Catch

In poke-idle there is no manual catching. While your lead hunts, every defeated enemy triggers one automatic throw from your ball stock. On success, the exact individual that just fell (same level, IVs, EVs, nature, rarity, shiny, and moves) lands in your Box (never the team). This works the same whether you're online or offline: nothing changes because you're away from the game.

The auto-catch loop

For each defeated enemy, with auto-catch on:

If the species isn't uncatchable and you still have balls, the game checks your filters. A filtered-out mon costs no ball at all.
The game picks the ball with the most specific rule the target meets, among the ones with stock. A Prismatic goes to the ball set to "prismatic+", not to the one set to "uncommon+". If that ball runs out, the next one that matches the target steps in.
The throw always spends the ball, hit or miss.
On success, the exact mon is minted into your Box and recorded in the catch log.
If the ball breaks, the attempt is logged too, marked as "escaped". The Captures screen shows everything: catches, escapes and your overall success rate. You can even filter just the escapes and see that shiny that got away.

The four balls

Ball	Power	Notes
Poké Ball	4	Free regen ball; shop 50 gold
Great Ball	7	Shop 250 gold
Ultra Ball	13	Shop 1000 gold
Master Ball	guaranteed	Sure catch, except shiny; never shop-sold; joins auto-catch with its own rarity rule

What determines catch chance

The success chance of each throw depends on six things:

The ball's power: 4 (Poké), 7 (Great), or 13 (Ultra). The Master Ball is guaranteed in the world and in the Boss Room (see above).
The type bonus: when the ball matches the target's type, that power is multiplied by 1.6x.
The species' difficulty: every species has its own catch difficulty number, catalogued in Catch Rates (lower is easier; it defaults to 20 when data is missing). The hardest species on the list weigh even more: difficulty is not linear, so the hardest species cost far more than their number suggests.
The individual's rarity: the rarer it is, the larger the divisor applied to the chance (table below). If the target is a catchable legendary, the throw gets 14 times harder on top of that.
Your team's level: hunting a region above your level drags the chance down (see below).
The stage's level: from level 45 on, no target is too easy. If the species that showed up is far easier than the stage, its difficulty rises to the minimum for that band. You will almost never see this, because high stages already use hard species. It exists for the rare case where a weak species ends up on a strong map: it stops being a one ball catch.

If the target is shiny, none of that factors in: not rarity, not the species' catch difficulty, not its power. A shiny has one fixed difficulty, the same for every species (see "Shiny is its own case", below). The same goes for Ditto, which has a difficulty of its own.

Rarity factor (the higher, the harder to land)

Common	Uncommon	Rare	Epic	Prismatic	Mythic	Astral	Divine
1	10	26	39	90	174	283	386

Your team's level

A team below the region's level catches less. What counts is the average level of the three in the field, compared to the target's level. Being up to 10% below changes nothing; past that the chance drops:

Team average (relative to target)	Catch chance
At level or above	normal
80% of the level	30% lower
75% of the level	42% lower
60% of the level	70% lower
50% of the level	83% lower
30% of the level	96% lower
Below ~24% of the level	98% lower (the worst case possible, it never gets worse)

When this is working against you, an orange warning appears in the catch panel telling you how much harder it is. The fix is to level all three up, or hunt an easier region.

The caps

Target	Per-throw cap
Legendary	1%

Probability examples

The examples below use a median-difficulty species, caught with an Ultra Ball (power 13), a team at level, on a level 50 stage:

Target	Chance per throw
Common	~21.4%
Uncommon	~2.14%
Rare	~0.82%
Epic	~0.078%

Notice how each rarity above Common makes a throw far more expensive. On an easier species the chances go up, but from level 45 on there is a floor: no target stays too easy for its stage.

Shiny is its own case

Against a shiny, the rarity it rolled does not count. What counts is the species' catch difficulty: a shiny of an easy species is easier, a shiny of a hard one is harder. The gap is capped, so no shiny ever becomes routine.

Shiny species	Chance per throw (Ultra Ball)	Balls to catch
Rattata (one of the easiest)	1.43%	70
Charmander	0.84%	119
median species	0.50%	200
Gyarados	0.23%	445
Kingdra (one of the hardest)	0.19%	534

With a Poké Ball the chance is just under a third of that; with a Great Ball, a bit over half.

And remember the rule that hurts: each shiny gives you a single throw. Miss it and it is gone. In practice you will see close to 200 shinies for every one you take home. In exchange they show up far more often than before: one every 2.6 days of hunting. Putting both ends together, a caught shiny lands around 17 months for a median species.

One rule the game always guarantees: a shiny is never easier to catch than the same pokémon in its plain form.

Collecting raises your shiny chance

Every different species you catch counts toward the Collection Bonus — a permanent increase to your chance of finding a shiny. How many you own of each does not matter: what counts is how many distinct species have passed through your Pokédex.

The bonus is retroactive. If you have been collecting for a while, it is already active right now, with nothing for you to do.

Species caught	Shiny chance	Milestone chest
10	+2%	common
25	+5%	common
50	+8%	rare
100	+11%	rare
200	+15%	epic
350	+18%	epic
500	+21%	legendary
684 (all)	+25%	legendary

The middle column is the running total: hitting the 200-species milestone means your shiny chance is 15% higher than someone who does not collect.

