Pokemon GO’s developer, Niantic Labs, announced last week that it would be looking at rolling out a new update that will change how players can get PokeCoins in-game. Right now, there are only a handful of ways to get “free” Coins while you play, but that could change soon. Until then, here’s how to earn PokeCoins in today’s version of Pokemon GO.

Every Way to Earn PokeCoins In Pokemon GO

Like a lot of freemium games’ currencies, PokeCoins are easy to spend and hard to get. In the current version of Pokemon GO, you can generate up to 50 PokeCoins per day by defending Gyms. You can station one of your Pokemon at a Gym that your team controls, which removes it from your collection until you get it back. When you reclaim your Pokemon, it brings with it some PokeCoins as a Defender Bonus, based on how long it was at the Gym. It works out to roughly 1 PokeCoin for every 10 real-time minutes, to a maximum of 50 total PokeCoins per day.

Theoretically, with a big enough collection of Pokemon, you can rotate them in and out of postings at your local Gym for a steady profit. With that plus the sheer number of methods in-game to earn staple items for free, you can have a perfectly good time as a Pokemon GO trainer without spending an actual dime on the game. It just takes patience.

Sooner or later, though, you’re going to get roadblocked by your lack of PokeCoins, and that’s where buying them with actual money comes in. You can spend as little as US$0.99 for 100 PokeCoins, or drop as much as US$99.99 for a cool 14,500 Coins. Buying in bulk tends to get you better overall deals, and the whole game moves faster and more smoothly when you’ve got PokeCoins to burn.

Pokemon GO has been set up this way since Gyms received an update back in 2017. Last week, however, Niantic threw the community a curveball by announcing on its official blog that it was looking at “providing more ways for you to earn PokéCoins while playing in one place. So, in the future, we’ll be rewarding you with PokéCoins for activities besides defending Gyms.” It’s part of the same post-pandemic thinking that produced the Remote Raid Pass, as well as several recent special events; more trainers are playing at home right now, so Niantic is making moves to simplify that.

Niantic is presently testing an update in Australia that allows you to take on several featured activities every day in-game in order to earn five PokeCoins. Their examples included evolving a Pokemon, taking a snapshot of your Buddy, catching a Pokemon, making a Great or Excellent Throw, or powering up a Pokemon. This would come in addition to raising the daily cap for “free” PokeCoins to 55. However, as a trade-off, the rate at which Pokemon assigned to Gyms accumulate PokeCoins is being reduced to 1 every 30 minutes. You can still farm free Coins with the Defender Bonus; it’s just going to take a lot longer.

Niantic plans to use feedback from the Australian tests of the new PokeCoin system to inform additional testing, after which the PokeCoin revamp will be pushed to all players worldwide.

We’ve been catching a lot of them–not all of them, but quite a few–lately here at Prima. Visit our Pokemon GO game hub for more articles, including:

• How to take Snapshots
• The scheduling and details of this week’s Johto Throwback Challenge
• Playing with your Buddy: an itemized guide

Pokemon GO testing its latest rules tweak in Australia is actually smart, when you think about it. This is a game that’s largely about tracking down untamed wildlife, after all, and if you’re ever going to see unexpected and potentially dangerous reactions from wildlife, it’ll be in Australia. Continue to irresponsibly speculate on the Pokemon ecosystem down under with us via our official Twitter, @PrimaGames.