Pokémon GO Stardust and XL Candy Farming Guide

Read This First: One Pokémon at a Time

Pokémon GO has two farming currencies, and they are spent together: Stardust powers up every Pokémon, and XL Candy powers up a specific species past level 40. Taking one standard Pokémon from level 40 to level 50 costs 296 XL Candy and 250,000 Stardust — a Purified Pokémon costs 272 XL Candy, a Shadow Pokémon costs 360. Each individual power-up step costs between 10,000 and 15,000 Stardust and between 10 and 20 XL Candy.

Those numbers are the whole farming discipline in one paragraph. Two hundred and ninety-six XL Candy for one species is months of focused play. Two hundred and fifty thousand Stardust is weeks of catching. Spread that effort across five Pokémon at once and you will have five half-built Pokémon and nothing usable. The rule is absolute: pick one Pokémon at a time, finish it, then pick the next. The guide that follows is the method for finishing one.

Stardust cannot be bought from other players, and Pokémon GO has no tradeable gold. There is no shortcut purchase for Stardust. Anyone offering to sell you Stardust is selling you something that does not exist — or an account, which violates the terms of service and can be banned.

Both currencies come from playing, not from paying. Stardust comes from catching, hatching, raiding, battling, and gifts. XL Candy comes from catching, hatching, trading, transferring, walking, and raiding — but only for Trainers at level 31 or higher, and only spendable from level 40. The sections below map every source, rank them, and build the plan.

Stardust Basics: What a Catch Pays

A standard unevolved catch pays 100 Stardust. That is the baseline everything else multiplies. An evolved Pokémon pays more. Weather-boosted Pokémon pay 25% more. Event multipliers pay two or three times more. A Star Piece pays 1.5 times more on top of all of it. The farm is not about finding a secret source — it is about stacking the multipliers on the catches you were already going to make.

The catch values worth memorising: Audino pays 2,100 Stardust — the most of any common wild catch. Cloyster pays 1,200. Shellder and Chimecho pay 1,000. These are the species to prioritise when they appear, to save in research encounters, and to hunt in nests and featured event spawns. A hundred basic catches are 10,000 Stardust before bonuses. A hundred Audino catches are 210,000 Stardust before bonuses. The species matters as much as the volume.

Pinap Berries do nothing for Stardust — they double Candy, not dust. Do not waste Pinaps on a Stardust farm unless you also need the Candy. And remember that the daily catch streak and the daily PokéStop spin are small, free Stardust-adjacent income that costs nothing to maintain.

Star Pieces: The 1.5× Multiplier and When to Burn One

A Star Piece multiplies all Stardust gains by 1.5× for 30 minutes. It stacks with event multipliers — a 3× Catch Stardust event becomes 4.5× with a Star Piece running. You can stack up to 200 Star Pieces at once for a longer unbroken window, which is how serious farmers run multi-hour sessions.

The math is what makes the Star Piece the best Stardust tool in the game. A 100-Stardust catch becomes 150. An Audino catch becomes 3,150. During a 3× event, an Audino catch becomes 9,450 Stardust — from one catch. A hundred catches in that window, at mixed values, can be hundreds of thousands of Stardust. The Star Piece costs PokéCoins, but it pays for itself many times over when used in the right window.

The right window is the same discipline as the Lucky Egg: never burn a Star Piece on an ordinary half hour. Burn it when an event multiplies catches, when you are sitting on a nest of high-value species, when you have a stack of research encounters to claim, or when you are about to do a batch of Max Battles. A Star Piece on a quiet Tuesday is a wasted Star Piece. A Star Piece on a 3× Audino event is the best purchase in the game.

Max Battles: The Biggest Single Payouts

The biggest single Stardust payouts in the game come from Max Battles: 15,000 Stardust for a 5-star Max Battle, 25,000 for a 6-star. Those are per battle, not per hour — a session of several Max Battles in a day is tens of thousands of Stardust in a short window, before any Star Piece or event multiplier.

