I am hitting about 145 hours in Pokémon Pokopia, the most hours I sank into a game since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. While the two are drastically different in size and scope, it’s not uncommon for cozy gamers to fall in love with this Pokémon franchise spin-off: you meet fellow Pokémon while creating ideal habitats, befriend them, and building your own utopia, well, Pokopia! As a Switch 2 exclusive, I was shocked and disappointed at someone I discovered 145 hours into the game that there are caps in the number of items and builds you can have in one region.
Does anyone know about this? Perhaps some, but this was news to me. After mainlining the story, I’ve slowly improved the existing biomes, but I poured most of my attention to Palette Town. For those that don’t know, Palette Town is an area where you can make everything your own. It allows for freeform building and where you can engage in multiplayer. As I fill out my Pokedex, I needed to build more homes to make my Pokémon happy. After welcoming a half-dozen new Pokémon, I set up a few sites to build, and lo and behold, I get a message saying I reached my limit!
Apparently, there is a cap of 40 per region on “interior” home builds, and larger homes count as two. Some loopholes include “open-air” builds like Pink or Yellow Huts or your own manually built homes. So, while there are some workarounds, this is a shocking limitation, especially for those that are less creative than others (I was the one used Autobuild in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom). Building templates like Stone, Sand, and Leaf den, hut, and house kits are very convenient as building your own home does require more materials and block specifications.
It seems that this cap may be to prevent crashes; however, I had to pause. I never considered myself a gaming snob or elitist of any kind, but I felt that was an odd limitation for a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. If we can fire up Minecraft, a block-based builder that constantly generates an environment, I am shocked and disappointed at a cap, and a cap as low as that.
The biomes in Pokémon Pokopia aren’t even limitless. You can given a finite area, so I thought the map size would inherently cap itself with limited real estate. We also need to consider that there are 300 Pokémon in the game. Divide that amongst five biomes and that’s 60 Pokémon per biome if we split things evenly, and odds are, they aren’t spread out that way. Sure, if you are selective about the type of homes you build, it may be possible to still use only indoor building kits; however, I never knew that the entire game, so I was throwing out those tiny one-Pokémon huts every time I found one from the sparkling ripples or Pokeballs on Dream Island. By doing so, I screwed future-me into a cap before I could home all my Pokémon, and 145 hours in, I am not sure I want to remove and bulldoze a bunch of small homes.
This has been the first major disappointment I’ve run into the game, and while it didn’t spoil my overall enjoyment, it certainly threw a curve ball. If Resident Evil Requiem can work smoothly on the Switch 2, Pokémon Pokopia surely can handle more than 40 homes in one biome, right?
I hope that we get an update for DLC in the future that will lift these caps, even if by a little bit. Have you hit any caps yet? Please share your thoughts with us on our Boss Rush Facebook Group or our Boss Rush Discord.
Nintendo Pow Block – A Nintendo Podcast by Boss Rush
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