Pokémon Go’s Ursaring evolution is broken
Features in Pokémon Go being broken is not really news, as Niantic’s game is more often than not a bit of a mess when it comes to bugs. However, players mostly are able to figure out where a problem lies and forward it to the developers for a targeted fix.
Issues surrounding the evolution of Ursaring to Ursaluna, though, seem to be so completely and utterly broken that not even the mobile game’s users are able to scrape together a good theory about what exactly is wrong with it.
Ursaluna, a creature from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, was added to the game last year and features a special evolution mechanic: You can only evolve an Ursaring to Ursaluna during a full moon – but not a real-life full moon, it turns out. Niantic seemingly has to activate a full moon in the game manually, which makes it very difficult for players to track if they can currently evolve Ursaring to Ursaluna at all.
Even when a full moon is active in the game, which is the case at the moment, things are looking a bit chaotic.
One Reddit user listed a bunch of different Ursaring they gathered over the last couple of years, showing that some can be evolved and some can’t.
From their post alone one could figure that it’s simply Shadow and Purified versions of the monster that can’t be evolved, which could be explained by Niantic forgetting to include them in the feature – in the code, Shadow and Purified Pokémon are listed as separate species, so an oversight like that is conceivable, even though these versions of the creature were able to be evolved when Ursaluna first debuted.
However, things get stranger, as many other players report that they have regular members of the species, which they can’t evolve into Ursaluna.
A working theory right now is that the weather can’t be cloudy and hide the full moon's shine, but has so far not been verified.
Niantic has not commented on the issue so far, but the amount of bug reports stemming from this confusion should force them to react at some point soon. If you can't evolve Ursaring to Ursaluna right now, we recommend patience as we wait for a clarification and a potential bug fix.
For more Pokémon Go, check out the overviews of the monthly Spotlight Hours and 5-Star Raids as well as our weekly event calendar.
