The second generation of Pokemon were added into ‘Pokemon Go’ in February. (Niantic)
Several weeks after evolution items were added into Pokemon Go, hundreds of players have literally never once encountered them.
In Pokemon Go, evolution items are used in combination with candy to evolve certain Pokemon. For instance, Dragon Scale is used to evolve Seadra into Kingdra. The other evolution items are King’s Rock, Metal Coat, Sun Stone, and Upgrade.
The only way to get these evolution items is to visit PokeStops, but the items are so ridiculously rare that it could take you months of gameplay to actually get them all. The exact drop rate is not known, but it’s low enough that one Reddit user recently reported that it took them 10,000 PokeStop visits to obtain all of the evolution items. This means that an item was given out only .00304 percent of the time.
Other players have had slightly more luck, but virtually no one has obtained all of the evolution items in anything less than 1,000 PokeStop visits. You should not expect to receive any more than one item every few hundred stops. If you visit 10 PokeStops a day, then, it will take about three and a half months to get all of the evolution items, and that’s if you’re lucky.
In fact, in a recent poll of 2,368 Pokemon Go players, 62 percent of them said they have not yet received all of the evolution items. Seventeen percent have received three of the items, while another 17 percent have received one, 19 percent have received two, and nine percent have not received any at all.
At this time, it does not seem that there’s much rhyme or reason to how evolution items are given out. When the February update first came out, players were guaranteed an evolution item after a seven-day PokeStop streak, but bonus is no longer in effect. And there do not appear to be certain types of PokeStops that are more likely to give out evolution items than others.
The rarity of evolution items has had an especially negative affect on rural players, who do not have access to as many PokeStops and for whom it is even more difficult to come across any of the items that are required in order to evolve certain Pokemon.
Players have over the past few weeks begged Niantic to adjust the drop rate of evolution items, but so far, the company has not announced any plans to do so.