Pokecord shut down very suddenly today on 2020-05-30. It sounds like it won’t be back, sorry. This guide will be left as it was for reference/history. This guide may or may not apply to off-brand Pokecord clones like Pokecord 2.0 that many people are using.
Try alternatives such as PokeTwo, MewBot, or PokeMeow.
This is the old Pokecord (this icon) 
Not the new one (this icon) 
Updates
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Pokecord Basics
How Pokecord works is it pulls Pokemon data from Bulbapedia. Each pokemon has base stats, IVs, a Nature, Moves, and can potentially be Shiny (presumably at the standard astronomically low rate).
Pokemon can be traded and fought (1 v 1), and there’s no penalty for losing a fight and no reason not to catch or trade anything. There’s no winning or losing the game, so you can play as casually or intensely as you like.
Pokecord isn’t a perfect Pokemon clone however. Some important points to note: Pokemon do not have teams or abilities in Pokecord (right now). Your ability to earn money is limited to dueling (a pittance), voting for Pokecord daily on Discord Bots (kinda…icky), or selling pokemon on the ingame market (which is pretty weird).
Where To Play Pokecord
You can play on any Discord server that has Pokecord enabled. You can either invite the bot to your own server or join the official pokecord server (expect catching spawns to be incredibly competitive).
Spawns seem to be a combination function of time and how many messages posted, meaning a more active server means more pokemon—but also more competition to catch those pokemon. On fast, popular servers, mobile users have a pretty strong disadvantage compared to keyboard users.
Quickstart
Once the bot is in your server, pokemon will start to spawn based on time and number of posts. Type p!start to get started, then p!pick (starter name) to select a starter.
When a pokemon appears, the first to correctly p!catch it gets it. There’s no limit to how many pokemon you can get, so there’s no reason (other than politeness) to not catch a pokemon. In a server with friends, consider letting other players catch pokemon you already have (alternately, catch them and trade them to who wants them for free).
It helps to add all pokemon you’re planning to duel with to your favorites list, so you don’t have to go through the whole pokemon list every time. Pokemon are always referenced by number not name in commands, so this will help you find the numbers quickly.
Pokemon level just by chatting in a server with Pokecord active; only your active pokemon gets experience this way though, so be sure to p!select who you want to raise. Without an Everstone (in p!shop), Pokemon that can evolve via level will automatically evolve at that level with no cancel prompt.
Duels are very buggy but there is no harm in losing, so do them as much as you want. See the Duel Commands section below for pitfalls.
What’s Missing/Different In Pokecord
As far as I can tell these are the major differences/omissions from Pokecord
- Teams/battles for more than 1v1 pokemon
- Status/stat changing moves do not work at all
- Pokemon gender, meaning some evolutions are presumably random? and some moves likely do not work
- You can’t cancel evolutions manually, you must buy and hold an everstone
- Held items only exist for evolving or preventing evolution
- Abilities are also completely omitted
- There is no breeding of pokemon
- Mega Evolutions work differently and are semi-permanently activated out of battle. Use p!mega to toggle Mega Evolution state rather than having them hold the stone in battle.
- Aside from selling pokemon (Team Rocket, anyone?) there’s no effective way to get money at a reasonable scale
- Any pokemon can be a random spawn, including baby pokemon, legendary pokemon, starters, and evolved forms that aren’t usually available.
Competitive Gameplay
Theoretically speaking, Pokecord attempts to emulate Pokemon battles almost 1:1. It is in practice quite buggy however and is nowhere near the quality of Smogon’s Battle Simulator, which I recommend you use if you want truly competitive and accurate gameplay (or you know, play the actual games).
That said, the same aspects of competitive gameplay in Pokemon apply to Pokecord. It is thus important to know Natures and IVs for individual pokemon, tiers and matchups and all the strategy in a normal pokemon game.
The biggest difference in Pokecord is that all duels are 1 v 1, which is actually an extremely unbalanced format leading to lots of bans in the unofficial Smogon format for it. Basically the best Legendary or Mega evo you have will always win. This greatly limits strategy specifically making any sort of switch in, kamikaze, or trap gimmicks pointless and greatly reducing the importance of Bulk while exaggerating the already high importance of speed.