Max Battles also pay XL Candy, which makes them doubly valuable for the level-50 project: one activity, both currencies. Spend your event days on Max Battles and raids — they have the best Stardust and the guaranteed Rare Candy XL days — and keep your Star Piece running through the whole session.

The practical note is that Max Battles require Max Particles and a team that can win them, so they are not a day-one farm. Build your Dynamax/Gigantamax attackers first, then make Max Battles a regular part of your event-day routine. A Trainer who does Max Battles on event days and catches on ordinary days will out-farm a Trainer who only catches, because the payouts per minute are an order of magnitude higher.

Catch Farming: Volume, Weather, and the Quick Catch

Between events, catching is the main Stardust farm, and the rule is volume with multipliers. One hundred basic catches are 10,000 Stardust before weather boosts, evolved spawns, the daily bonus, or a Star Piece. Two hundred catches are 20,000. The farm is a numbers game, and the numbers favour the Trainer who catches everything.

Weather is the free multiplier: weather-boosted Pokémon pay 25% more Stardust, so favour boosted types and boosted weather when you choose where to walk. Evolved spawns pay more than unevolved ones, so do not ignore the evolved Pokémon — they are worth more dust and more Candy per catch. And the Quick Catch trick — hold the Berry or Ball tray, throw, slide, tap run — skips the catch animation and raises your catches per minute, which is the same as raising your Stardust per minute.

Save your high-value encounters. Research encounters, especially Audino, can be stacked — claim them when a Stardust event is running and a Star Piece is active, and a saved Audino becomes 9,450 Stardust instead of 2,100. A stack of saved encounters is a Stardust savings account, and the interest rate is the event multiplier.

Eggs and Adventure Sync: The Passive Stardust Engine

Eggs pay Stardust when they hatch — a 10 km egg pays 1,600–3,200 Stardust, a 12 km Strange egg pays 3,200–6,400 — and they pay it while you are doing other things. Adventure Sync tracks your walking distance even with the app closed, so eggs hatch while you live your life, and the Stardust arrives without you catching anything.

The Daily Adventure Egg, standard since October 2025, hatches in 1 km and pays a 10,000 XP bonus — hatch it first thing, because it blocks your Adventure Sync egg rewards until it is hatched. Use your infinite orange incubator on 2 km and 5 km eggs and your limited blue and purple incubators (3 uses each) on 10 km and 12 km eggs, which pay the most Stardust and the most Candy.

Eggs are not the fastest Stardust source, but they are the only one that runs while you sleep, walk to work, or do anything else. Keep eggs incubating always. An empty incubator is a passive engine switched off.

XL Candy Basics: What It Is and Who Can Earn It

XL Candy is the resource that powers Pokémon from level 40 to level 50. Regular Candy stops working at level 40 — from there on, only XL Candy (plus Stardust) moves a Pokémon higher. Each species has its own XL Candy: Charmander XL Candy works only on Charmander, Charmeleon, and Charizard. There is no universal XL Candy except Rare Candy XL, which works on any species.

Two gates control XL Candy. You can only earn it from Trainer level 31 onward. You can only spend it from Trainer level 40 onward — which is also the level you must reach before you can power any Pokémon to 50 at all. A Trainer below 31 earns no XL Candy from any source. A Trainer between 31 and 39 earns it and banks it for later. The farming starts at 31; the spending starts at 40.

The cost is the discipline: 296 XL Candy and 250,000 Stardust for a standard Pokémon, 272 for a Purified one, 360 for a Shadow. At 0–3 XL Candy per catch, that is a hundred or more catches of one species — or the equivalent from the other sources below. Pick one species. Farm it. Finish it.

XL Candy From Catching: The Main Source

Catching is the main XL Candy source, and it works like this: if you are level 31 or higher, each catch has a chance to give 0 to 3 XL Candy. Higher-level wild Pokémon give XL Candy more often, and evolved Pokémon tend to give more than base-stage ones. The rate is a chance, not a guarantee — some catches give none, some give three — and the average is what matters over hundreds of catches.

