Pokémon Scarlet & Violet: How to Get Rare Candy

You want to get Rare Candy to level up your Pokémon as quickly as possible. In Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, there are multiple ways to harvest this reclusive resource. Thankfully, you can collect quite a lot of them through normal gameplay.

Find Rare Candy While Exploring

There are two ways that items spawn in the Paldea region. One way is they can appear as Poké Balls lying on the ground. This kind of loot has a short beam of light shooting out from the top of the item, so they are easy to spot.

Other items can also spawn as small yellow sparkles on the ground. These are a lot harder to see, though still not too difficult to spot if you keep your eyes peeled. This type of item, known as hidden items, is the kind that is most likely to be a Rare Candy.

With that said, you can’t tell what the item is until you pick it up. There are tons of different resources that spawn this way, so reliably farming only Rare Candies like this isn’t viable. Although since such items appear everywhere, make sure to collect as many of them as you can for better odds.

Get Rare Candy From the Ace Academy Tournament

To start, you need to unlock the Ace Academy Tournament by beating the main storyline quest of the game. This involves heading down to Area Zero and coming face to face with some Paradox Pokémon.

After this, some important NPCs will get the idea to begin the recurring tournament. Then all you need to do is go to the Entrance Hall in the academy and speak to one of the NPCs at the main counter.

Every time you win the Ace Academy Tournament, you get rewarded with one Rare Candy. This isn’t an efficient method of farming Rare Candies, as every entrance into this tournament involves three full battles with NPC trainers. You’re better off using other methods if you’re only after Rare Candy.

However, if you want to farm experience and get a bonus Rare Candy afterward, participating in the Ace Academy Tournament is a decent course of action. Depending on how strong your team is, you can clear a tournament run in as little as five to ten minutes.

Earn Rare Candy From Tera Raid Battles

You can only get Rare Candies as rewards from 5-Star, 6-Star, and 7-Star Tera Raid Battles. To unlock the higher-level events, you need to complete the main storyline quest. However, 5-Star Tera Raid Battles become available after you gather all of the Herba Mystica.

The higher the star level, the better rewards you get—including more Rare Candies. This is by far the best method for farming Rare Candies, as the time-to-yield ratio is the most efficient out of all the options. For example, you can clear a 5-Star Tera Raid Battle in a couple of minutes and get multiple Rare Candies.

Lower-tier Tera Raid Battles (4-Star and under) will never yield Rare Candies. Though they do give you Exp. Candy, which is almost as good as Rare Candy for leveling up your Pokémon.

Get Rare Candy by Using the Pickup Ability

There is an ability called “Pickup” which, as you can guess, lets a Pokémon collect items. However, “collecting” in this case means spawning an item independently of many other factors.

Every time you participate in a battle and have a Pokémon with the Pickup ability on your team, they have a chance to spawn one of many different items after the battle. The Pokémon in question does not need to participate in the battle, but they must not be holding an item for this method to work.

After a battle, check your Pickup Pokémon to see if they have generated an item. They will be holding this item, which you can take. Rinse and repeat this method to farm tons of items.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to specifically get Rare Candy like this; you need to get lucky. The odds of a Rare Candy spawning this way are quite low. Thankfully, since Pickup activates after every battle (both wild Pokémon battles and trainer battles), you can repeat this method very quickly.