Other major differences in Pokecord (other than the bugs) include that status moves do not work, natures can be changed (but not IVs, which normal Pokemon DOES let you enhance…), so you’re really only looking for good IVs, if you care about them. Also abilities don’t appear to be implemented (RIP Shedinja) and held items are also only for evolution.
This is a guide for playing Pokecord quickly, not in-depth Pokemon strategy. There’s already very established sites to teach you the latter, so check out those links if you want to know more.
I highly recommend Bulbapedia for any in-depth gameplay information and Smogon for any practical/”Meta” strategy in the games, and Serebii is great as a quick reference as well.
Commands
The official command list is actually missing quite a few important commands, mostly server administration stuff. Whenever (pokemon) is included in a command, replace it with the number of the pokemon without the parenthesis. Almost no commands use the name of the pokemon, number is instead how to reference them, since you can have multiples of any given Pokemon.
Starting Pokecord
- p!start
- Enters you into the game. Other commands will not work, including p!catch, until you officially start the game.
- p!pick (pokemon)
- Select your starter, you can pick any “starter” pokemon from any mainline generation. This does not include Pikachu or Eevee.
- p!help
- The bot will DM you a series of help messages for p!help 1-5. You have to enable DMs from server members to get the DMs
Pokemon Commands
- p!catch (pokemon name)
- The most important command, catches the currently spawned pokemon, if you guess the name correctly and no one else catches it first. Spawns eventually expire, or expire instantly if another spawn occurs. If the bot doesn’t respond to this command, the pokemon is already gone.
- p!hint
- Get a hint to the currently spawned pokemon. It’s just the first letter though
- p!order alphabetical|number|level|iv
- Orders your p!pokemon list in the manner selected. Note “number” means order caught, not Pokedex number
- p!detailed
- Use this to show/hide IVs in info boxes, in case you want to see them. Disabled by default.
- I strongly recommend leaving the info off, as you can’t do anything about it and in the context of this game it’s basically meaningless.
- Use this to show/hide IVs in info boxes, in case you want to see them. Disabled by default.
- p!select (pokemon)
- Sets your active pokemon to the input number
- use p!select latest to select your last caught pokemon, useful for quick Nicknaming.
- p!pokedex
- Shows all pokemon, limited to pokemon caught since the Pokedex update on 2019-05-03
- Options –rewards –caught –uncaught
- Use “pokedex claim all” to take all rewards at once
- p!collection
- Shows all collected pokemon, basically the old pokedex before the new update
- p!release
- Releases a pokemon
Favorites List Commands
- p!addfav (pokemon number)
- Adds a pokemon to your favorites list
- p!fav
- Displays your favorites list, for easy reference/selection for trading/duels
- p!removefav (number)
- Removes pokemon from favorites list
Other Commands
- p!challenges
- p!daily
- Claim your
- p!redeem
- Redeem a code. These have to be generated by the developers so you probably don’t have any of these
- p!silence
- Silences your personal level up warnings
- p!challenges
- Dead command for a time limited event
Duel Commands
Battles are very buggy.
When a player uses a move in a public channel, the bot will delete it (but it will show briefly).
Market Commands
Bot Commands
Mostly self-promo stuff from Pokecord.
- p!appeal
- Appeal a ban on the official server only
- p!botinfo
- Shows Pokecord bot info
- p!donate
- Donation link for Pokecord
- p!invite
- Get a link to invite the bot to your server
- p!patreon
- Patreon link for Pokecord
- p!server
- Get invite to the official pokecord server
Administration
Only the server admin can activate these commands. They affect settings for the whole server.
If you’re worried about Pokecord disrupting your server, I would first set up the redirect and channel commands, and possibly clearspawns and disable levelup. Alternately, just prevent the bot from speaking in any channel but your spawn channel via restricting its role.
Consider changing the prefix early too so people get used to it, p! is a bit annoying to type.
- p!redirect (#channel)
- Redirects all Pokemon spawns into the channel passed. Useful to prevent spam and annoyed server members if everyone’s not a fan. I recommend starting out with it redirected on a large server.
- p!redirect disable
- Disables redirecting of spawns
- p!prefix (prefix)
- Sets the server prefix, if you don’t like p!. My server uses just p so it’s easier to type, especially for quick p!catch rushes.
