Changing your party member’s Tera Type allows you to significantly customize your Pokémon composition and create tactics never seen before in the franchise.
A Pokémon’s Tera Type is often one of its types. For instance, a Normal/Flying Pokémon will most likely have a Normal or Flying Tera Type.
However, this is not a rule. Your Pikachu might have a flying Tera Type, allowing you to use the Terastal Phenomenon to surprise your enemy by suddenly changing your Pokémon’s weaknesses.
If you want to surprise your adversaries with an unpredictable Tera Type, here’s how to change your Tera Type in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet.
Before you can change your Tera Type, you’ll need to make sure that you have plenty of Tera shards available.
How to Change Your Tera Type
Go to Medali’s restaurant with 50 Tera Shards, and you should change a Pokémon’s Tera Type.
It might sound expensive, but you know it’s worth the grind if you know how Terastallizing works.
Although changing your Tera Type is possible, it will require some grinding. You won’t be able to just change your Pokémon’s Tera Type whenever you want.
Not only that, you can’t just change your Pokémon’s Tera Type to any other type you want. It demands a decent amount of a somewhat rare resource to make it work.
Since doing all that isn’t that simple, and there’s quite a lot of work to be done, some players might take a different approach. For instance, a simpler solution would be to check your captured Pokémon’s Tera Type before leveling it up.
If it has the right Tera Type, keep using it. If it doesn’t have the Tera Type you want, maybe look for raids to get Pokémon with unusual Tera Types that you might want to use.
If that isn’t working for you, or if you have a very specific strategy in mind, you might have to change your Pokémon’s Tera Type in Medali.
If that’s the case, here’s what you need to do.
First, you must find a town called Medali. That’s the place where you will be facing Larry, the Normal Type Gym Leader.
Once in Medali, look for a restaurant in the city with huge Japanese letters over the entrance. The restaurant is also decorated with Poké Ball lamps, so you shouldn’t have much trouble finding it.
By this point, you should have already finished the Gym Challenge, so you should know what restaurant I’m talking about.
There, go to the Sushi bar area. You will see a cook straight up asking if you want to change your Pokémon’s Tera Type.
Unfortunately, here’s where the grind is. You will need Tera Shards to change your Pokémon’s Tera Type.
On rare occasions, these shards form when a Tera Pokémon falls in battle, and its Tera Jewel shatters. You can also find these shards on the ground when traveling. However, more often than not, you will get them from raids.
You can exchange 50 of these Terra Shards in the restaurant in Medali to change a Pokémon’s Tera Type. The shards must all be of a single type, which will be the Pokémon’s new type.
The first time you get to this place, you will receive 50 normal Terra Shards.
Why You Should Change Your Tera Type
A Pokémon’s Tera Type allows it to ignore a weakness it has momentarily. This is especially useful when you are fighting competent opponents, like Gym leaders.
This is also significantly helpful when your opponent suddenly uses a Pokémon that counters yours.
When that is the case, Terastallizing your Pokémon will cause its type to change to its Tera Type. A Water Type Pokémon can, for instance, become a Ground Type Pokémon while Terastallized.
That change alone would allow your Water Type Pokémon to face Electric Types and possibly win.
This is the layer that the Terastal Phenomenom brings to competitive Pokémon, which can be quite fun. It completely changes the way one thinks about team composition.
Just the fact the Terastal Phenomenon exists might make you think a lot more about your next move.
For instance, you might never be sure if you should keep your Pokémon on the battlefield for longer or call it back when the opponent shows something new.
The mind game is much more present in Pokémon battles than ever.
Although it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, this new gimmick brings something new to the franchise, which helps keep Pokémon games fresh.
There’s also a new goal besides catching a Pokémon that makes things interesting. Raids allow you to get stronger Pokémon with unusual Tera Types, but it does more. It also allows you to gather shards.
With them, as explained above, you can go to Medali’s restaurant and change your Pikachu’s Tera Type to Flying or something else equally weird.
