‘Pokémon Sleep’ players are pretending to sleep to speedrun the rewards

Pokémon Sleep players have worked out that they are able to speedrun to the rewards if they pretend to sleep with their Pokémon Go Plus+ peripheral connected to their phone.

The cheat is antithetical to the purpose of Pokémon Sleep – a sleep tracker application which encourages healthy habits and, in result, attracts different types of Pokémon to the virtual world.

According to these players, the night’s first lot of 90 minutes of sleep is recorded by switching the app’s sleep sensor on and off respectively.

Exclusive Special Research for Pokémon GO Plus+
by u/g47onik in TheSilphRoad

Then, the phone’s internal time and date can be changed to the next night, where the player can log another 90 minutes of sleep for that night. Two Sleep Cycles are trackable in a given night. Repeating this over and over allows them to snag the rewards for the Catching Some Z’s Special Research quest in a number of hours.

The most coveted reward is a Snorlax wearing in a blue polka dot nightcap which also has the ability to be a Shiny Snorlax. Seeing that the odds of catching a Shiny Pokémon in a random encounter in Pokémon Go is about 1/520 (via Eurogamer), it’s understandable why players are tempted to speed through the Special Research quest as quickly as possible.

At the moment, it is not known how Niantic is going to prevent players capitalising on this trick as it is to do with the device’s internal time and date settings.

Pokémon Sleep is intended to “make you look forward to waking up in the morning,” said chief operating officer Takato Utsunomiya. Different Pokémon respond to different types of sleep that are identified in the app – dozing, snoozing and slumbering.

In other gaming news, a new King Kong game was leaked in a product listing for Skull Island: Rise of Kong for PC and consoles.