Two multipliers raise the rate. An active Mega-Evolved Pokémon at level 2 or 3 significantly boosts XL Candy catch rates for Pokémon of the same type — plan your farming sessions around a Mega Evolution that matches the species you are hunting. And Community Days, which flood the map with one species, are the best XL Candy farming days in the game: hundreds of catches of one species, each with an XL chance, plus the event's own bonuses.

The exact per-catch drop chance is not published — no verified source gives a percentage — so this guide does not invent one. What is verified is the range (0–3 per catch), the level dependence, and the Mega boost. Farm in volume, farm with a matching Mega active, and farm on Community Days, and the XL Candy accumulates.

XL Candy From Everything Else: Raids, Eggs, Trades, Transfers, Buddies

Catching is the main source, but seven other sources fill the gaps — and for some species, they are the only sources that matter.

Source	XL Candy	Notes
In-person raid	At least 1	Guaranteed per raid; also gives Rare Candy XL
Eggs (2 km)	About 1 on average	10/12 km eggs give more
Trading	1 guaranteed	If the Pokémon was caught 100+ km apart
Transferring	Roughly 1 in 15–20	Bulk-transfer during 2× transfer events
Buddy walking	Up to ~70–75%	Rate rises with buddy level, at 31+
Conversion	100 regular → 1 XL	Fallback only — 29,600 Candy for 296 XL
Meltan Box	Up to 18 per hour	Meltan is the most farmable XL species

Three of these deserve emphasis. Trading is the only guaranteed XL source besides raids — one XL Candy per trade when the two Pokémon were caught 100+ km apart, so trade with distant friends or your own catches from travel. Conversion is the ceiling, not the plan: 100 regular Candy for 1 XL Candy means 29,600 regular Candy would cover a full 296-XL project, which is a staggering amount — use conversion only to top off the last few XL Candy, never as the main method. And the Meltan Box is the exception that proves the rule: up to 18 XL Candy per hour, because Meltan spawns from a box you control, making it the most farmable XL species in the game.

Rare Candy XL: The Universal Currency

Rare Candy XL works on any species — it is the universal XL Candy, and it is the cleanest route for a Legendary or rare Pokémon you have few Candies for. It comes from in-person raids and from level 71–80 Level-Up Research tasks, one per qualifying level.

The discipline is to save it. Rare Candy XL is rare — the name is honest — and spending it on a common species you could farm by catching is a waste of the game's scarcest resource. Save it for the species you cannot farm: Legendaries you can only raid, Mythicals you can only get from research, regionals you cannot catch locally. A Rare Candy XL spent on a Legendary is a month of raiding saved. A Rare Candy XL spent on a Pidgey is a joke.

Raids are the renewable source, so raid trains do double duty for the XL farm: each in-person raid guarantees at least 1 XL Candy for the boss species, plus a chance at Rare Candy XL, plus raid XP, plus friendship progress. A raid day is an XL day.

Mega Evolution: The XL Multiplier

Mega Evolution is the XL Candy multiplier most Trainers forget. An active Mega-Evolved Pokémon boosts the XL Candy catch rate for Pokémon that share its type — and at Mega level 2 or 3, the boost is significant. The sources do not publish exact percentages, so this guide does not invent them, but the effect is verified and large enough to plan around.

The method is to match your Mega to your farm. Hunting a Water-type species for XL Candy? Mega Evolve a Water-type first. Hunting a Dragon? Mega Evolve a Dragon. The Mega lasts hours, costs Mega Energy you earn from Mega Raids, and turns an ordinary catching session into an XL session. It also boosts regular Candy and XP for matching catches, so the Mega is never wasted — it is a multiplier on everything you were already going to do.

Keep a rotation of Megas ready: one per type you farm regularly, levelled to 2 or 3, with enough Mega Energy banked to activate on demand. A Mega used on a Community Day is the difference between a good XL haul and a great one.

