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2 clever ways to find rare and hidden Pokémon even when Pokémon Go is glitching

It's been about a week since Pokémon Go's tracker — the tool that guides players toward hidden Pokémon — has worked as intended.

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The tracker sits in the lower-right corner of your screen and shows you which Pokémon are in your immediate area.

When a Pokémon is far away, it shows three little paw prints. As you get closer, it goes down to two paw prints, then one, then the prints disappear and the Pokémon will appear on your map.

Pokemon Go (Arrows)
Pokémon Go's tracker, which hasn't worked correctly in about a week. The Pokemon Company

It's like a hot-or-cold game. At least, that's how it works ideally.

For the last several days, for reasons unknown, it's been showing three paw prints no matter how near or far you are from a Pokémon. It's been frustrating players:

The rumor on the street is that Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, purposely turned off the tracker to ease the strain on the servers, which have been unreliable since the game's launch just over two weeks ago. Regardless of the reason, players are getting annoyed.

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But Nick Johnson, the Pokémon Go master who recently became the first to capture all 142 monsters available in the US, says that he used a very clever workaround to find and catch 'em all. Plus, here's a bonus method that Johnson didn't use but that could work for you.

Download Ingress

Before Niantic made Pokémon Go, it was best known as the creator of Ingress, a similar kind of map-based real-world game, but with more of a science-fiction bent.

Not only is Ingress still up and running on iPhone and Android, but players like Johnson find it an indispensable tool for Pokémon hunting, since Niantic brought a ton of data from the older game into the new one.

This is Ingress:

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Ingress android game
Google

See the white dots on the screen? In Ingress, that's called "exotic matter," or "XM," and it's the key to the whole affair. Players like Johnson have noted that areas where the XM dots are concentrated in Ingress also have a very high correlation with where Pokémon pop up.

So if you're having trouble finding a Pokémon that's showing up on your tracker and you're really dedicated, then you can switch over to Ingress, find an area with a high concentration of XM, and walk toward it. Once you're over it, switch back to Pokémon Go and a Pokémon should appear.

"I found more than a few rare ones by spotting them on radar, then ignoring the radar and using the Ingress in-game map to navigate to those hotspots," Johnson told Business Insider. "May not work 100%, but definitely helped me."

This comes with a massive caveat: Pokémon Go draws a lot of battery, and so does Ingress, so tread with caution or carry an external battery pack on your Pokémon hunts.

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PokéVision

There's a second option, not used by Johnson, but loved by plenty of others. It's called PokéVision, and it'll show you all of the Pokémon around any address you plug into it.

Here's Central Park's Grand Army Plaza, as viewed through PokéVision:

grand army plaza pokevision pokemon go
Screenshot/PokeVision

Dang, that's a lot of Pokémon. No wonder Grand Army Plaza has become such a hotspot for Pokémon hunters.

The timer you see below each Pokémon shows how long they'll be at that particular spot. If you make it to their precise location before the timer expires, then you're all but guaranteed to find that Pokémon.

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In a brief excursion to test PokéVision, it wasn't 100% reliable: I tore out my front door and jogged a few blocks to successfully capture a Gastly that PokéVision had spotted before time ran out, but I wasn't quite able to locate an Eevee that it assured me was close. And at one point, I caught a Squirtle that PokéVision had completely failed to mark on the map at all.

This might feel like cheating to you, so use it at your own discretion. Also, it uses data taken straight from Niantic, so it seems possible that it could change something and turn off PokéVision's access. So enjoy it as much as you can for as long as you can.

Nick Johnson applico
Nick Johnson. David Won Ko

In the meantime, we're still waiting for word on when Pokémon Go's radar glitch will get fixed. So if you don't want to stop your hunt, then you have some options.

On a final note, Johnson says that a good idea is to pay close attention to your fellow players. If you're out hunting and it looks like the crowd is about to stampede in one direction, then it's probably time to stop what you're doing and open your map.

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"The stampeding horde was also an awesome form of real-life push notification at Grand Army Plaza," Johnson jokes. "I caught a few things just by following the crowd or hearing other people shout out that it had spawned."

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