Each milestone also hands you one chest, once. The early ones land soon on purpose — they exist to reward players who are starting out, not only the ones who finished.

Where to see it: open the Pokédex. The top of the screen shows how much bonus you already have and how many species are left until the next milestone.

If the shiny belongs to a legendary species, it gets 14 times harder still — the toughest target in the game.

The Master Ball still does not work against a shiny.

Ditto has its own rule too

Ditto is the universal template, so it uses neither its species' catch difficulty nor the rarity it rolled. It is a fixed number: 0.5% per throw with an Ultra Ball. Around 200 Dittos seen per 1 caught — and they show up every ~31 hours of hunting, which puts a caught Ditto around 9 months.

A shiny Ditto shows up once every 90 Dittos, and its catch chance is the same as a plain Ditto (it is never easier than the normal one). It is by far the rarest thing in the game: of every shiny that shows up in the world, fewer than 1 in 40 is a Ditto. A caught shiny Ditto is a server-wide event, not a personal goal.

Free Poké Balls (regen)

You earn Poké Balls for free over time, even offline:

Item	Regen	Cap
Poké Ball	+1 every 30 minutes	25

The regen clock accrues by real time, it works even while you're away from the game. At full stock the clock pauses; sub-interval progress is preserved. Great and Ultra Balls do not regen: they come from the shop or from chests.

Catch filters

Filters decide who to spend balls on (and who not to):

Species blacklist = never catch (wins over everything).
Whitelist = always catch (wins over rules).
Mode all: catch everything catchable.
Mode custom: a "not caught only" option (it only spends balls on species still missing from your Pokédex), then a per-type rarity threshold (a specific threshold per type, or a default rule). The whitelist wins over this option: a species marked there is caught again even if you already have it.
Specific pokémon + rarity: on top of the general and per-type rules, you can target ONE pokémon and lock its rarity on its own — say, "only Charizard, and only the rare one". This is the strongest rule of all (only the blacklist beats it), so it applies even if the whitelist or the default rule said something else for that species.

This per-pokémon rule takes two ways to lock the rarity: at least (that tier or better, same as the normal threshold) and exactly (only that tier — no weaker, no stronger). If you want just the pure rare Charizard and would rather let its epic and prismatic rolls slip by unspent, "exactly rare" is the pick; if anything rare-and-up works, use "at least".

You don't need to know the names by heart to build these lists (or the per-pokémon rule): the panel shows the pokémon that appear in the region you are hunting. Just click a name. The search with every species is still there if you want to mark something from another region.

During the hunt, the pokémon currently taking hits also shows its name above the health bar, and every shiny shows its own.

Thresholds, lowest to highest: off, any, uncommon, rare, epic, prismatic, mythic, astral, shiny.

A rarity threshold means "that tier or better". shiny counts as the top of everything; the shiny threshold catches only shinies.

You can also cap how many balls auto-catch spends per time window (0 or absent = uncapped).

Uncatchable species

No legendary can be caught in the wild. They still show up on hunts (spotting one is chat-worthy), but balls simply don't work on them and none are spent. The way to own a legendary is winning raids.

Mega forms can be caught, but they join your collection in the normal form. A wild Mega Charizard X becomes a level 1 Charizard. This holds in the world, in group hunts and on floor bosses. The Mega form itself still comes from one place only: awakening the Mega Stone in the Lab.

Beyond those, these species are also blocked:

The fossils Aerodactyl, Kabutops, Kabuto, Omastar and Omanyte.

Fossils only enter your collection by reviving fossils: see Fossils, Lab & Box.

When the Box hits its limit

The Box has a limit, and it changes at launch: 15,000 until August 31, 2026 and 3,000 from September 1 on. That limit applies only to catching on the map, and it does not cut everything off at once:

From the limit to plus 1,000: your trainer only throws at Uncommon or better. Common walks past and costs no ball.
More than 1,000 over: no ball is thrown at all.

You never lose a pokemon over this, and catching comes back on its own as soon as the Box drops below the step. To drop, release what you do not use and earn Dust. Details in The box limit.

Your catch record

The Catches screen keeps the history of everything you have tried to catch.

It opens on My catches, which has two views. Next to it sits Global, the numbers for the whole game.

Where	What it shows
My catches > Log	Your most recent throws, one by one, caught and escaped
My catches > Species	How many balls of each type you have spent on each species, how many tries since it last fell, and the all-time total
My catches > Species > Prismatic+	How many Prismatics, Mythics and Astrals showed up for you, how many you caught, and the rate between the two
My catches > Species > Shiny only	The same cut for shinies: spotted, balls spent on them and how many you caught
Global	Shiny numbers for the whole game, to compare against yours

Species is the view that answers "how many balls has this thing cost me?". The Since last column is your current streak: how many balls you have thrown at that species since the last time you caught one. It resets every time you catch.

Prismatic+ answers a different question: "how many good targets did I let get away?". A target counts as spotted even if you threw no ball at it, whether the filter blocked it or your stock was empty. That is on purpose: losing an Astral for lack of balls belongs in your history just as much as losing one to bad luck.