A big part of playing Pokémon Legends Arceus is filling the Pokédex, but to do this you’ll need to know how to get all starters, because they’ve each got entries. Obviously, you’ll choose one of these right at the very beginning of the game, so that will tick off one of them straight away, but that will leave you with two to find, but no trace of them out in the wild.
It’s a similar story for most Pokémon games and Legends Arceus is no different, despite the fact that it’s set long before any of the other titles in the series. The most recent exception was Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl where you could actually find all starters in the Grand Underground once you’d completed the game and unlocked the National Dex.
AdvertisementThat doesn’t appear to be the case here, though, and either way it meant waiting a long time to get them. If you’re looking for a much quicker solution, the simple answer is that you’ll need to trade to get all starters, and the trade that you’ll probably need to make is with your existing starter.
That might sound worrying if you don’t actually want to lose your first Pokémon, but in the section below we’ll talk you through the entire process to help you add the three to your Pokédex without being stuck with a different one. We’ll also talk about possible other solutions you could try if you don’t want to trade or you don’t have an online subscription.
How to trade to get all starters
AdvertisementIt won’t take you too long to get to the part in Pokémon Legends Arceus that you’ll be able to go to the trading post. This becomes available pretty much as soon as you get to to Jubilife Villlage, which will take place fairly close to starting the game, so by the time you get to an hour at the very most you should be able to get cracking.
What you’re looking for is a large noticeboard close to the Training Grounds in Jubilife Village. It looks a lot like the quest board for Monster Hunter, so if you’ve played that before then you should know what you’re looking for. Everyone else, just aim to the left of Galaxy Hall when you’re looking at it and keep an eye out for a large wooden noticeboard with a lady standing next to it. You can’t miss it to be honest.
AdvertisementOnce you’ve located it, you can then walk up to it and press A to interact with it. You’ll have two options here, depending on how you want to trade your starters. You can either do it locally with your friends if you’ve got a good Pokémon group, or you can do it online if your trading partner is further away.
There should be a lot of other gamers looking to do just that, but you’ll probably have to trade starter for starter to get the ball rolling, especially if you try to complete this early on. Another approach is to wait it out and build up some very cool ‘mon catches to try to temp someone to trade their starters for it. You’ll both need to enter the same Link Code at the same time to set things up, but once you’ve done that you can choose the trade.
Once you’ve made the trade for one of them, you can then repeat the process with someone else to get your second, but then you need to decide which one you want to keep in the short term. We’ll cover it in more detail below, but as soon as Pokémon Home opens up for Legends Arceus, you’ll then be able to transfer your starters into Home and then back again to give you all of them at the same time.
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Alternative method to get all starters
If you’re really against the idea of trading to get your starters then there may well be another option if Pokémon Sword and Shield is anything to go by. However, you will need the Home app to be able to do it. The bad news is that the release date for this for Legends Arceus hasn’t been confirmed as of yet, so it probably won’t be an option on day one.
When it does open up, you’ll then be able to play the start of the game until you get to Jubilife with the trade post, transfer your starter to Pokémon Home, delete your game and repeat the process for the other two. Another option is if you have multiple Nintendo accounts, you can try doing a similar thing and trade with yourself to get them all. If you have access to multiple Switches then you could even do this locally.
Its a similar situation with the point above to allow you to have all of the starters in your team at the same time. This will only be an option when Pokémon Legends Arceus links up properly with the app. This has been confirmed for 2022, but other than that there’s little to go on in terms of the release date. Hopefully, it won’t be too long after the game arrives.
You can also check out our computer games section to keep tabs on more game releases, or visit the Pokémon Legends Arceus website at legends.pokemon.com/.
