Pokemon Go Expands Nearby Feature, Adds Ditto At Last

By Dominik Bosnjak for AH.

It’s turning out to be quite an exciting week for Pokemon GO fans. After Niantic Labs rebalanced its popular augmented reality mobile game and announced a new Thanksgiving event, the San Francisco-based studio revealed that it’s expanding the testing scope of the recently introduced Pokemon GO Nearby feature which was originally only available in its home city. In addition to that, Pokemon GO developers revealed that they’d reworked this functionality which will now only be available when players are near a Poke Stop. In all other cases, the Nearby tab will be replaced with the Sightings feature which was also slightly tweaked by developers earlier this week.

So, starting today, these changes will be available to residents of all US states west of the Mississippi River except Hawaii and Alaska, all Canadians located in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the western half of Ontario, and all Australians. Niantic Labs has yet to elaborate on this highly specific testing region. Regardless of that, the studio called for all players to send feedback to its official social media accounts and other relevant gaming communities. Developers promised to continue tweaking the game based on what Pokemon GO players think of these new changes,

Official announcements aside, SlashGear reports that some players have finally managed to encounter and capture the elusive Ditto in Pokemon GO. As suspected, Ditto can’t be encountered in the wild in its original form as you just have to get lucky instead. Namely, this shape shifting Pokemon takes on the appearance of other low-level pocket monsters and only reveals its true nature once caught. While we’re still trying to figure out a reliable method of capturing Ditto, the screenshot below proves that this creature is finally encounterable in the wild. So, if you’re looking to catch it, it’s time to start tracking all those Pidgeys, Rattatas, Zubats, and Magikarps once again. With Ditto finally included in Pokemon GO, it’s only a matter of time before the second generation of pocket monsters debuts in Niantic Labs’ hit AR game. That will hopefully happen sooner rather than later, as the latest version of the Pokemon GO APK file already includes references to all Silver and Gold Pokemon.