Pokémon GO‘s Best Buddy Platinum Medal is a marathon measured in hearts. The medal requires 200 Best Buddies, and each one takes 300 hearts to reach the final level. That puts the full target at 60,000 Buddy Hearts.
One trainer spent roughly seven months tracking a push from 34 Best Buddies to 102. The resulting routine offers a practical way to choose between a relaxed daily pace and a much more demanding schedule. These figures come from one player’s calculations and experience, so they work best as planning estimates rather than guarantees.
Reflections of Six Months of Buddy Heart Grinding
byu/MikeStemmle inTheSilphRoad
The math behind the Best Buddy grind
A basic swap takes about a minute. It involves giving a buddy three treats, taking a snapshot, and playing with it. That produces three hearts before any walking, routing, or battling is added to the process.
At 100 hearts per day, the 60,000-heart requirement would still take 600 days. The slower approaches stretch the project into several years, while the most intensive routine brings the estimate below 16 months.
Daily habits that add hearts
- Battle with the active buddy. Put the current buddy on the team for Team GO Rocket fights, raids, and Gym battles. Gyms receive special attention because clearing them can produce many Battle Together hearts. Since these activities are already part of normal play, the extra time can be small.
- Do not chase every distance heart. The 2-kilometer hearts may not be worth prioritizing when buddies are being swapped often. They become easier to target for players who spend much of their time walking in areas with fewer stops and activities.
- Use Routes regularly. Routes provide another source of hearts and fit naturally into a walking routine.
- Save Poffins for a full plan. The advice is to use one only when there is a clear path to at least 20 hearts. A buddy that is already close to 300 hearts is a poor target because some of the benefit can be wasted.
- Keep a ready-to-swap roster. Trainers can swap buddies 20 times per day, which allows hearts to be added to as many as 21 buddies in one day. A pool of 26 buddies, renamed from
.Athrough.Z, keeps them near the front of the sorting list.
The target average is six hearts per buddy swap. Some swaps will produce more and others less, but that number gives the daily routine a simple benchmark.
Five ways to reach the medal
The grind falls into five different levels of commitment:
- Stick with one buddy. Keeping the same Pokémon until it reaches Best Buddy status is the easiest option, but the estimate for reaching 200 Best Buddies is around 12 years.
- Use a casual rotation. Maintain a group of buddies and switch during walks when Battle Together hearts are complete, a second Route is nearly finished, or changing makes sense. This pace produces roughly 30 to 40 hearts per day and could take about 4 to 5.5 years.
- Add swaps during Gym clears. Switching between rounds of a Gym battle can raise the total to about 60 to 70 hearts per day. The extra work can add up to two minutes for a heavily loaded Gym, but the medal estimate falls to around 2.5 years.
- Finish the roster at home. After the walking and battling routine, spend about 10 minutes on the couch completing basic swaps for buddies that were missed. This method averages about 95 hearts per day, cutting the estimate to roughly 1.7 years.
- Add Trainer Battles. The most demanding version also fills Battle Together hearts through Trainer Battles. It could reach about 125 hearts per day and bring the estimate below 16 months, though the added time may not feel worthwhile for every player.
What the tracked routine looked like
Over roughly seven months, the fourth approach pushed the Best Buddy total from 34 to 102, after years of slowly working on one buddy at a time.
After reaching 50 Platinum Medals through other achievements, the pace shifted to the third approach instead. At that slower pace, the Best Buddy Platinum Medal is expected sometime in late 2027. The Gym-focused routine is a practical compromise for adding hearts without turning every day into a second job.
Buddy Excitement is not included
Buddy Excitement can double the number of hearts earned from a swapped buddy, but it was left out of these calculations because managing the feature can feel tedious. Trainers who already use Buddy Excitement may see different daily totals from the estimates above.
Whether the goal is 200 Best Buddies or just a stronger bond with a few favorites, share your own heart-grinding routine in the comments. More Pokémon GO updates are available on X, Bluesky, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pokémon Go
Developed by Niantic Labs, The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Go is an augmented reality mobile game that uses GPS to let players locate, capture, train, and battle Pokémon in real-world locations. Players explore their physical surroundings to find PokéStops for items, battle at Gyms for team control, participate in Raid Battles cooperatively, and compete in the Go Battle League's player-versus-player format. The game is free-to-play with in-app purchases and features Pokémon from across multiple generations of the franchise.
- Genre Role-playing (RPG), Simulator
- Platforms Android, iOS
- Perspective Third person, Bird view / Isometric, Side view
- Modes Single player, Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)
- Release July 6, 2016
- Publisher Niantic Labs
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Age Rating
