How to trade with your friends in Pokémon Go

At long last, trading has been added to Pokémon Go, but the process of swapping Pokémon is not as easy as it initially seems.

Niantic has taken a unique approach to trading. By adding a number of rules and additional depth, it’s actually quite difficult to trade high-level Pocket Monsters.

Before users can trade, they also need to build out their ‘Friends List’ and ensure that they’re at least level 10.

To add friends in the game users need to first open up their ‘Trainer Profile’ screen. There’s an option labelled ‘Friends’ at the top of the screen. Inside this new section, users are able to add friends by inputting their ‘Trainer Code.’ To view your own trainer code, just hit the ‘Add Friend’ button to make it appear.

There are three main requirements for trading: being friends, being physically close to the person you’re trading with and the Stardust cost of making the trade.

Once the user is ready to trade, both players are able to select which Pokémon they want to swap.

The game then weighs the value of each Pokémon and assigns the trade a Stardust price tag. Low-level trades start at 100 Stardust, while high-level trades can be priced all the way up to 1 million, depending on the trainers’ friendship level and the Pokémon they’re trading.

There are five levels of friendship in Pokémon Go: ‘Friends,’ ‘Good Friends,’ ‘Great Friends,’ ‘Ultra Friends’ and ‘Best Friends.’ Depending on what level of friendship you’ve achieved, the cost per trade will be different.

Some trades even require players to have at least a ‘Good’ level friendship with the person they’re trading with. These are called Special Trades and can only be done once a day. Pokémon that the trainer hasn’t caught before, including shiny variants and legendaries, are all considered Special Trades.

Every trade will net the users XP and Pokémon candy, depending on how far apart the Pokémon were caught from one another.

One of the more interesting twists that has come along with this update is the Pokémon’s IVs, HP and CP will change when traded. Users can only trade each Pokémon once, so trying to trade back and forth to get perfect IVs is not possible.

This update has finally added a feature to the game that fans have been asking for since it launched two years ago, though it is a bit harder to understand than it was with traditional Pokémon games. Either way, this is an exciting new feature that should help trainers all over the globe fill out their Pokédexes.

Image credit: Reddit