How to Gain Stardust / Are Incubators Important?
Currently in the game there are five ways of gaining stardust: catching pokemon, hatching, feeding berries at a gym, successfully beating a raid boss, and daily-catch bonuses:
| Stardust | Source |
|---|---|
| 20 | Feed a berry at a gym |
| 100/300/500 | Catch the 1st/2nd/3rd evolution of a pokemon (baby pokemon don't count) |
| 500 | Successfully defeating a raid boss |
| 600 | Regular daily bonus catch |
| 3000 | 7 day streak catch |
| 400-800 | 2km egg (on avg, 300 dust /km /egg) |
| 800-1600 | 5km egg (on avg, 240 dust /km /egg) |
| 1600-3200 | 10km egg (on avg, 240 dust /km /egg) |
It has recently been proposed that incubators are not valuable anymore because high-IV pokemon come more cheaply and easily from raids. So, typically, how much of your stardust comes from eggs?
I'm going to do the analysis with numbers that roughly match my own habits; other urban players will have something similar. If you don't trust the numbers, feel free to plug in your own parameters. So, I will assume:
- 12.5 minutes per km (google maps walk speed)
- 1 pokemon per minute
- Playing 1 hour/day
- 22% of eggs are 2km
Then every day, I get 1215 stardust with 1 incubator = 10938 stardust with 9 incubators, and 6800 stardust from pokemon.
So including the daily bonus, you can expect ~20,000 stardust/day with purchased incubators, and ~10,000 without. Full incubators just about double your stardust gains.
For rural players, since there are fewer pokemon/km, you'd likely expect 3x or 4x stardust gains from full 9x incubators.
~doublefelix921
Running Full Incubators...What's it Gonna Cost Me?
Someone in the comments recommended (maybe sarcastically) that I should figure out what that would cost a player. Let's take a weighted average to find the number of egg hatches per km:
eggs/km = 2.05. There is a factor of 8 because you would have to pay for 8 incubators.
The number of km in an hour is 4.8, so you'd use 10 incubators. But this is with a strategy of using any incubator on any egg... you can subtract 1/9 = 0.11 from the percentage of 2k eggs, assuming that you use the free incubator on them, and renormalize the probabilities. Now,
#incubators = km total * eggs/km (renormalized version) = 8.6, or 430 coins. The cheapest you'll get that is $2.96.So for an hour of play per day, full incubators cost $2.96