Shadow and Purified: The XL Cost Trap

Shadow and Purified Pokémon have different XL costs, and the difference is large enough to change your plans. A standard Pokémon costs 296 XL Candy to take from 40 to 50. A Purified Pokémon costs 272 — cheaper, because purification discounts the cost. A Shadow Pokémon costs 360 — more expensive, because Shadow power comes at a premium.

The trap is to power up a Shadow Pokémon without knowing the cost. Shadow Pokémon hit harder — their attack is boosted — which makes them attractive for raids and PvP. But 360 XL Candy is 64 more than standard, which is weeks of extra farming for one species. Before you commit to a Shadow level-50 project, check whether you have the XL Candy to finish it. A Shadow Pokémon stuck at level 44 because you ran out of XL Candy is worse than a standard Pokémon finished at 50.

Purified Pokémon are the bargain: 24 XL Candy cheaper than standard, plus the purification bonuses. If you have a strong Purified Pokémon, it is often the cheapest level-50 project available. The discount is small in absolute terms, but on a 296-XL project, every XL Candy you do not have to farm is a day saved.

The Stardust Plan: A Week of Farming

Here is a week that balances both currencies. Daily: catch everything you see, keep your streaks alive, hatch your Daily Adventure Egg, send and open gifts, walk your buddy. Event days: run a Star Piece through the whole session, prioritise Audino and other high-value catches, do Max Battles and raids in batches. Community Day: catch the featured species in volume with a matching Mega active — this is your XL day as much as your Stardust day. Raid Hour: run a raid train with friends under a Lucky Egg — XP, Rare Candy XL, and guaranteed XL Candy per raid.

The spending rule for the week is the same as the spending rule for the month: Stardust goes to one Pokémon at a time. Do not power up five Pokémon a little. Power up one Pokémon completely. A level-50 Pokémon you use every day is worth more than five level-44 Pokémon you never field.

And keep a Stardust reserve. Powering up is expensive — 250,000 Stardust per level-50 project — and the game will offer you trades, second moves, and purifications that all cost Stardust. A reserve of 100,000 Stardust means you can take an opportunity when it appears. A balance of zero means you watch it pass.

The XL Plan: Picking Your First Level-50 Pokémon

Your first level-50 Pokémon should be one you will use constantly — a raid attacker, a GBL staple, or a Mega Evolution you run every day. It should also be one you can farm: a species with a Community Day behind it, a nest nearby, or a Meltan Box in your inventory. The worst first project is a Legendary you can only raid — the XL Candy comes one per raid, and 296 raids is not a plan.

The best first projects are the farmable ones. Meltan, from the Mystery Box, is the classic first level 50: up to 18 XL Candy per hour, a species you control entirely. Community Day species are next: hundreds of catches in a day, each with an XL chance, plus the event's bonuses. A common species with a nest near you is third. A Legendary is last — save your Rare Candy XL for it, and build it slowly while your farmable projects carry your teams.

Once you have picked, commit. Walk it as your buddy. Trade for it. Transfer duplicates during 2× transfer events. Convert regular Candy only for the last few XL. And do not start a second project until the first is done — the one-at-a-time rule is the difference between a finished level 50 and a box full of level 43s.

Trading for XL Candy: The 100 km Rule

Trading is the only XL source with a guarantee, and the guarantee has a condition: the two Pokémon must have been caught 100 or more kilometres apart. Trade a Pokémon caught locally for one caught in another city, another country, or another continent, and you get 1 XL Candy, guaranteed, every time.

The method is to save your travel catches and your friends' distant catches for trading. A trip to another city is a trading stockpile. A friend who travels is a trading partner. And the game's own events — which sometimes feature distance bonuses — are the time to clear your stockpile.

