Cottonee and Whimsicott may not be the most powerful Pokémon you’re able to add to your roster, but they’re definitely fun choices, bouncing around with smiles and fluff. After first appearing in Generation V’s Unova region, these two have made their way to the Galar region for players to catch in Sword & Shield.
If you’re looking to add these bouncing cotton Pokémon to your team, you’ll need to find and subsequently evolve them. Here are the locations, evolution method, and a few other facts about Cottonee and Whimsicott that you might not already know.
10 Where to Find
Cottonee isn’t the easiest Pokémon to find in Sword & Shield. First, head to the Stony Wilderness in the Wild Area on the mainland. Here, you can find Cottonee as a random encounter in the grass when the weather is overcast.
There’s a 40 percent chance of encountering one, so it might take a few minutes, but not too long. Luckily, it can also appear in Max Raid Battles in Bridge Field, Dappled Grove, Giant’s Mirror, or the Stony Wilderness.
9 How to Evolve
Once you’ve found and captured a Cottonee, you’ll need to evolve it. This can be done by exposing it to a Sun Stone. Near the arched rocks in the Dusty Bowl, you can spot small sparkling spots that indicate a hidden item. These can be Sun Stones if you’re lucky. Alternatively, you can find them in the Lake of Outrage near the stone formations along with the other evolutionary stones.
One final method for obtaining a Cottonee is an in-game trade. Grazia, a trainer in Hulbury, will trade her Cottonee for your Minccino.
If you’d like to skip the whole affair, you can also just catch Whimsicott in Max Raid Battles in the following places: Bridge Field, Dappled Grove, Giant’s Mirror, or Stony Wilderness.
8 Blows Around on the Wind
It’s pretty clear that Cottonee is based on a cotton puff or dandelion seed puffs. It should come as no surprise then that they like to float around on the wind from place to place. They’re said to go “wherever the wind takes them” in the Pokédex.
When they get wet, such as in the rain, their bodies are too heavy to float around, so they shelter under big trees to dry. When several Cottonee travel together, they look like a full cloud in the sky.
7 Whimsicott and its Wig
One of the most jarring things to occur in the Pokémon anime is seeing Whimsicott take off its hair. This was news to many viewers and fans, who didn’t realize that the cotton puff that makes up the majority of Whimsicott’s body is not actually attached permanently.
The jarring image revealed that Whimsicott is basically just a small brown humanoid shape, and the “hair” of cotton is removable entirely. It’s a bit of a strange choice, but canon nonetheless.
6 Lowest Attack Stat
As a floating cotton puff, it’s probably to be expected that Cottonee isn’t the most powerful Pokémon around in terms of physical strength. And that’s true for the most part.
Out of all Grass-type Pokémon in existence, Cottonee has the single lowest base attack stat. This stat only comes to a meager 27, which is kind of pathetic. Overall, Cottonee’s base stat total of 280 is on par with many Baby Pokémon. Yikes.
5 Prankster Whimsicott
There are quite a few Pokémon that delight in playing cruel tricks and fun pranks on others, including people. It turns out that Whimsicott is one of these Pokémon.
Supposedly, Whimsicott is capable of squeezing its tiny body through the narrowest of cracks. It likes to utilize this ability to play pranks, moving people’s belongings around and leaving cotton balls for them to find as a sort of calling card. It’s said that, if it gets wet, it can’t move and has to “answer for its pranks.”
4 Luxury Threads
Since it’s a small cotton puff, Cottonee actually contributes to textile manufacturing, much like a sheep in real life would. Cottonee’s fluff is used to make various textiles, according to the Pokédex, much like real cotton is in the real world.
Interestingly, it’s said that Cottonee’s fluff is combined with Eldegoss’s to make luxury textiles. One can only wonder what the cost of such luxurious fabric would be and whether the Eldgegoss and Cottonee give it up willingly.
3 Inspiration/Origin
Most Pokémon have obvious connections to the real world, and one might think Whimsicott is a combination of a sheep and a cotton puff. But it’s more than that, strangely. Whimsicott seems to be based on the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.
People believed that there was a plant called the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary that would produce sheep as its fruit — yes, you read that right. They believed that the sheep was connected to the plant by an umbilical cord and would graze the foliage around it. What was actually happening, of course, was that cotton plants were producing cotton.
2 Fairy-type Conversion
In Generation VI, the first new type since Johto was added to the series: Fairy. This type was said to have been discovered by Professor Sycamore, and his findings actually helped clear up the typing of some Pokémon that had already been discovered.
As a result, 22 Pokémon were converted to the Fairy-type. Two of them were Cottonee and Whimsicott, who both went from being pure Grass-type to being Grass/Fairy. This made them doubly-weak to Poison, vulnerable to Steel, immune to Dragon, and damaged normally by Bug. They also now resist Dark and Fighting-type moves.
1 Horoscope Role
The zodiac and horoscopes are very important to some people, even in the Pokémon world. Like in real life, the Pokémon zodiac is represented by 12 symbols, many of which are animals. Since the in-game world wouldn’t use real-life animals for these representations, there is instead a series of twelve star signs represented by Pokémon, specifically called the Unova zodiac.
These star signs are represented by months, though, rather than real-life zodiac periods. The counterpart to real-life Aries, the ram, is Whimsicott, who fills in for the month of April.
NEXT: Pokémon Sword & Shield: Every Way To Increase Your Pokémons’ Happiness
