One of the most overlooked and oft-forgotten aspects of Pokemon Go is the medals system, displayed on the trainer’s personal page. It essentially works as an achievement system, granting bronze, silver, or gold medal icons for meeting certain milestones.
Some of these medals even award unlockable outfits, usually themed around whatever the medal is for. For example, players who catch enough Kanto Pokemon for their Kanto medal will unlock FireRed and LeafGreen attire. Some medals are much more difficult than others, especially for newer players. Here are the hardest ones to achieve if you were to start today, as well as some tips for obtaining them.
12 Pilot
The Pilot medal is awarded to those who trade Pokemon that were initially caught far away from one another. It’s a cumulative medal, luckily, with the top tier being awarded to those who have traded Pokemon across a total of one million kilometers.
Tips To Get It
Since hatched Pokemon list their catch location as where the egg was obtained, the easy tip here is to find someone online who lives far away and ensure you send gifts to one another. If you live in New York and trade gifts with someone in Japan, you’ll have a bunch of eggs from the other side of the world to trade to a local friend, completing this medal with ease.
11 Youngster
This medal used to be a lot easier, but is becoming harder and harder as more time passes. It requires the player to catch Rattata that are “small,” or listed under 1 kg (although there is some debate about how high this number can go with the Rattata still “counting” — as high as 2.3 kg) in weight. Bronze requires three of these small rats, silver requires 50, and gold requires 300.
As more and more Pokemon are released, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find Rattata. Luckily, Alolan Rattata count toward this total, so catch all of them that you can. For many areas, Alolan Rattata seems to be much more common than Kantonian.
10 Fisher
This medal is very similar to the Youngster medal, but it concerns a different Pokemon. The Fisher medal requires the player to catch a certain number of “big” Magikarp — three for bronze, 50 for silver, and 300 for gold, much like Youngster. These Magikarp must be at least one meter or larger, though, again, there exists some debate about smaller sizes counting toward the medal.
Despite the difficulty of this medal, you can increase your progress with a few suggestions.
Magikarp tend to spawn near water and during rain, so hunt under both those conditions. Also, Magikarp is frequently a boosted spawn in Water-type events, so take advantage of those.
9 Dragon Tamer
There exists a medal for catching certain numbers of each Type of Pokemon — 10 for bronze, 50 for silver, and 200 for gold. Some of these are very easy to finish, like the Normal-type Schoolkid medal, which is probably the first one many players obtain.
Some of them are a bit harder, though, since there aren’t many Pokemon of those types and the few that do exist are somewhat rare. The harder ones include Rail Staff (Steel), Fairy-Tale Girl (Fairy), and possibly the most difficult, Dragon Tamer (Dragon).
Take advantage of Dragon-type Community Day events, like Dratini and Bagon have had, to complete this medal more easily. You can also try to keep an eye on raids as much as possible, since raid bosses you catch afterwards are often Dragon-Type Pokemon.
8 Master League Veteran
The Battle League (Pokemon Go’s version of PvP) can be quite difficult to make progress in, as it requires high levels of skill, luck, and investment in the right Pokemon (some of which are very hard to find). As a result, earning the related medals can be quite a chore.
The hardest of the three is, of course, the Master League Veteran medal, which requires the player to win five, 50, and 200 victories in the Master League for bronze, silver, and gold respectively.
7 Gym Leader
This one also requires quite a bit of luck to obtain. The Gym Leader medal asks that you defend gyms with your Pokemon for a certain amount of time: 10 hours for bronze, 100 hours for silver, and 1,000 hours for gold.
Of course, how long you defend a gym is mostly dependent on how active players in your community are at knocking you out. There are certain Pokemon that make for better defenders, which we cover a little in our team-building guide. You’ll have to battle down a lot of gyms and leave a defender to earn this medal. A thousand hours amounts to almost 42 full days.
6 Berry Master
This medal also requires that you dedicate an incredible amount of time to gyms. You’ll become the Berry Master by feeding your Pokemon in gyms some of your berries. Now, we say “some,” but the gold medal requires you to feed 15,000 berries in total!
If you have enough Berries to sustain it, check back on a Pokemon in a gym every 30 minutes; that’s the limit for how often you can feed the Pokemon. So, every 30 minutes, you can feed 10 Berries. To get up to 15,000, you would need to spend 750 hours doing that.
Thankfully, you can also feed Berries to other players’ Pokemon, and that still counts towards the medal. Still, though, it’s an enormous amount of Berries to have to collect!
Camp out near a PokeStop whenever possible for collecting Berries, and, if your item bag is full, try to delete Pokeballs and Potions before Berries.
5 Best Buddy
One of the newer medals introduced is Best Buddy, which concerns the level of friendship you have with your Buddy Pokemon. For the first Pokemon, you obtain Best Buddy status with, you’ll earn a bronze medal. After that, the silver medal requires 10, which is still fairly easy, and the gold medal requires 100, which is where it gets super difficult.
You’ll need a total of 300 Affection Hearts with a Pokemon for it to become a Best Buddy, so get to feeding! (And playing together, and taking snapshots, and visiting new places, and so on.) View our in-depth Buddy guide for more tips.
4 Successor
Successor was released as a medal alongside the Mega Evolution mechanic. It requires that the player Mega Evolve Pokémon a certain number of times, all the way up to 500 times for the gold medal.
The sheer amount of Mega Energy needed to Mega Evolve Pokemon that many times could take a lifetime, considering how difficult it sometimes is to obtain. The best advice we can give you is to do a lot of raids to earn the Mega Energy, and use it strategically once you have it.
3 Battle Legend
This gold medal is probably only currently held by the most dedicated top tier of players in the world. It requires a certain number of Legendary raids be completed — 1,000 total for the gold medal.
This isn’t impossible, per se, but if the player only uses their free pass, and still does a Legendary raid every single day, this medal will take close to three years to complete. Legendary raids were introduced in July of 2020, so it’s probably unlikely that many people have finished this medal.
The only tip for this medal is to grind, grind, grind. Keep putting Pokemon into gyms in order to earn PokeCoins and only ever spend them on Premium Raid Passes to, hopefully, not have to wait three years to earn the medal.
2 Rising Star Duo
The Rising Star Duo also asks you to take on a lot of raids. To get it, you’ll need to win 2,000 raids in which one of your friends is also participating. They don’t need to be Legendary raids, but having your friend in the same raid is tough enough. Not everyone who plays Pokemon Go does so in a group, so it might be almost impossible for them.
The easiest way to finish this medal is to find people online who are hosting raids and join them. By necessity, you have to be Friends with the other player for them to invite you remotely. In fact, you could finish it today if you were willing to spend all that money on Premium Raid Passes.
1 Unown
This medal is probably one of the hardest ever. The gold tier requires the player to catch all 28 different forms of Unown. It technically can appear in the wild, but the spawn rate is so low that it may as well not. Otherwise, you’ll find it hatching from eggs, in raids, and as a result of completing some research tasks.
The only thing you can really do is be vigilant. When you see an Unown raid, take the five-minute walk to participate! If you’re lucky enough to see it in the wild, use your Golden Raspberries!
NEXT: Pokemon Go: Every Shiny Eevee Evolution, Ranked
