Eggs can be hatched by being placed in an incubator while the player walks around in real life. (Niantic)
Aside from catching them in the wild, one of the best ways to acquire Pokemon in Pokemon Go is to hatch eggs. This requires players to walk around in real life, traveling either 2, 5 or 10 kilometers. Many have tried to get around this requirement by keeping the app open in a vehicle, but as it turns out, there’s a speed limit beyond which the game will not register you as moving. So how fast are you allowed to be going?
There is no official word about this from Niantic, but according Pokemon Go Hub, the speed limit is currently about 10.5 kilometers per hour. If you’re going any faster than that, your movement will usually not count towards hatching the egg. Some have reportedly been able to go a bit above this limit, but in general 10.5 seems to be roughly the cutoff.
This obviously means that having the app open in the passenger’s seat of a car or on a train is not an effective way to hatch eggs. Biking usually won’t work, either, unless you’re moving incredibly slowly. In fact, this has led many bicyclists to complain and ask Niantic to increase the speed limit so that they can bike around town and still make progress in the game.
Ultimately, though, Niantic really wants you to be walking around, not driving or biking, and so it’s unlikely they’ll be upping the speed limit anytime soon. They of course also want to avoid a situation where players are encouraged to become distracted while driving; not long after the game launched, we already saw our first Pokemon Go related car crash, with a Baltimore man hitting a police car while playing the game, according to ABC News.
Walking on a treadmill won’t help you hatch eggs, either; the game registers distance traveled, not steps taken, and so unless you’re physically moving around on the map, you’ll be out of luck. According to The Silph Road, the system works by repeatedly pinging your GPS and seeing how far you have traveled since the last ping, thus ruling out the possibility of hatching eggs at the gym or by just walking around your room. It also means that if you aren’t moving in a straight line, the distance you travel may not always be measured completely accurately.
As one Reddit user explained, “What this means is, if you’re walking a weaving path, back and forth, and happen to be quite close to your starting point after the first location check, it won’t measure the entire distance you’ve walked in the intervening time. It’ll just measure the straight line distance, which can be considerably less.”
However, fans are incredibly creative, and so some have found ways to get around the game’s egg hatching restrictions. One user claims that they were able to hatch eggs by placing their phone on a record player and letting it spin around, according to CNET. Supposedly the movement around the player provides just enough distance to trick the game into believing you are really moving. Others have placed their phone on a Roomba, letting it travel around the house and do the walking for them.