If you’ve recently tried to head to the cold north of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl’s Sinnoh Region then you’re going to have come up against the rock impasse that will leave you wondering how to move boulders. Without this skill, you won’t be able to advance in the game to get one of the gym badges and you won’t be able to catch any of the cool snow Pokémon that you find past the boulders, so it’s really important.
You can actually start to head up Mount Coronet fairly early on in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, but you’ll find that the boulders are in the way and the only way to move them is to push them using one of the hidden moves. The problem is that it’s actually easy to miss the move and even if you do pick it up, you might not realize that you need to activate it with a gym badge.
AdvertisementOnce you do move the boulders, you’ll then be able to pick things up on the snow drifts of Route 216, which is a lot of fun, as you push on further towards Acuity Lakefront and Snowpoint City. This is where you’ll find the 7th Pokémon Gym – obviously the ice gym – and it’ll see you progressing a little step closer to the end game for Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.
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How to move boulders in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl
Okay, so the simple explanation is that you need to pickup the Strength TM at Lost Tower and activate it by earning the 6th gym badge from Canavale City. With these two steps in the bag, you’ll then be able to return to Mount Coronet, walk up to one of the boulders and press A to move it.
AdvertisementThis will activate the Strength move in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl and you’ll then be able to walk towards the boulder again if you want to move it even further. You can check it out for yourself in the video below, which has also got some links that will show you how to get to Canavale City, but we’ll include that a little further down in the how to for more details.
The reason things are so complex in terms of how to push the boulders is that there’s a lot of the main campaign progression that you need to get through to be able to string everything together. Picking up the Strength TM comes relatively early on in the story on Route 209 east of Hearthome City, so you might well have already completed that step.
AdvertisementIf not, you just keep following the route around, battling trainers along the way, and you’ll eventually come to the Lost Tower. Make your way to the top floor, beating anyone and anything that gets in your way, and talk to the old ladies in the middle of the room and they’ll give you the strength TM.
How to get to Canavale City in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl video:
By this stage, you will probably have just two gym badges, but you won’t be able to get to Canavale City until you complete the 5th gym, which happens to be Fantima at the Hearthome Gym. From here, you’ll continue on to Veilstone City to get the 3rd badge, and then you’ll travel south to Pastoria City to get the 4th.
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For the most part, these are pretty easy to follow the map objective instructions, but after the 4th badge, things get a little trickier in terms of progression. There are two things you need to do in Pastoria City to advance. The first is to get the Defog TM from the guy close to the entrance inside the Safari Zone, and then once you have that you need to talk to the Team Galactic Grunt outside the Safari Game.
He’ll then run off, so you’ll need to chase him down, beat him and then talk to Cynthia north of his last position. She’ll give you some medicine for the Psyducks on Route 210 and you can take this to Celestic Town, using Defog on the way to see where you’re going.
In Celestic Town, you then need to talk to Cynthia’s Granny, beat the Grunt blocking the Ancient Ruins and head on inside. The granny will then come on in to give you the Surf TM and tell you that you need to beat Fantima to get the gym badge to activate it, so head to Hearthome gym to complete that and then you can Surf across the water on Route 218 west of Jubilife City, taking you to Canavale City to beat the gym leader there to activate Strength.
How to get to Snowpoint City
With Strength activated, you have everything that you need to move the boulders at Mount Coronet and progress to Route 216 in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. However, it’s easy to get lost in the vast expanse of the snowdrifts on the route to Snowpoint City, so you might be frustrated that even with the boulders out of the way, you still can’t get to the place you want to go.
AdvertisementTo save you a little time, what you’re aiming for is the entrance to Acuity Lakefront, with is in the very north west of the 218 snow field. Once you get there, you’ll see a couple of Team Galactic Grunts blocking the way and they won’t move to let you through.
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This is a good marker for directions, because as soon as you get to them, you can simply head east of their location and follow that path to go directly to Snowpoint City. Complete the ice gym there to get the grunts to move and you’ll be away to check on your friend at Acuity Lakefront and that is probably enough to help you progress everything related to moving the boulders at Mount Coronet in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.
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