Pokemon GO 1-80 Leveling Guide

Pokemon GO 1-80 Leveling Guide Quick Overview:

• The best XP farming strategies in Pokemon GO usually involve the Friends system as well as consistent use of Daily bonuses and 7-day streaks.
• In Pokemon GO, XP requirements grow progressively, making the stretch between level 70 and level 80 much more difficult than all of the previous leveling.
• Getting from level 70 to level 80 will require completing multiple additional challenges, like earning 50 Platinum Medals.

Don’t feel like visiting 50,000 PokeStops to get that Platinum Medal? Take a look at Skycoach’s Pokemon GO Account Boosting options to save yourself the trouble.

 

 

 

How Leveling in Pokemon GO Works

Pokemon GO provides experience for basically every action a player does, the only issue is that some actions are far more rewarding than others. The base XP reward for catching a Pokemon is a pathetic 100 XP, while claiming Research Breakthrough is worth 30 times more (which is still only 3,000 XP).

Now that you have some numbers, let’s take a look at level requirements.

Trainer Level	Total XP Required
10	48,000 XP
20	258,000 XP
30	1,083,000 XP
40	3,953,000 XP
50	12,753,000 XP
60	34,353,000 XP
70	85,853,000 XP
80	203,353,000 XP

​If some of these figures look ridiculous, it’s because they are. There are several reasons for it, but it mostly comes down to the fact that Pokemon GO is over 10 years old, and the developer needs to keep moving the goalposts so that its most devoted players never reach full completion and drop it.

While getting level 80 in around 18 months is not unheard of in the community, these cases are not really representative of how an average player progresses through the game, especially if they aren’t investing actual money into it.

The game is designed with a long-term time investment in mind. If you have picked it up for the first time, my best piece of advice is to curb your expectations: don’t aim to reach the max level ASAP, just enjoy your progress and the gameplay loop itself.

However, note that certain level caps are very helpful for accelerating your further progression. Each level comes with a bunch of rewards, and some of these are quite literally game-changing. The best examples of it are:

• Level 15 — provides a Daily Adventure Egg, which provides 10,000 XP when hatched.
• Level 70 — increases the chance of becoming Lucky Friends with players you’re at least Best Friends with.

At the same time, even getting a Daily Adventure Incense early on can be helpful depending on your playstyle.

Efficient XP Farming

Friends and Social Interactions

Pokemon GO is a social game that massively rewards completing objectives that involve more than one person. Numbers-wise, there aren’t any XP rewards greater than those for achieving Best Friend (100,000 XP) and Forever Friend (150,000 XP) statuses with someone.

Admittedly, this is more of a long-term oriented strategy, because becoming Best Friends with someone requires a lot of time and effort. The Friends system in Pokemon GO is based on daily interactions, and maxing a relationship out will take at least 90 days. The interactions themselves include

• Opening gifts,
• Trading Pokemon,
• Battling together in Gym or Raid Battles,
• Challenging each other in a Trainer Battle,
• Completing a Weekly Challenge together.

While you are allowed to have up to 650 Friends, most players probably won’t be able to keep the relationships with this many people. Luckily, the Forever Friend status provides its 150,000 XP reward every 90 days as long as you keep interacting with said friend, so having even a relatively small pool of people will be very helpful as long as you interact regularly.

As for the social activities, Raid Battles and Max Battles can offer several tens of thousands of XP. The only issue is that these are quite demanding, and most players cannot really earn experience this way with any sort of consistency. This is where the privilege of living in a big urban area can come into play — lots of players admit that big cities are far more lucrative in terms of basically every resource in the game.

Consistent Performance

As you can notice from the Friends system, aside from the social aspect, another thing that the game likes to reward is consistency. Spinning a Photo Disk in a PokeStop provides a meager 100 XP, but doing it for the first time of the day suddenly adds 500 XP to that number. Now, if you’ve been spinning Photo Disks every day for the last 7 days, then the bonus grows to 2,500.

Same goes for the first catch of the day, which will provide 1,500 points without an active 7-day streak, and 6,000 if you do have one going. These aren’t super huge numbers even at their max potential, but they still help you work towards your leveling goal if you keep them going.

Think of it this way: getting a Forever Friend Bonus every 90 days is essentially the same as earning 1666 XP on a daily basis. Considering that keeping up the Friend progression also requires at least a small bit of active participation from you, keeping the Daily Catch and Photo Disk streaks suddenly seems viable and valuable enough.

 

 

Late Game Leveling (70 to 80)

If you’re good at maths, you have probably figured something very important by now. The jump from level 70 to level 80 requires 136% of all the XP that you needed to get to level 70 in the first place. Essentially, if you’ve reached level 70, you aren’t even halfway to the top.

To make matters worse, XP alone isn’t going to suffice from now on. The game requires you to complete additional challenges in order to level up, and these aren’t exactly easy.

