Although using and maintaining your Festival Plaza is not crucial to game progress or even your enjoyment of the game, there are a lot of benefits to doing so. The most important of which are the quickest and most reliable ways to reach Level 100 and earn the coveted Bottle Caps for Hyper Training.

Efficient FC Farming¶

As you learned earlier, FC is everything in Festival Plaza; you need FC to use facilities and you need it to rank up your plaza and get more facilities. The common ways to earn FC are by interacting with guests and participating in Missions or Global Missions.

Once your Festival Plaza is a decent rank, you may find that it becomes a chore to increase its rank further. However, what if we told you there’s an easy way to rake in 100s of FC in mere minutes by exploiting a bizarre oversight?

To begin with, you need a way to stop your Nintendo 3DS (or 2DS) from connecting to the Internet. If you have a standard 3DS model, you can simply toggle the wireless switch located on the side of the 3DS off. But if you have a 2DS or new Nintendo 3DS, you’ll need some clever thinking.

One, you can edit your Connection Settings in your System Settings so you don’t properly connect (for example, by deleting the settings or by using incorrect settings). Two, you can do something to your wireless access point to stop it connecting with your 3DS (like turning it off).

Next, save your game, then close it and wait 30-40 minutes. Maybe longer if you’re not in a hurry. What this does is give ample time for your Festival Plaza to be repopulated with new red-coloured whispers. Once you’re happy, load up your game and enter Festival Plaza like you would normally.

Slowly look around your plaza for guests with red-coloured whisper bubbles. Specifically ones that say “Do you want to know a secret?” or “I want to meet! I want to meet!” Perhaps “Tell me! Tell me!”, “Battle! Battle! or “Do you understand?”. Ignore the rest.

Speak to those guests and see how much FC you earn. At most, “Do you want to know a secret?” rewards 20 FC, while “I want to meet! I want to meet!” rewards 30 FC if you pick somebody with high statistics (which generally isn’t hard).

But if the numbers look acceptable, keep going until you have 3 or so guests who give a good amount of FC. If there aren’t enough guests like that, soft reset your game by pressing L, R and Start/Select simultaneously. Then reload your game and start again from when you enter Festival Plaza.

Once you’ve found 3 or so suitable guests, attempt to connect to the Internet without the ability to do so. The game will prompt you to save–agree and then continue to where you get a connection error. Now for the sneaky part. After closing the error message, soft reset your game and re-enter the Festival Plaza.

You will find that all of the guests you’ve spoken to should have the same whisper from before, meaning you can talk to them again for quick and easy FC! Given that a typical mission grants up to 60 FC for 3 minutes of effort, you can get 60-90 for just talking to 3 or so guests, which shouldn’t take more than a minute.

But the really clever part is yet to come. Before speaking to the guests again, note down their names on a piece of paper etc. and head inside the middle castle. Chat to the receptionist towards the west side and use her to page the guests. Find the 3 or so guests you noted down in the guest list and call them to the castle.

After summoning the guests, speak to them while still inside the castle and make them a VIP . Now connect to the Internet to save your game and soft reset after the expected connection error. The next time you enter the Festival Plaza, you’ll find the 3 or so VIPs near the entrance of the plaza.

This means you don’t even need to search the plaza to find them again! In addition, VIPs grant 50% more FC, so the secret-spilling guests will now give 30 FC instead of 20, while the guests that want to find somebody amazing will give you a whopping 45 FC instead of 30 FC.

So long as you only save while inside the plaza, you can continue to speak to these FC-churning VIPs for as long as you want… Well, that’s what we’d like to say, but after 30 or so minutes have passed, the whispers will automatically shuffle around and you’ll need to start all over again.

Still, within those 30 minutes, you can easily get 100+ FC a minute, so in 30 minutes, that’s 3000+ FC! Compare that to the average 30 FC from a 3 minute mission, while equates to 300 FC for 30 minutes. There’s no contest!

Recommended Uses of FC¶

Once you have a load of FC, you might wonder what you should use it for. Actually, despite all the bells and jingles, there’s not much in Festival Plaza that’s absolutely necessary.

For example, the EV training provided by the Bouncy Houses and Restaurants can be substituted with Poke Pelago or SOS Chaining. The Lotteries are a lottery–and so too are the Haunted Houses. Which leaves the Dye Shops as the only worthwhile investment–and that’s if you’re into fashion.

Or so it appears on the surface. In fact, FC and the facilities in Festival Plaza can be very useful for hardcore players, due to Hyper Training, which we discussed earlier in the Advanced Trainer Info section.

In case you missed the memo, one of the most useful facilities is the 5-Star Rare Kitchen , which can greatly speed up getting your Pokemon to Level 100 for Hyper Training. After you’ve become Champion and your Plaza has reached Rank 30, the 5-Star Rare Kitchen will offer two amazing dishes:

To really speed up the process, you’ll want to invest in not one but two 5-Star Rare Kitchens. This will allow one Pokemon at exactly Level 66 to reach Level 98 by eating two Rare Dinners and two Rare Buffets.

That said, acquiring a 5-Star Rare Kitchen is completely random. If you manage to get Sophocles to give you one when you Rank Up, then lucky you! Otherwise, you’ll need to be Rank 8 or higher so you can ask your guests for a recommended facility and pray they have a 5-Star Rare Kitchen.

Via the method of recommendation, you’ll need to fork out 1500 FC to convince a guest to build a 5-Star Rare Kitchen for you and 3000 FC for the second one. Hmm, that cheeky way of earning FC fast that we just covered is looking very necessary , isn’t it?

In theory, you can build more 5-Star Rare Kitchens, but it will cost 4500 FC for the third one, 6000 for the fourth etc. Which unless you’re really, really good at farming FC, is a gigantic waste of FC. Instead, just stick with the two kitchens and focus on raising one Pokemon per day. You’ve got plenty of days, right?

The other incredibly useful facility is the 2-Star Treasure Hunt . Nope, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. That’s 2 -Star and not 5 -Star or anything fancy. This facility is useful, but not in the way originally intended. The first time you visit a Treasure Hunt, you will receive a rare Bottle Cap , necessary for Hyper Training.

What you can do is search for a guest with a 2-Star Treasure Hunt (or make a deal online) and VIP a guest that has it. Making sure you don’t have a 2-Star Treasure Hunt already (if you do, replace it), request the VIP to build the 2-Star Treasure Hunt. This should cost you 100 FC. Not a lot, right?

After building the 2-Star Treasure Hunt, visit it for the guaranteed Bottle Cap. Next, find a guest with a 1-Star facility not in your plaza and replace the 2-Star Treasure Hunt with this facility for 50 FC. After that, return to the VIP with the 2-Star Treasure Hunt and repeat the process for unlimited Bottle Caps!