How to Get Over 200 Friends in Pokémon GO

As a passionate Pokémon GO player and content creator, I‘m often asked: "How do you get so many friends in the game?"

Well, with the recent increase of the friend cap to 400, there‘s never been a better time to expand your in-game social circle.

Why Get More Friends?

Having an extensive friend list unlocks huge benefits:

• More gift sending/opening means faster friendship leveling
• Higher chance of getting lucky friend status
• Trading regionals/shinies is cheaper with best friends
• Easier to coordinate raids with more participants
• You help more people by sending gifts from unique pokestops

I easily maintain over 300 friends through deliberate effort. Let me share expert tips I‘ve learned over the years for maximizing friendships.

1. Leverage Online Communities

Reddit and Discord groups dedicated to Pokémon GO are goldmines for friend codes. I post my trainer code in the weekly sticky threads. Within a day, my friend requests are full.

I try to accept players under level 40 first since they benefit more from extra items/XP. High level players often just delete items anyway.

Here‘s a table showing major communities and their memberships:

From these groups alone, you can easily add 200-300 active daily players. Use the find-a-friend function too.

2. Attend In-Person Meetup Events

While risky now, when the pandemic ends, Meetup.com groups for Pokémon GO are fantastic for in-person friend meets.

I‘ve probably added 50-80 reliable local friends from the 3 groups in my city. We raid often and have a discord chat.

Meeting in-person creates stronger bonds so there‘s little gifting/raiding dropout. I make sure to nickname these friends with their real name so I remember who‘s who.

3. Prune Inactive Friends

Even with 400 slots now, inactive friends still hamper progress.

• They take up gift opening slots
• Offer no raid assistance
• Don‘t level up friendship

I remove friends who haven‘t opened my gift in 14+ days. This data is easy to extract using apps like Poke Genie.

For remaining friends, I nickname them with their last interaction date so I can better track inactivity. If space becomes an issue, I prune again at 30 days inactive.

4. Stagger New Friendships

Early on, I made the mistake of adding too many friends at once. I‘d hit the gift sending limit and mutual level ups were chaotic.

Now I only open 20-30 gifts a day and don‘t mass add after reaching 400 friends already. This gives me time to coordinate friendship milestones.

If you want efficiency though, opening the maximum of 30 gifts lets you churn through more friends daily. I cap myself for more organized level-up sessions.

5. Sync Lucky Eggs

Coordinating egg timing with my Best Friends has dramatically boosted my XP gains.

Since gifting a Best Friend is 100,000 XP, combining a Lucky Egg doubles it to 200,000 XP per friend. Even just becoming Best Friends daily with 5 friends after raids means 1 million XP!

We schedule Lucky Egg sessions over Discord so all eggs are popped concurrently. That 30 minutes nets me easy multi-millions of XP.

Final Tips

• Nickname friends with their location too for pilot medal progress
• Remove clutter like old 2016 friends with no interaction
• Open gifts just before Ultra/Best to align other friends
• Judiciously use friendship filters to gift who you want first

With these methods, maintaining 400 daily active friends is very achievable. You too can hit the friend cap through communities, events, and organization. Stay safe when meeting strangers though and happy friendship building!