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Pokémon GO Guide: How to Transfer Your Pokémon to Professor Willow and Deal with Screen Freezes

There are a lot of frequently asked questions about Pokémon GO – too many, in fact, and far too many for us to cover in one go. We’ve already covered some of those questions, dealing extensively with the topics of how to catch certain rare Pokémon, and even one question that talks about Eevee, its evolutions, and how you should go about those evolutions. Now, we’ve decided to cover a couple more, which we shall be explaining below.

One question would be what you should do with your extra Pokémon, and how you should do it. Indeed, you’re bound to end up with dozens of Pidgeys at some point in the game, for instance, and you may be wondering what you should do to those pesky pigeons (or pigeon-esque Pokémon) that are surplus to your requirements. And for the second question, you may also be having it up to here with the game freezing after you catch a Pokémon, and may be wondering about the best workaround for that. So with that said, our new Pokémon strategy guide will be a mini-FAQ of sorts, answering both of the above questions to the best of our knowledge.

1. How To Transfer Your Extra Pokémon To Professor Willow

So you’ve got too many Pokémon of a certain type, especially if it’s a common one like Pidgey. At this point in your game, you don’t quite know what to do with all the extras you have. Well, you can transfer those extras to Professor Willow by following these steps, starting by tapping on the PokéBall located on the bottom of your screen. Select the Pokémon option, then choose the Pokémon you want to transfer to the professor. As a bonus tip, you’ll want to select the Pokémon that have the lowest CP if you’re trying to transfer duplicates of a certain Pokémon. Make sure you double-check those CP ratings, because you cannot undo things once you’ve selected Pokémon for transfer. Once you’ve reviewed everything, click on Transfer, then on Yes, and you’re set.

What happens after you’ve gone ahead with the transfer? Once it’s completed, your inventory will be boosted by some Candy associated with the Pokémon you had transferred. Though we’ve mentioned this before, we should remind you that the Candy you shall receive is always linked to the transferred Pokémon, and is never general, or one-size-fits-all in nature. So if you sent Pidgey over to the professor, you’ll get Pidgey Candy, which you can use when trying to evolve your existing Pidgeys.

Just keep on repeating this following “farming” process when trying to level up one of your Pokémon. Go hunting like you always would, prioritize catching more examples of the same species, then transfer the extras to Professor Willow. And if you’d rather try something else aside from transferring extras for Candy, you can get new Pokémon by hatching eggs. These come in 2km, 5km, and 10km, and these variations depend on the distance you need to travel in order to hatch them. Now that’s a topic we’ve covered many times in the past, so we shall move on to our second question – what to do when your screen freezes after catching a Pokémon.

2. How To Deal With Screen Freezes

As Pokémon GO has been a runaway success in so many parts of the world, and on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, that has greatly affected Niantic’s servers. This was a case of the company probably being too modest in forecasting the game’s impact, though one can say that Pokémon GO”s success was something completely unexpected.

Now the problem we’re referring to is the game’s tendency to freeze after a player has caught a Pokémon. This is not to be confused with the Niantic server outages that accompanied the game’s launches in certain parts of the world. However, there is one fairly reliable workaround, or home remedy if you will, that can help you deal with those nasty, annoying screen freezes.

The screen freezes, just like the broader and more serious problem of server outages, are also a result of intense server demand on Niantic. This happens when you throw your PokéBall, only to see it flounder and flail around before everything stops. The game may unintentionally put you under the impression that you caught something, but as you’ll soon realize when nothing happens after the up-and-down bouncing, the game is actually hanging on you. So what’s to do to deal with this unfortunate glitch?

Even if you’ve got a frozen PokéBall, it’s still okay to pull this off on your device. Take a look at the spinning white PokéBall on the top left corner of your screen. That means Pokémon GO is still loading, so you’ll want to wait until the white dot is completely gone before force-closing the app. But did you catch the Pokémon prior to the game freezing, or would you have to repeat the process right from the start? Apparently, you often won’t, as many players have reported seeing the Pokémon they had caught and found out that they had gotten it all along. Expect to see the Pokémon you caught once you return to the game.

There’s no ironclad guarantee that you’ll be able to get the Pokémon you had caught once you reopen the app. Sometimes, you’ll find that you were right – you didn’t catch the Pokémon at all, and you’ll have to hope what you did to catch it still works now that the game is back online.

There are actually a couple other interesting ways to work things around, such as throwing your PokéBall only when the white icon is completely gone. You can also try this out if you’re an iPhone 6 user – according to a player posting on Reddit earlier in the week, go to your phone’s settings, your cellular option, and your data option. Go to your phone’s settings, go to cellular options, then to cellular data options. Once there, turn off the “enable LTE” option, which temporarily improves the smoothness of the game, with emphasis on the word “temporary.”