How to Win Scavenger Hunts

While easy official hunts have fallen out of favor, they are still held every once in a while. They focus on testing the sheer knowledge of the players. Questions are usually easy enough to know by heart or with a little bit of searching, but hard enough that not everyone knows them. This causes the people who know the most to win. For these hunts, preparation is the most important thing you can do outside of learning Bulbapedia by heart. Preparing is simple yet extremely handy. You should have "/scavenge " ready to copypaste so you don't have to type it and have "/joinhunt" ready. It's also convenient to have a Smogon, Bulbapedia, and Google tab open so that you can quickly find information if needed. Of course, you won't know in advance what kind of hunt it will be, so to do well consistently, you'll have to prepare at any time. Usually you'll have to know the questions by heart to get the first question quickly enough, as you will rarely get the chance to Google any of them.

Seemingly hard hunts obviously seem to be hard at first sight, but they tend to be easily found by searching a bit. These kind of hunts test the player's ability to quickly browse various sites and weed out unnecessary information. For these kind of hunts, it's important that you've prepared well. While getting the commands ready isn't as important (but still convenient), it's extremely handy to have the tabs ready, as you can immediately start searching. In these hunts, it's also important that you know how to search. At first, you'll have to analyze how to find the answer. While it's kind of obvious, if it's anything about Smogon, like a post or a user, you'll have to search on Smogon. However, this is usually mentioned. Otherwise, you'll probably have to find it on Bulbapedia, unless it has nothing to do with Pokémon or it specifically mentions another site. When you've found an appropriate page, you can use Control+F to find key words. This way, you can easily find where to look. If there's a list on the page, then you can just look through it and try possible answers. If you don't know what to do anymore for these kind of hunts, you can always try to Google the question. While questions you can Google aren't the best, they're still pretty common, and you can sometimes find the answer that way.

Psywaves hunts are some of the harder and more obscure hunts. They receive a seperate section here because they're so different from any other hunt. They focus on testing the player's sense of speech. Instead of giving hints that are about the answer itself, the hints focus on the answer's name, most of the time in multiple parts as well. The trick to these hunts is trying to find synonyms and examples and pronouncing them in your head. A hint like "a letter" might mean R, but as it sounds like "ar", that could be the answer. Usually, you try to find possible answers for one hint and try to think of Pokémon that fit with the answer. While these hunts are pretty unorthodox and might be hard for non-native speakers, they are still a fun thing to try!

Hard hunts are hunts that can be found normally while browsing. They are not as easy to find as most hunts, though. They require looking through multiple pages, usually while either putting the right answer together or getting redirected until you finally find the right answer. Preparation is not that important to these hunts as there's rarely a photo finish. It's rather important to have patience, though, and to know how to search for specific information. The necessary information will often be in large walls of text in very general pages or unexpected places. To find the right pages, you can try thinking about anything that you know that has to do with the question and seek pages with information of those. When you are at a page that you think might have the answer, you can use Control-F to seek for keywords or use the key to go to the correct place. You just have to take time for these hunts and don't rush, and you'll get them eventually. It's just not at easy to find as others and sometimes you have to read walls of text. Luckily, most of these are other Pokémon trivia, which are often pretty fun and can come in handy next time!

Every once in a while, there will be a question or a hunt which you have no idea on how to solve normally. You could waste hours of dedication have been wasted, and you still might have no idea. While these kinds of questions don't appear too often, there are two ways of solving them: an easy and a hard way. The easy way is fairly simple: try to find loopholes. Whether it mentions that it's a Pokémon or that it is in Kalos, it's still a hint, and when you can't figure it out by searching, you can always guess. Even though this will be tedious at times, you'll still get your well-deserved points. When guessing isn't possible due to an infinite amount of answers or too large of an amount to guess, you will have to do what the question says. Usually, when the question isn't able to be found easily nor able to be guessed, it's still doable, but just takes time. You'll have to watch or research whatever the question is about and notice everything that you discover, which could help you with getting the answer. While these hunts can be an absolute pain, they test your dedication, and it's fairly easy to score a good number of points. These hunts might have their blitzkrieg time increased so that it's actually possible to achieve.

These hunts are technically not especially fun nor necessary to win, but at times, you might want to compete against your friends to see who can do them the quickest. While they don't give you points either, you may enjoy the bragging rights. Practice hunts are usually held before official hunts so that you can get used to the adrenaline and be as quick as possible. They consist of math questions that are always extremely easy. Nearly anyone can answer them without looking anything up. As with the easy hunts, the most important thing for these hunts is the preparation. They're so short that everyone will finish in a few seconds, so you'll have to pay attention and immediately start doing the hunt. Every once in a while there might be practice hunts at other times as well to actually practice for official hunts in the right style, but if that happens, you just have to follow the tips given for that particular hunt.

Pokémon hunts are probably the most common hunts and focus on testing your knowledge of Pokémon trivia. They are very common and thus handy to be prepared for. Obviously, knowing standard information about Pokémon is very handy for these kinds of hunts. You can decide yourself to what level you want to take your basic knowledge. Whether you only want to know the typings or the type chart by heart or you want to read through all of Bulbapedia, it'll help you sometime. It's not a burden either when you're not doing hunts, as during battles, it's also convenient to know standard facts about your and your opponent's Pokémon. Other than this, you'll have to know how to search when you don't know it by heart. The best approach is to set up a number of parameters for yourself. This way, you can efficiently go through lots of Pokémon instead of going by them one at a time. You can just search a page that is about the aforementioned parameter and see if there are any Pokémon that fit the bill in your opinion. And if worse comes to worst, you can always just guess all of the Pokémon that are listed there instead of the huge list of all Pokémon. In the case that there's a list of conditions, you'll have to see if there are any conditions that can be right and eventually look to those conditions to see what Pokémon fit into them.

PS!, or Pokémon Showdown!, hunts are common hunts that put your knowledge about Pokémon Showdown! to the test. While a lot of these questions will be easier with sheer experience, there are still tricks to doing them more easily. When there are questions about the Lobby that you don't know, they're usually hard to find unless they're very recent. If they're recent, you can try to Control+F something with which you think you might get to the answer. If this method fails, you will have to resort to asking people, unless you have access to the logs. It is also efficient to know about the various commands so you can quickly look things up. These include: /staff, /faq, and /help. When the question is about any room, you can do the same as in the Lobby, but instead of /staff,s you have /roomstaff. These rooms also tend to be more casual, so you can probably easily discover the answer by talking to its users. At times, you can check their sites or forums too, but this will take a tad longer. Sometimes it'll give you the win, though.