Trading also builds friendship, which is the XP engine, and can produce Lucky Pokémon, which cost half the Stardust to power up. A Lucky trade is the best outcome in the game for a level-50 project: half the Stardust cost, guaranteed XL Candy if the distance qualifies, and a friendship milestone on top. Trade daily, trade distant, trade old Pokémon — old catches have a higher chance of becoming Lucky.

Event Farming: When the Multipliers Align

Events are when the farm pays off, because the multipliers align. A Catch Stardust event multiplies your dust. A Community Day floods one species for XL Candy. A raid event guarantees Rare Candy XL days. A Spotlight Hour focuses one species for an hour. The Twilight Trails season (September 8 to December 1, 2026) is the current seasonal frame, and the next season will bring its own bonuses — check the in-game news for what is live now, because event bonuses expire with their events and a guide that does not name its dates is already stale.

The event routine is: read the bonus, pick the farm, run the multipliers. Stardust event? Star Piece on, Audino hunt on, saved research encounters claimed. Community Day? Matching Mega active, catch everything, transfer during the event window. Raid event? Raid train with friends, Lucky Egg on, Rare Candy XL banked. The event is the plan; the ordinary day is the maintenance between events.

What Not to Spend Stardust On

Stardust is the currency you will run out of first, and the spending mistakes are the same for every Trainer. Do not power up Pokémon you do not use. A level-50 Pokémon you never field is 250,000 Stardust in a box. Do not buy second moves casually. A second charged move costs 10,000–100,000 Stardust depending on the species, and it is worth it for GBL staples and worthless for everything else. Do not purify for the sake of it. Purification costs Stardust and Candy, and a Shadow Pokémon is often stronger unpurified — purify only when the discount or the IV change makes the specific Pokémon better.

The test for any Stardust spend is one question: will I use this Pokémon every week? If yes, spend. If the answer is "maybe someday", do not spend — the Stardust will still be there someday, and the Pokémon will still be there too. Stardust spent is Stardust gone, and the next level-50 project is always waiting.

The Verdict: The Farm Is the Game

Stardust and XL Candy farming is not a side activity in Pokémon GO. It is the endgame. The Trainer level gets you to 40, and then the real progression begins: 296 XL Candy and 250,000 Stardust per Pokémon, one Pokémon at a time, for as many Pokémon as you want to use at the top of the game. There is no shortcut, no purchase, and no trick that replaces it — only the methods in this guide, done consistently, for months.

The good news is that the methods compound. A Star Piece during an event, a matching Mega on a Community Day, a raid train with friends, a Meltan Box on a quiet evening — each one is a multiplier on the others, and a Trainer who stacks them will finish a level-50 project in weeks where a Trainer who catches casually will take months. Pick one Pokémon. Farm it. Finish it. Then pick the next one. That is the whole game, and it is enough.

Gift Stardust: The Daily Envelope

Gifts are the smallest Stardust source in the game, and the easiest to ignore — which is exactly why they belong in this guide. Opening a gift can pay Stardust, and sending gifts builds friendship, which pays XP, which levels you up, which unlocks more farming. The amounts per gift are small. The amounts across a year of daily gifts are not.

The habit costs almost nothing: open your gifts daily, send gifts daily, and keep your gift storage from filling up — level 70 grants +15 gift storage and level 80 adds +5 more, which is the game telling you that gifts are meant to flow, not to sit. A Trainer with twenty friends sending and opening gifts daily is running a small, constant Stardust and friendship engine in the background of everything else they do.

Gifts also carry eggs — 7 km eggs from gifts hatch species you cannot always catch locally, and those hatches pay Candy, Stardust, and sometimes XL Candy for species you would otherwise never farm. Open your gifts, hatch the eggs, and let the background engine run.

Gym Battles: Stardust From Fighting

Gym battling pays Stardust in small amounts that add up: feeding a berry to a friendly Pokémon in a gym pays XP and contributes to your gym badge, beating a gym defender pays XP, and defending gyms pays PokéCoins — which buy Star Pieces and Lucky Eggs, which are the multipliers for everything else in this guide. The gym loop is not a Stardust farm on its own, but it is the economy that funds the farm.