Level	XP Required	Challenges	Rewards
71	8,000,000	Earn 15 Platinum Medals Power up Legendary or Mythical Pokemon 20 times Make 999 Nice Throws Catch 100 Pokemon in a single day	Level 71 Shoes 1 Rare Candy XL 1 Premium Battle Pass 20 Max Potions 30 Ultra Balls 25 Nanab Berries
72	8,750,000	Earn 20 Platinum Medals Complete a Route 7 days in a row Use 200 supereffective Charged Attacks Earn 1,000,000 Stardust	1 Rare Candy XL 1 Premium Battle Pass 1 Lucky Egg 10 Max Revives 30 Ultra Balls 25 Razz Berries
73	9,500,000	Earn 25 Platinum Medals Purify 100 Shadow Pokemon Power up 3 Pokemon to their max CP Win 30 raids	Level 73 Shades 5 Gift storage expansion 1 Rare Candy XL 1 Premium Battle Pass 20 Max Potions 30 Ultra Balls 25 Pinap Berries
74	10,250,000	Earn 30 Platinum Medals Level up a Max Move 20 times Explore 200 km Complete 250 Field Research Tasks	50 Postcard storage expansion 1 Rare Candy XL 1 Premium Battle Pass 1 Incubator 10 Max Revives 30 Ultra Balls 25 Nanab Berries
75	10,250,000	Earn 34 Platinum Medals Make 999 Great Throws Hatch 75 Eggs Send 500 Gifts to friends	Level 75 Pants 25 Pokemon Storage expansion 1 Max Particle Pack 5 Starpiece 5 Lure Module 2 Super Incubator 15 Max Revives 30 Max Potions
76	12,000,000	Earn 38 Platinum Medals Defeat 100 Team Go Rocket Grunts Explore 300 km Catch 200 Pokemon in a single day	1 Rare Candy XL 1 Premium Battle Pass 1 Lucky Egg 20 Max Potions 30 Ultra Balls 25 Pinap Berries
77	13,000,000	Earn 41 Platinum Medals Win 100 Max Battles Power up 7 Pokemon to their max CP Make 10 trades with Pokemon caught at least 300 km apart	Level 77 Pose 50 Postcard expansion 1 Rare Candy XL 1 Premium Battle Pass 1 Incubator 10 Max Revives 30 Ultra Balls 25 Nanab Berries
78	14,000,000	Earn 44 Platinum Medals Earn 400 hearts with your buddy Explore 400 km Complete 500 Field Research Tasks	75 Pokemon Storage expansion 1 Rare Candy XL 1 Premium Battle Pass 20 Max Potions 30 Ultra Balls 25 Razz Berries
79	15,000,000	Earn 47 Platinum Medals Defeat a Team Go Rocket Leader 30 times Obtain 50 Lucky Pokemon in trades Hatch 100 Eggs	Level 79 Hairstyle (Short) Level 79 Hairstyle (Long) 1 Rare Candy Xl 1 Premium Battle Pass 10 Max Revives 30 Ultra Balls 25 Pinap Berries
80	16,000,000	Earn 50 Platinum Medals Win 80 Trainer Battles in the Go Battle League Make 999 Excellent Throws Win 80 raids	Level 80 Jacket 100 Pokemon Storage expansion 100 Item Storage expansion 1 Max Mushroom 7 Lucky Egg 7 Incense 5 Super Incubator 25 Max Revives

Platinum Medals

Starting from level 70, Platinum Medals become incredibly important — they are the only consistent requirement for every single level up from now on. You won’t be able to get to level 80 without having 50 of these.

​There are 54 General Platinum Medals you can obtain, all with varying degrees of difficulty. Some require walking 10,000 kilometers or catching 50,000 Pokemon, while others might be comparatively easy — like getting a Best Friends status with 20 people.

​You can also earn 18 platinum medals by catching 2,500 Pokemon of each type. There are two pieces of good news here. First, progressing through each tier of these medals increases your capture rate by 10% for a specific Pokemon type, making it more reliable. Secondly, catching dual-type Pokemon contributes progress towards both Medals.

 

 

Other Requirements

As for the rest of the stuff that you need to do to earn a level-up, everything comes down to playtime. The most annoying part here is that more often than not you might find yourself in a bottleneck, meeting the requirements for the level up that comes after the current one, but not the one that you need right now. This happens because challenges are a bit inconsistent and don’t really have much to do with each other.

​For example, at level 71 you might already have earned 25 Platinum Medals, purified 100 Shadow Pokemon, powered up 3 Pokemon to their max CP, and won 30 raids, meaning that level 73 is going to be a breeze once you get there. But level 72 demands that you earn one million Stardust, forcing you to kind of forgo the game loop you enjoy and grind this task until it’s done.

​If you really want that level 80 jacket, you will clench your teeth and do it, but many players just stop caring about XP at a certain point because of these requirements, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

​Read our other Pokemon GO guides:

• Best Gym Defenders
• Best Attackers
• All Active Codes

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