One of the main new wrinkles of Legends: Arceus is crafting. In order to keep a steady stream of Poké, Great, and other forms of balls stocked in your inventory, players will have to scavenge the multiple biomes for the proper ingredients. The primary resources you’ll need in the beginning to make Poké Balls are Apricorns and Tumblestone. The former can be found in the trees and on defeated Pokémon in the numerous regions of Hisiu, while the latter can be found in mineral deposits. The problem we ran into, though, is there are plenty more crafting materials to be found, and your bag fills up quickly. With such a finite amount of space in the beginning, we found it helpful to prioritize inventory slots for the aforementioned Poké Ball crafting ingredients. Being able to easily craft 50 balls at the start kept us in the beginning biomes longer and allowed for more satisfying returns when we could report back to the professor with all of our important findings.

Speaking of reporting back to the professor, the way players are monetarily rewarded is different in Arceus as well. Instead of stealing the money from children when defeating trainers, you’ll receive financial compensation for capturing Pokémon. The more monsters you catch, the heavier your purse is when you decide to return to Jubilife Village. And while I know I had to fight the temptation to deck out my character in swanky new clothes, your hard-earned coin is better spent elsewhere. As you progress in the game, a vendor becomes available that allows players to upgrade their bag to carry more items. His price starts small at 500 but continues to go up the more you buy. While it can get pretty expensive quickly, it’s worth it to have a bigger bag so you can stay in the fields longer without having to return home.

The other thing you should spend money on is the game’s charms. Hidden away in the back of the village is a man selling charms that will aid you against the more dangerous creatures of Hisui. These charms have different effects, but the most helpful ones prevented my character from blacking out after getting hit by a wild Pokémon. That one prevented me from losing all my supplies when the dark day came where I couldn’t outmaneuver a Psyduck.

Another easy way to fill your bags with Apricorns is to take part in the farming side requests found in Jubilife Village. At the start of the game, you’ll find two farmers with a single plot of farming land. As it stands, you’ll be able to ask the farmer to plant Apricorns, amongst other helpful resources. Once you progress further in the game, though, the other farmer will start to ask you for help to expand the fields by bringing him Pokémon to help tend the land. The more you assist your fellow residents by bringing Geodudes, Psyducks, and more, the more options for harvest you’ll have, and the greater your return will grow. It’s an easy way to accrue plenty of resources you don’t have to always carry with you and it’s useful when you’re in between missions and need to craft supplies.

Legends: Arceus offers the smoothest and most engaging way to catch Pokémon we’ve seen in quite some time. Players can either sneak up or charge at a Pokémon and simply throw a ball in order to secure them. But what happens if your highly sought-after Shinx decides it doesn’t want to stay in its new home? Fret not, for Pokémon escaping the initial catch attempt can actually be a blessing. If a creature doesn’t enter the iconic wooden sphere on the first attempt, it will turn around to run and gain its barring. This is when you strike. Have another Poké Ball locked and loaded and aim for the creature’s back when it starts to run. You can also do this without the first failed attempt as long as you manage to sneak up on them from behind and hit them with your first Poké Ball toss.  If you land the throw properly, you’ll trigger a back strike which raises your chances of actually catching your new best friend! However, this is not always the case, as some of the more aggressive Pokémon will actually turn towards you and launch an attack. In that case, it’s either run or throw your own Pokémon out.

Got a huge bounty of all sorts of Poké Balls? Good, you’re going to need them. Alpha Pokémon are some of the most daunting creatures in the game but are well worth the fight. They can be found all over the different biomes of Hisui and are more powerful than your normal garden variety monsters. Once you catch them, though, you’ll be able to use that power against your foes, as their unique abilities and better stats carry over to when they become your partners. It’s imperative here that you use type advantages against them but also have a few status effect moves like Hypnosis ready to go if you want to add them to your team. It also greatly helps your fight if you use the same back strike move discussed earlier to be able to strike first at your fearsome foe in battle.

When you do enter the harder fights of the game with Alphas and Noble Pokémon, your team is going to be pushed. Sometimes all the way to your last Pokémon even. Instead of abandoning ship and running when you have one ally left, stick with it if you have your red-eyed target on the ropes. Even when you fully run out of Pokémon to use, you’ll have the ability to run away from your victorious enemy and escape to fight another day. Be warned, though. You won’t be able to fight against other Pokémon until you’ve returned to a place where you can properly heal your squad. You’ll also have to look yourself in the mirror after knowing you sacrificed your entire team for a shot at adding a monster to replace one of them.

Let’s say you do triumph over the harder foes of Hisui, and you successfully level up your squad. Unlike other games, Pokémon in Legends gain a list of moves that they never forget. The trade-off is you’ll have to manually change your Quilava’s moves yourself instead of being prompted by an unskippable menu like the days of old. Be sure to head into the menus by hitting up on the d-pad to ensure your team is using the best possible moves at its disposal.

After you’ve spent a long day catching Pokémon, you’ll return to Jubilife Village to see they’ve all been placed in the pasture. Like the old games, you can release them back into the wild. But why would you ever do that? In Legends: Arceus, players are actually rewarded by the released Pokémon with resources that will help level up some of your partner creature’s base stats such as health, attack, and more. I always kept two or three types of Pokémon just in case I wanted to one day go for the ever-elusive living dex, but being rewarded for setting them free is a really nice way to keep boosting your team while sending your unused Pokémon back to the homes you so coldly stole them from.

If you’re anything like me, you’re always accepting every side request icon you can see around the game. A lot of the time, it’s easy to lose sight of some of those side objectives while trying to unravel the mysteries of your new home. Luckily for you, a lot of the requests can be completed without even realizing it, as many of them have to do with completing Pokédex entries and scavenging for berries, resources, and more. If you feel like you haven’t made a ton of progress on your requests, it wouldn’t hurt to take a quick peek at the menu to see what you’ve already accomplished. It always feels good to get a quick influx of Great Balls that you weren’t expecting by turning in these requests.

Look, I get it. We’re all busy. There are hundreds of games out right now, and you only have so many hours in the day. But the more time you can spend doing side requests and leveling your partner Pokémon, the better suited you’ll be for the more challenging levels later in the game. In Legends, wild Pokémon, Alpha, and Noble variants will all actually use type advantages and move masteries against you. Your Quilava will either be badly hurt or completely succumb to a Bubblebeam attack, so it’s best to have a few Alpha Pokémon on your side that are adequately leveled. On top of that, side requests will give you plenty of resources to keep you flowing through your main missions without having to frequently pause the action to go and scavenge for the right supplies. Finally, each new biome you unlock is gated by your Pokédex progress, so if you’re moving through each region without catching any Pokémon, there’s a good chance that’ll catch up to you and require you to grind for a little bit.