In the all out quest to have one of the best pokemon, many people have turned to breeding. There are many advantages to breeding that you can’t obtain with the normal catch-in-wild routine. Some of them are getting moves that you can’t normally obtain on a pokemon, getting somewhat better Individual Values for your pokemon (stats), and just a less harder impact on your wallet in the game since you’re saving pokeballs. If you want to obtain some interesting movesets or would like to have some better stats for your pokemon, then breeding is for you.

To start off, let’s talk about the basics of breeding. When you get to Mauville City in Pokemon Ruby or Sapphire, go west from the city and the first thing you should see is a house with a man in between a fence to the left. This is where you can breed. Obviously, you need a male and a female pokemon to breed. They also however, need to be in the same breeding group or “Egg Group”, in which different pokemon are assigned. These are the groups:

Monster
Dragon
Ground
Bug
Plant
Water A
Water B
Water C
Indeterminate
Fairy
Humanshape
Mineral
No Egg

Thirteen in all. The No Egg group at the bottom includes all genderless pokemon, baby forms of certain pokemon, and Latias and Latios. As the name says, you can’t breed them unless you have a lovely pokemon called Ditto, but even then you can only breed the non-legendary genderless pokemon for eggs of that pokemon. Anyway, if you’re having trouble finding a pokemon’s egg group, try to compare the physical appearance of that pokemon to another. Absol is a pokemon that has four legs and paws to go with them, so a pokemon in its breeding group should have a similar appearance, like Manectric. Wobbuffet is a pokemon that relates to no animal or plant, so Koffing can be a mating partner with it.

So after you stick a compatable male and female pokemon into the daycare, the old man in the fence outside will tell you the status of your two pokemon, if they’re going to mate or not. Out of the few things that he says to you, there’s one thing that he will say that tells you that they will not mate at all.

Yeah, the guide writer is lazy. He asked Serebii to make a picture of it. Anyway, that’s the only occurrence of when two pokemon will not breed in the daycare. After that, they’ll produce an egg depending on, again, what the daycare man says. It could be almost instantaneously to get an egg, or it could take a whole boring day. You will get one though, be patient. This is all dependant on several things, their natures, ID numbers and so forth. A Traded Pokémon for example can take longer to get an egg with than one you personally caught.

So after you get the egg after the daycare man, you’re probably wondering when it will hatch. No, leaving your Gameboy Advance on for 3 hours will not hatch the egg. Like training a pokemon, it takes effort to hatch the egg. You need to walk a certain amount of steps in order to hatch the egg, depending on the pokemon you’re trying to hatch. It could take from 1,000 to roughly 10,000 steps to hatch the egg, depending on the type of Pokémon. Daunted? Use the Mach Bike and go back and forth in Mauville and the routes to the east and west. Eggs hatch quickly wherever you use the Mach Bike really.

Now, when your egg hatches, you may notice a few things about it. For example, it is at level 5 and the stats are according to that. One interesting thing you may see is that the pokemon knows more moves than it should at level 5. For example, I bred my female Gardevoir and male Wobbuffet together and when I hatched the Ralts egg, it knew Growl, Safeguard, and Destiny Bond. But wait! It’s not supposed to learn Destiny Bond, and Safeguard comes as a TM! Why does this Ralts have both of those moves already?

Breeding is a very useful technique when you want to aquire your movesets because of the fact that you can breed over two different sets of moves: Technical Machine aquired moves, and “Egg Moves”. Earthquake is a very popular move used by almost every physical sweeper, but the problem with this is that you only get one TM 26. You can however chain-breed it to any pokemon you would like. Chain breeding? Some pokemon can only get a move through breeding only if you first breed two other pokemon for a male version and breed it again to the pokemon you wish for a certain move to be on. For example, say I wanted to breed Rock Slide to a Cradily. First, I would need to get a Male Relicanth and Female Corsola, breed for a Male Corsola with Rock Slide and breed that with a Female Cradily/Lileep for a Lileep with Rock Slide.

I mentioned something about somewhat higher stats in the beginning. Take a look at the Individual Value guide for an in depth explanation for that part… if you want to even try to understand it. :P

Oh yeah. There are also certain pokemon that can be obtained by breeding. Igglybuff, Pichu, Cleffa, Smoochum, Elekid, Magby, Azurill, Wynaut, and Tyrogue.

And that’s everything related to breeding. Use the Drop Down Menu below to check out all Egg Groups and all Pokémon in them Third Generation