modifiers on Wonder Trades the first day you get them. This is pretty useless, so if you are going to stack a bunch of Fortune Telling tents, do it all in one day so they’ll all be fresh for the next day.
• The “next day” is when 00:00 passes on your internal clock, it’s not a 24 hour system.
• Don’t mess with your internal clock, the game will notice and freeze your game world’s time for at least 48 hours.
• In case you don’t know, you soft reset by holding L + R together and pressing Start or Select. Don’t manually turn off your 3DS, it’s WAY slower and makes no difference.

6) Conclusion

Once you’ve leveled to 100 you’re basically done in terms of progress, but can still earn FC for use with your facilities so how many tents/kitchens/other facilities you want in your plaza is a matter of choice.

All in all, ranking up the Plaza will typically involve savescumming for the facilities you want, farming the levels needed to get those facilities, then once you’ve got a bunch of tents, waiting for the right combination of buffs – once you get them, you can go full steam ahead and probably get to level 100 in a mere matter of hours, earning a nice bank of FC to buy some facilities and use their services afterwards. Try to do this without the right buffs and it will take far longer, so it’s better to prepare early on.