- p!config
- Shows your current configuration and all the settings you can change
- p!config enable|disable (setting)
- This is the syntax to disable/enable a specific feature. The settings list is just below.
- p!channel enable|disable
- Toggle whether pokecord commands can be used in a channel. Default is on. Send this message in the channel to enable/disable. Note this does not disable level up messages in a channel; the only way to do that is to either disable them server wide with p!config, or completely disable Pokecord’s send messages rights in a channel.
Config Settings
You can confirm the settings with p!config but here’s a little more info on each.
- shrink
- Shrinks the size of pokecord’s posts to reduce clutter
- levelup
- Removes levelup messages for the whole server
- clearspawns
- With this enabled, the bot will remove the image/post of a pokemon spawn after it’s caught. Can clear up chat spam but also makes it more confusing for new players.
- spawns
- This lets you totally disable spawns for the server. If for some reason you want the bot for battles/etc, but no spawning pokemon. You probably don’t want to disable spawns.
Pokecord Evolutions
Here’s a spreadsheet with info on non-standard evolutions in pokecord.
Administration Tricks
Restrict Level Up Messages To Channel
There’s no built in way to do this, but if you restrict PokeCord’s Send Messages permission by default, then only give it rights to post in specific channels, it can only post level ups (and commands) in those channels.
Bugs
If you thought designing a robust, highly accurate pokemon game inside a Discord API sounds difficult, you’re right.
Double Spawns
Sometimes the bot will spawn a pokemon then immediately give a second spawn. Only one spawn is ever active at once in a channel (server?) in Pokecord, so the first pokemon is simply gone.
Battle Bugs
There is a lot that can go wrong in battles. There is a pretty brief timer on move selection,
If one player can’t start a duel because the bot says they’re already in a (canceled/completed) fight, try having the other party start the battle instead.
According to the bot itself, some moves are buggy and may “crash” battles. If this happens, there’s not much you can do but not use that move.
No Wild Pokemon Spawn
This is a big problem and there’s a few reasons. First, make sure the bot can post at all and double check it’s permissions.
If everything was working and all commands still work but spawns never appear to happen (wait at least a few hours with good server activity; spawns are based on chat frequency), what may need to happen is you need to make a new channel to spawn pokemon and delete the old channel. In our case, deleting the old channel was what actually fixed it, a new channel alone isn’t enough.
This bug seems to happen to users who have already forced a redirect. Since deleting a long-running channel can be such a big deal in a server (plus since not everyone wants to see the pokecord spam), I strongly recommend making a separate channel just for pokecord, otherwise there may be no easy way to fix this with the current buggy version of the bot.
Addendum
My Patreon – Check it out if my guides help you!
The Pokemon Videos on my YouTube
My Other Pokemon Discord Bot Guides
My Other Pokemon Game Guides
Pokemon Sun/Moon Island Scan Guide
there was a command that gives you coins for your pokedex, what wsa it?
It’s in the guide at the pokedex command
Can someone tell me how to get new pokemons???
Old pokecord is dead. If you mean the clone, it’s the same as always…they randomly spawn when you talk
PLS REVIVE POKECORD PLS!!!!! 🙁
It’s not my game lol I just made a guide for it. You can see me discuss some alternatives and stuff here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNAE_Qgc_Lo
I have a problem with pokecord, not work the command p!shop or p!market, i cannot buy any items
Pokecord is totally dead nothing works and probably never will again, it’s at the top of the guide
how to sell ?
Neither I nor anyone in my server ever messed with it TBH hence it’s omission here, “p!help market” should get you started, prepare for overpriced nonsense
Can you reply the legendary mark code it’s to complicated for my small brain
I can only assume you have commented in the wrong place
The spreadsheet link doesnt allow me access
Eh? Works for me. If you mean to edit, it’s not managed by me, you’d need to make your own copy or ask the owner for access, which I have no idea if they’d give
how do you use a rare candy?
All shop items are instantly used upon buying. There’s no using rare candies, you’re basically just directly buying a level for your active pokemon, so make sure you switch to what you want to level first.
My pokecord isn’t responding to commands… I’ve checked its permissions. do you think you could help?
No