Breeding Pokemon has been around since Generation II in a long line of games in the series. It is the best way to multiply some of the rare Pokemon in the game.
The most popular use for this is breeding the starter Pokemon and trading it to a friend, since starter Pokemon are only given out at the start and you can only pick one of the three options.
However, some trainers also want to breed the absolute best Pokemon with regard to IV (Individual Values) stats for their lineup.
We will show you how to breed Pokemon in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet in this comprehensive guide that covers everything you need – whether it is just replicating Pokemon, getting the best IV, best nature, and everything in between.
How Does Breeding Work?
Breeding is having two Pokemon of the opposite gender make an egg that can hatch as one of the two Pokemon that just bred.
You can breed Pokemon from the same egg group as well.
The two parent Pokemon will have different natures and IVs, and the resulting offspring will have a randomized nature and IV that is heavily affected by its parents.
However, there are many tricks to making breeding more distinct or fixed, which we will cover more extensively later in the guide.
How to Breed Pokemon
The only way to breed a Pokemon is by setting up a Picnic. You need to clear out your lineup/roster and put in two Pokemon of the opposite gender before setting up the Picnic.
Once the Picnic is set, you will have both Pokemon outside their Pokeballs and frolic around the Picnic.
They could run around, become playful, or just sleep. However, there will be a basket near the Picnic table that you can check.
This basket is where you will check for any resulting eggs.
You just have to wait until these two Pokemon lay eggs on the basket so you can pick them up. A basket can only hold a total of 10 eggs at a time, so you should regularly check if there are eggs inside already.
It may take a while, but there is a way for you to get these eggs faster because sometimes, it can take more than a few minutes.
To make the Pokemon give you eggs faster by increasing your Egg Power. The Egg Power is a buff that is acquired by eating a specific type of sandwich.
There are a lot of sandwiches that give you Egg Power, and there are also varying levels of Egg Power you can receive.
You can go to your local sandwich shop to check which sandwiches give you Egg Power and purchase them. Every town has them.
You can also make your own sandwich while the picnic is up, but it requires you to have the ingredients and a sandwich pick.
The sandwich buff only lasts for 30 minutes, so make sure you have enough ingredients to make more sandwiches.
Although 30 minutes is more than enough to get more than 10 eggs.
The Best Way to Breed
The best way to breed a specific type of Pokemon is by capturing a Ditto. If you breed a Ditto with another Pokemon, the resulting egg will always be the other Pokemon, as you cannot have any Ditto offspring.
What happens is that the offspring will now be deterministic once you have a Ditto. Bring a Ditto and a Pokemon you want to breed into your lineup and set up a Picnic.
Make and eat a sandwich with Egg Power, and you will get eggs that hatch into the Pokemon that are bred with Ditto.
What is good about this method is that the gender of the Pokemon does not matter.
If you care about the stats, nature, and abilities, you need to read the next part of this guide.
How to deterministically choose the nature
Each Pokemon has a nature. These nature types slightly affect the Pokemon’s stats which can either make them weaker or stronger.
For example, you can have a Tyranitar that is Timid by nature. Being Timid in nature means that their speed stat is increased while their physical attack is decreased.
Since Tyranitar is already slow, adding speed doesn’t affect it that much. However, reducing the physical attack is also a big deal because Tyranitar is a physical attacker.
Here is a table of all the nature and their effects in Pokemon.
| Nature | Increased Stat | Decreased Stat |
| Hardy | None | None |
| Lonely | Attack | Defense |
| Brave | Attack | Speed |
| Adamant | Attack | Special Attack |
| Naughty | Attack | Special Defense |
| Bold | Defense | Attack |
| Docile | None | None |
| Relaxed | Defense | Speed |
| Impish | Defense | Special Attack |
| Lax | Defense | Special Defense |
| Timid | Speed | Attack |
| Hasty | Speed | Defense |
| Serious | None | None |
| Jolly | Speed | Special Attack |
| Naive | Speed | Special Defense |
| Modest | Special Attack | Attack |
| Mild | Special Attack | Defense |
| Quiet | Special Attack | Speed |
| Bashful | None | None |
| Rash | Special Attack | Special Defense |
| Calm | Special Defense | Attack |
| Gentle | Special Defense | Defense |
| Sassy | Special Defense | Speed |
| Careful | Special Defense | Special Attack |
| Quirky | None | None |
To breed a specific nature, you will need an item first. You will need to get an Everstone. The easiest way to get it is by buying it from the store in Mesagoza.
The Delibird Presents Store is located west of Mesagoza and sells all these items, including the one for the next section of the guide.
The next step is getting a Ditto with a specific nature. For example, if you have a Ditto that is Jolly and you want to breed a Pokemon with a Jolly nature, you need to let Ditto hold the Everstone when you start breeding.
All the Pokemon you get will have the same nature as the Ditto holding the Everstone, even if the other parent has a different nature.
With all the natures listed above, it may seem like a hard task to get a Ditto for each nature. It is best to keep all the Dittos you can find and just get rid of the ones with the same nature or low IVs.
You can always use mints to change the nature of a good Pokemon if you have the Pokedollars to spare.
How to breed high IV Pokemon
Apart from nature, you can also affect the IVs or Individual Values of your Pokemon through breeding. However, this one is more random.
