Like so many Pokémon games, Pokémon Legends: Arceus encourages players to catch lots and lots of Pokémon. It even incentivizes you to catch tons of the same creature, in order to obtain shinies and to fully complete its enhanced Pokédex. And this time around, instead of storing all those Pokémon you catch in the sterile PC boxes of previous entries, Arceus offers pastures, which allow you to gander at your Pokémon as they chill and interact with each other. There’s just one problem, as fans have pointed out: your options for organising the dozens of Pokémon you’re likely to catch are frustratingly threadbare.
Whenever a Pokémon is caught, they’re automatically sent to the main hub’s pastures, where players can talk to an NPC to open a grid-based system similar to that in previous series entries to organise them, add them to their team, or release them for stat-boosting items. But unlike the game’s menu for item storage, which has a feature to automatically sort items by type with the press of a button, players have to manually organise their Pokémon.
There’s an option to multi-select Pokémon to move them around in bulk, and you can check off multiple Pokémon to release en masse, but that’s about it.
Across social media, players have pointed out how time-consuming and annoying it can be to manage pastures. Natalie Watson, a Waypoint Radio host, wrote on Twitter, “i am begging game freak to give us the ability to sort our pastures please broe we’ve been good.” Twitter user @tammytrashbags replied, “they make the first great pokemon game in years then make it impossible to [organise] my pokemon. I gotta respect it.”
Reddit user strangegoo created a thread called “[PLA] There *really* needs to be a way to sort/organise the pastures.”
“I’ve got about maybe 10 pastures full and it’s just annoying having to go through each one individually to find something,” strangegoo wrote. “I know there’s the search option but that’s not really what I want. Something like how you can organise the satchel would be a god send. Hopefully they can patch that in.”
Allowing players to automatically organise by Pokémon species if nothing else would be the most obvious improvement, but the game could also offer other sorting options, like alphabetically or by level.
Anything is better than the messy randomness of pastures that haven’t been organised, so players have been taking the time to arrange pastures in ways that are pleasing to their eyes. Twitter user @ShaolinHorizons showed off a screenshot of her Pokémon organised by colour. Twitter user @woahfinnick replied “honestly, this looks a lot less chaotic.”
@ShaolinHorizons replied, “[it] is the only way I can handle looking at it hahah.”
Some players have suggested tips and workarounds to make organising less painful than the hours some players have reported spending on the process. Twitter user @Buri_Chizu wrote that she keeps her first box empty so that all new Pokémon are plopped there, rather than being scattered throughout any empty spaces throughout the pasture.
YouTuber KennyMaximum made a video containing a tip to make organising Pokémon easier. In it, he suggests bunching Pokémon of the same species together, multi-selecting them, pressing the plus button to open the All Pastures menu which shows each pasture box in a grid, and then pasting them into an empty box. When players do this, the Pokémon will be placed automatically into the first empty slots available in that box.
“By far, it’s not the best solution,” KennyMaximum said in his video, “but it definitely works.”
Viewers commented to thank KennyMaximum but also pointed out how automatic sorting features would be so much better.
“Dude, I was sitting in the pastures menu for a solid 15 minutes clicking around trying to find the auto sort button that I was POSITIVE the game had,” KennyMaximum wrote in a reply to one commenter. “That oversight is the strangest thing. I can’t even call it lazy, it just seems like someone forgot to add it more so than being lazy.”
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