The coin math is the point. A defender earns PokéCoins over time, up to the daily cap, and those coins are the free currency that buys Star Pieces. A Trainer who holds gyms regularly never has to spend real money on Star Pieces. A Trainer who ignores gyms pays for every Star Piece out of pocket or goes without — and going without a Star Piece during a 3× Stardust event is the most expensive decision in the game, because it throws away the 1.5× multiplier on every catch.

Feed berries to gym defenders when you pass a friendly gym. Battle enemy gyms when you have time. Place defenders in gyms that are likely to last — quiet gyms in low-traffic areas hold longer than busy gyms in city centres. The gym game is slow income, but it is the income that pays for the multipliers.

Research Encounters: The Stardust Savings Account

Field Research encounters can be stacked — completed research can be claimed later, and the encounter waits for you. That waiting is the most underused Stardust tool in the game, because a stacked encounter claimed during a Stardust event with a Star Piece active pays several times what it pays on an ordinary day.

The method is to stack high-value encounters and claim them in the right window. Audino is the prize: 2,100 base Stardust, 3,150 with a Star Piece, 6,300 during a 3× event without a Star Piece, 9,450 with both. A stack of ten saved Audino encounters claimed in that window is 94,500 Stardust — from encounters you already earned, just claimed at the right time. Other high-value research encounters — evolved species, rare spawns — work the same way, at lower values.

The discipline is to check your research stack before every event. Claim nothing on an ordinary day that you could claim during an event. The stack is a savings account, the event is the interest rate, and the Star Piece is the compound. A Trainer with a full stack and a Star Piece on event day is farming at a rate no ordinary catching session can match.

Community Day XL Math: The Best Farming Day

Community Day is the best XL Candy farming day in the game, and the math shows why. Hundreds of spawns of one species, for hours, each catch with a 0–3 XL Candy chance, plus a matching Mega Evolution active at level 2 or 3 boosting the rate, plus the event's own bonuses. No other day produces that volume of one species. A Community Day spent catching seriously can produce dozens of XL Candy for the featured species — a meaningful fraction of the 296 needed for a full level-50 project, in a single day.

The preparation matters as much as the day. Stock Poké Balls beforehand — you will throw hundreds. Have your matching Mega ready with energy banked. Clear storage space so you can keep catching. Plan your route around the densest spawn area you know. And bring a Star Piece for the Stardust, because Community Day is a Stardust farm too — hundreds of catches at event multipliers, each paying dust.

After the day, transfer during a 2× transfer event if one is running, or transfer immediately and take the ~1-in-15-to-20 XL chance per transfer. Convert regular Candy to XL only for the last few needed — the 100:1 rate makes conversion a top-off, not a method. One Community Day will not finish a 296-XL project. But three or four of them, with the other sources running between, will.

Lucky Pokémon: Half-Price Power-Ups

A Lucky Pokémon costs half the Stardust to power up. On a 250,000-Stardust level-50 project, that is 125,000 Stardust saved — the single largest Stardust saving in the game, worth more than a month of casual catching. Lucky Pokémon come from trading, and old Pokémon have a higher chance of becoming Lucky, so the method is to save your oldest catches and trade them with a friend.

The trading loop for Lucky Pokémon is simple: trade daily, trade old Pokémon, trade with the same friend repeatedly to build the friendship that also pays XP. A Lucky trade is three rewards at once — half-price power-ups, a guaranteed XL Candy if the distance is 100+ km, and friendship progress. There is no better trade in the game.

Plan your level-50 projects around Lucky Pokémon when you can. A Lucky Legendary is the cheapest Legendary level 50 available — half the Stardust, and Rare Candy XL for the candy side. If you have a Lucky version of the species you want to build, build the Lucky one. The 125,000 Stardust you save is the next project's funding.

