How to get lucky eggs in 'Pokémon Go' and how to get the most experience when you use them

Lucky Eggs are some of the most useful and difficult-to-find items in Pokémon Go. They are also the key to leveling up as fast as possible. Go figure.

Finding Lucky Eggs without spending real world money is tough. Not having Lucky Eggs increases the length of your experience grind, and puts you at a disadvantage in gym battles against higher-level trainers that catch Pokemon with a higher CP than you can. So here's how to get Lucky Eggs, and how Pokémon Go power players use them.

How to get Lucky Eggs in Pokémon Go: Either level up or buy them

There are two ways to get your hands on Lucky Eggs. However, the first option, simply waiting until you level up, is pretty terrible. The experience grind in Pokémon Go once your level enters the mid-20s feels interminably long, so depending on hitting another level for the chance to get a Lucky Egg means you won't be using many Lucky Eggs at all.

Alternatively, you can buy Lucky Eggs with PokéCoins in the Pokémon Go shop. Five dollars will get you enough PokéCoins for a stack of 8 Lucky Eggs, and you'll need $11 to get enough PokéCoins for a stack of 25 Lucky Eggs. And if you want to quickly level up in Pokémon Go, you're going to need a lot of Lucky Eggs.

How to get Lucky Eggs in Pokémon Go: How best to use them

Lucky Eggs last for 30 minutes and double all your experience point gains, but 30 minutes is not a lot of time if you're walking around between PokéStops and catching a Pokémon here and there. There's going to be a lot of dead space during that half-hour where you're not getting any XP at all.

Alternatively, you can use a tried-and-true power leveling method called Pidgey Spamming. Basically, this a popular method in which you save up a bunch of evolutions for common Pokemon and then evolve as many of them as possible during the 30 minutes your Lucky Egg is active. Pidgeys are particularly good at this because they don't require that many candies to evolve.

Pidgey Spamming requires some planning to do right, and for that you can use PidgeyCalc, a free online tool that helps you figure out precisely what you need to do in order to get the most out of your Lucky Egg. PidgeyCalc makes Pidgey spamming very easy.

Pokémon Go Lucky Eggs: Pidgey spamming is the fastest way to level up

Pidgey spamming is built around Caterpie, Pidgey and Weedle evolutions because these three species only require 12 candies to level up and they're all common Pokémon. You should be able to gather a bunch of these Pokémon and their candies relatively quickly.

Go to PidgeyCalc and enter the number of Caterpies, Pidgeys and Weedles you can evolve. You can type "1000" into the "candies" field if you already know you have enough candies to cover all the evolutions. When you've finished plugging in the information, click "Calculate."

PidgeyCalc will then tell you how much time it will take to evolve those Pokémon, how much XP you will gain, and most importantly how many more evolutions you will need to max out the entire 30 minutes that the Lucky Egg lasts.

If you don't have enough Caterpies, Pidgeys and Weedles to take up the entire half-hour you can add new species to your PidgeyCalc list and recalculate. Type the name of the species you want to add into the field at the top of the PidgeyCalc tool and then press the green "+" button. PidgeyCalc will add a new line for that species.

If you use this technique you will wring every point of XP you can out of your Lucky Egg, and when you're spending real world money to buy Lucky Eggs you'll probably want the kind of efficiency Pidgey spamming provides.

More Pokémon Go guides, tips, tricks and updates

Check out Mic's Pokémon Go tips and tricks. Here are guides on how to get stardust, how to determine how long it will take you to reach level 40, the kind of Pokémon you get from 10km eggs, how to create new PokéStops, how to maximize your chances of catching Pokémon and how PokéStops distribute Pokémon eggs. Also check out how to catch Gen 2 baby Pokémon, our analysis of post-balance update Chansey and Rhydon and everything you need to know about finding the long-awaited Pokémon Ditto.