Since the IVs will be mostly based on the parents’ current IVs, the offspring will likely have the same IVs as the parents.
If you have parents with only a decent IV stat, you can still produce offspring with amazing IV stats.
Here is a table of the IV stats in Pokemon
| Stats | IV Value |
| Amazing stats | 151 – 186 |
| Great stats | 121 – 150 |
| Good stats | 91 – 120 |
| Ok stats | 0 – 90 |
How are these determined? Once you finish the game, you will unlock the judge function. You can go to your Pokemon box and judge each Pokemon by pressing ‘+’.
The judge feature will show if a Pokemon has amazing stats, great stats, good stats, or ok stats. However, you may notice that the stats or attributes for each Pokemon can still vary.
You need to look at the Pokemon’s stats to look into the best possible stats it has.
For example, if you look at a Dragapult and it shows ‘Best’ on attack and ‘Pretty good’ on speed, it can still be judged as good stats or ok stats by the judge function if its other stats are abysmal.
Since Dragapult is good with attack and speed boosts, it might be better than other Pokemon with better-judged stats.
It is another way of looking into the judge function, as it is bad to just look at the ‘great stats’ text and assume it will be better than the other.
Now, to get back to breeding.
You can look for Dittos with high IVs and keep them for breeding. The IVs will not be deterministic even if you have a high IV Ditto, but it will have a higher chance of producing offspring with better stats.
There is one way of increasing the chance even further. In the same store where you bought the Everstone, you can also buy a Destiny Knot.
Destiny Knot – An item to be held by a Pokemon. Should the holder of this bright-red thread become infatuated
If you let your Ditto with the high IVs hold the Destiny Knot, it will increase the chance of the offspring mirroring your Ditto’s high stats.
How to Breed Better Pokemon
After following all the steps to breeding, what else do you need to do to get the best version of a specific Pokemon?
Apart from IVs and nature, there is another hidden stat called EV or effort values.
These effort values increase your Pokemon’s stats even further, but it is a more controllable factor.
In fact, this is the easiest part of maximizing a Pokemon’s strength. Once you have done all the breeding process and got yourself the best IVs and nature you want for a Pokemon, you should move to maximize the EVs.
Let’s say you have your perfect Pokemon, and it hatched as a level 1 Pokemon. Let’s take Gardevoir as an example.
You want it to be Modest in nature to increase the special attack and lower the physical attack just because Gardevoir is an insanely strong special attacker.
Let’s say this Ralts (Gardevoir’s base evolution) has the perfect IVs as well, having ‘Best’ on each stat.
To improve Ralts, you want to farm EV or effort values to increase a specific stat. There are two ways to increase EVs.
The first one is through battling, and the other is through using vitamins.
When you battle a Pokemon, your Pokemon naturally increases its EV based on the Pokemon that was defeated. Everyone in your lineup will get their EVs increased.
Let’s say you defeated a Chansey with Ralts in your lineup. Ralts will gain 2 points in EVs for the HP stat.
Each Pokemon gives a different EV stat once defeated. You should look up another list online to check the effort value yield of each Pokemon if you want to go through this method.
The other method is through vitamins. You can go to the Chansey Supply Shops and purchase vitamins to increase your Pokemon’s EVs.
- HP Up – Increases base points for a Pokemon’s HP stat.
- Protein – Increases base points for a Pokemon’s Attack stat.
- Iron – Increases base points for a Pokemon’s Defense stat.
- Calcium – Increases base points for a Pokemon’s Special Attack stat.
- Zinc – Increases base points for a Pokemon’s Special Defense Stat.
- Carbos – Increases base points for a Pokemon’s Speed stat.
Each vitamin costs 10,000 Pokedollars, and you need a lot of these to max out your Pokemon’s EV.
To fully maximize a Pokemon’s EV, you would need a total of 53 vitamins. You can only increase a stat up to a maximum of 252 points, and each vitamin adds 10 points to a specific stat.
If we are still looking at Ralts, we want more special attack stats and maybe some HP.
You will then need to give Ralts 26 Calciums and 26 HP Ups. After that, you still have one vitamin spot left to give to Ralts, and you can choose either defense or special defense.
After maxing out the EVs of Ralts, you can now slap all the Exp candies and rare candies you have on it until it reaches level 100 and evolves into Gardevior.
Once it is level 100, you have your first ‘perfect’ Pokemon.
As another bonus tip for breeding, you can also use this strategy for getting shinies.
How to Get Shinies from Breeding
If you are a long-time fan of the Pokemon series, you should already know about shiny Pokemon or even the Masuda method.
Shinies are shiny alternate versions of a Pokemon that is extremely hard to find. The odds of finding a shiny Pokemon is 1/4096.
The Masuda method increases those chances to 1/683, which still looks terrible, but definitely better than the original odds.
The Masuda method is a breeding technique where you breed two Pokemon with different languages of origin.
You just need a foreign Ditto and you can start breeding as a shiny hunting strategy.
What to Do Next
Now that you understand how to breed Pokemon in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, it’s worth looking up some speed leveling methods so you can get your new Pokemon to a high level quickly and start clearing gyms and challenges with them.
Check your Friendship levels regularly, too. This will increase as you level your Pokemon and battle with them, but there are ways to speed the Friendship leveling process up too. It’s important to know if you want to evolve certain Pokemon and have them perform well in battles.