Second Moves and the Stardust Tax

A second charged move costs Stardust — 10,000 for common species, up to 100,000 for Legendaries and Mythicals — and it is the most common Stardust mistake in the game, because Trainers buy second moves for Pokémon they never use in PvP. A second move is worth it for a GO Battle League staple, where coverage wins matches. It is worthless for a raid attacker, where you only ever use one charged move.

The rule is to buy second moves only for Pokémon you battle with weekly in GBL, and only after the Pokémon is powered up. A level-50 Pokémon without a second move beats a level-40 Pokémon with one. Power first, moves second — and for raid-only Pokémon, never.

The same discipline applies to purifying. Purification costs Stardust and Candy, and a Shadow Pokémon is often stronger unpurified — its attack is boosted. Purify when the discount (272 XL instead of 296) or the IV change makes that specific Pokémon better, not because purification feels like progress. Every Stardust spend should answer one question: will I use this Pokémon every week? If not, the Stardust stays in the bank.

Seasonal Rotation: Twilight Trails and Beyond

Pokémon GO runs in seasons, and the season sets the farming calendar. The Twilight Trails season runs September 8 to December 1, 2026. The September GO Pass ran to October 6, 2026 — already expired by the time you read this, which is the point: seasonal bonuses expire, and a guide that quotes them without dates is already stale. Check the in-game news for the current season and its bonuses, and plan your farming around what is live now, not what was live when a guide was written.

Seasons change spawns, bonuses, research, and events. A season with a Catch Stardust bonus is a Stardust season — run Star Pieces, hunt Audino, claim your stacked encounters. A season with a Catch Candy bonus is an XL season — run matching Megas, farm Community Days, trade distant catches. A season with raid bonuses is a Rare Candy XL season — run raid trains and bank the universal XL for your Legendary projects.

The long habit is to read the season announcement when it lands and write down three things: what is boosted, what is spawning, and what the GO Pass rewards. Those three lines are your farming plan for the next three months. Everything else in this guide is the method; the season is the schedule.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much Stardust and XL Candy does it take to max a Pokémon?

A standard Pokémon needs 296 XL Candy and 250,000 Stardust to go from level 40 to level 50. A Purified Pokémon needs 272 XL Candy; a Shadow Pokémon needs 360. Each step costs 10,000–15,000 Stardust and 10–20 XL Candy.

What is the fastest way to farm Stardust?

Catch in volume during Stardust events with a Star Piece active (a 3× event becomes 4.5×), prioritise Audino (2,100 per catch), and do Max Battles — 15,000 Stardust for a 5-star, 25,000 for a 6-star. Weather-boosted catches pay 25% more.

How do I get XL Candy fast?

Catch in volume with a matching Mega Evolution active (level 2 or 3), farm Community Days for one species, do in-person raids (at least 1 XL guaranteed), trade Pokémon caught 100+ km apart (1 XL guaranteed), and use the Meltan Box (up to 18 XL per hour). You must be Trainer level 31 or higher to earn XL Candy.

When can I use XL Candy?

You can earn XL Candy from Trainer level 31, but you can only spend it from level 40 — and you must be level 40 to power any Pokémon past level 40. XL Candy is species-specific, except Rare Candy XL, which works on any species.

Should I convert regular Candy into XL Candy?

Only to top off the last few XL Candy of a finished project. The rate is 100 regular Candy for 1 XL Candy, so a full 296-XL project would need 29,600 regular Candy — far more than catching earns in a reasonable time. Treat conversion as a fallback, not a plan.

Can I buy Stardust?

No. Stardust cannot be bought from other players, and Pokémon GO has no tradeable gold. The only sources are in-game: catching, hatching, raiding, battling, gifts, and events. Anyone offering to sell you Stardust is selling something that does not exist.

Sources

Every fact in this guide carries its source. Where sources disagree, this guide prints the disagreement instead of picking a winner silently. Last checked November 9, 2026.

MMODude Editorial Team

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