What do Bottle Caps do in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet?

Now that you have made significant progress in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, you may have noticed Bottle Caps being sold at the Delibird Presents shops. What are they? What purpose do they serve? We can explain that below.

What Are Bottle Caps For in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet?

This item is probably the most expensive thing in the store, but that is for good reason. Bottle Caps are special items that are given to a certain NPC who can beef up a particular stat for your Pokemon. If you ever heard of IV farming, this is what it’s tied to.

In Pokemon games, every Pokemon has a set of IVs, ranging from 0 to 31. To get an understanding of what these numbers mean to make them more easily understandable, you can get a judgment function to determine that for you. After certain progress is made in the game, you can unlock the judgment feature, which can easily determine the IV for your Pokemon.

The values range from No Good, Decent, Pretty Good, Very Good, Fantastic, and Best. If your Pokemon has “Best” on a certain category like HP, Attack, or Defense, it will have its highest possible output to grow into that stat. Pair it up with EVs (effort values), and that stat can be extremely high. Because of that, you want to capitalize on the strengths and weaknesses of your team.

As for Bottle Caps, you can bring a stat from No Good into the “Best” via Hyper Training. When you get to Montenevera, there will be a man in a coat standing next to an Abomasnow who can Hyper Train a Pokemon for you. Giving him a Bottle Cap will then prompt him to boost one stat for a Pokemon’s stat to maximum IV. If you want to boost all of a Pokemon’s stats to “Best”, you’d need six for each Pokemon.

There are Golden Bottle Caps that count as six, but those are extremely rare. It’ll be most likely tied to 5-star raids and higher as those are one of the most valuable items in the game.

Compared to previous games too, your Pokemon simply needs to be at level 50 or higher to be Hyper Trained. Before, they had to be level 100, making the grind that much harder. Scarlet and Violet really cut down the time it takes to get a competitively viable team going!

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are available now exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.