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Ahoy! The Season of Heritage story continues with the Mountains of Power event. It will last until January 13 at 8 pm local time.

The short description of the event reads:

"Spark’s intuition leads him to believe that the mysterious door’s second mechanism requires the help of Rock- and Steel-type Pokémon to unlock it.

Journey through terrain reminiscent of the mountains found in regions like Johto and Sinnoh, and work with Spark to unlock the next mechanism!"

This event has a bonus for 1/2 walking distance to earn hearts with your buddy. Which means that if you've given your Buddy Pokémon some berries to have it adventure with you, you'll have to walk 1 km instead of 2 to earn a heart from walking. You can earn 3 hearts this way per day, if you get your Buddy excited you can earn double hearts. For walking that would be 6 in the day. To get your Buddy Pokémon excited you need to either have enough interactions with it during the day or feed it a Poffin.

There is some Timed Research for catching Pokémon, hatching Eggs and earning Candy walking with your Buddy.

With the event Zubat, Machop, Geodude, Slugma, Nosepass and Barboach will be appearing more in the wild. Additionally Onix and Ferroseed will also appear more in the wild, but are rarer spawns than the others. With Shiny Slugma making its Pokémon GO debut, all of these event spawns can be encountered Shiny!

For a nice overview of the wild spawns as well as the Pokémon in Raids, make sure to check out Niantic's post about the event at https://pokemongolive.com/en/post/season-of-heritage-mountains-of-power-event/

This months we are getting Timed Research for Steelix Mega Energy. We were supposed to get 50 per 7-day Research Breakthrough box, but due to an issue with that they gave us Timed Research that will reward those 200 Steelix Mega Energy if you finish all steps. It's exactly enough to Mega Evolve Steelix for the first time. My Onix and Steelix aren't the greatest, so I'm not sure if I'll be Mega Evolving one yet. You can see the ones I had in my storage here.

The Lucky one is quite bad, so I'll have to check actually if I have Lucky Steelix in the Pokédex already. That could've been the reason I kept this one. I feel like I did evolve it already. I might've just kept this one because it's my highest IV non-Shiny Onix. The one named "#zero" has 0 in every stat. The Shiny 93% IV could be a good candidate though to evolve to Steelix and then Mega Evolve as it's high IV and has 15 Attack. After I Mega Evolve Steelix for the first time I'd be able to earn additional Mega Steelix Energy by walking with any Onix or Steelix. So I could work my way up to 200 again to Mega Evolve a better IV once I get one.

Heatran is back in Raids now, so I decide I'll Mega Evolve Gyarados sometimes now to use when I fight against Heatran. Although not the best option, because my automatically suggested battle party mostly gives Ground-type attackers. Which means Mega Steelix would be a better option to bring into Raids for a Ground-type damage boost. Though it could faint quickly when Heatran has a Fire-type attack.

Event Field Research Encounters

This event has 3 different Field Research Tasks that lead to Pokémon encounters. They're the following:

• Hatch an Egg: Alolan Geodude
• Walk 1 km: Slugma
• Earn 2 Candies walking with your Buddy: Mawile

I'm especially interested in the Mawile ones. So far my best Mawile is a 96% IV. It would be great if I could get a 100% IV from one of the Field Research Tasks, since Mawile doesn't really spawn in the wild. Eventually it will get its Mega Evolution in the game too. Here you can see my Mawile, including some I got from the earlier mentioned Field Research Tasks.

I don't have Lucky Mawile yet either it seems. So I'm definitely going to try trading these from the encounter rewards with friends who also complete some of those Field Research Tasks. The trading will give an additional chance for a 100% IV, although at a much lower chance than the encounter rewards.

What are you looking forward to the most in this event?