Beautifly

Behind the design is a swallowtail butterfly: broad wings ending in points, red markings over a yellow background, and a proboscis coiled into a spiral. That proboscis is the key to the character. Pokédex entries use it for two opposite things — sipping flower nectar and collecting pollen, and driving it into a rival to drain their fluids. The same part for eating flowers and attacking, which is why the official category, Butterfly Pokémon, falls short of describing what it does. One entry even says that simply leaving a flowerpot by the window is enough for one to appear looking for pollen; another calls it aggressive without qualification.

Its one-metre height does not prepare you for the 28.4 kg it weighs, a high figure for something that flits from flower to flower.

It occupies the end of one of the two branches that come from Wurmple. The caterpillar cocoons itself into Silcoon at level 7 and emerges as Beautifly at 10; the other half goes through Cascoon and ends as Dustox. You do not choose which one you get. Beautifly is the showy, special-attacking branch; Dustox is the nocturnal one.

Females are easy to tell apart: the red spots on the upper part of their wings are smaller.

395 points spread badly. The 100 Special Attack is the only thing that stands out, and it is left hanging from 50 Defense, 50 Special Defense and 60 HP: any neutral hit takes half its bar. Its 65 Speed does not outrun anything that matters, and the 70 physical Attack is just decoration, because its entire offensive movepool is special. It leaves 3 effort points in Special Attack when it faints, which fits the only thing it knows how to do.

Swarm, its standard ability, boosts the power of Bug-type attacks when HP falls below one third; with those defences, that happens just before it dies. Rivalry, its Hidden Ability, increases damage against opponents of the same sex and reduces it against the opposite sex, and with females making up 50 % it is a coin toss every time it comes out.

On the attack, Bug and Flying cover Grass, Fighting, Dark and Psychic. Defensively, the combination is one of the worst there is: Rock hits four times as hard, while Fire, Ice, Electric and Flying hit twice as hard. A layer of Stealth Rock strips away half its HP the moment it steps onto the field.

The usable moves arrive late. Bug Buzz, at level 43, is its serious attack, with 90 power and STAB; Air Slash, at 34, has 75; and Venoshock, at 25, stays at 65 unless the opponent is poisoned, in which case it doubles. The move that gets the most out of it is Stun Spore, at 11, because with the opponent paralysed its 65 Speed stops being a problem. In a normal playthrough, that is its role: paralyse something and hit it once. Iron Defense, which it learns at level 6, raises a Defense stat of 50 and fixes nothing.

Bug Egg Group and no other, with the sex ratio split down the middle: 50 % female. It can breed with almost any insect in the Pokédex, and there is no need to resort to Ditto to start a breeding line.

The 15 Egg Cycles work out at about 4080 steps, among the shorter stretches in the Pokédex. Its growth rate is Medium, the flattest of the six: it neither arrives late to the early levels nor gets bogged down at the end, and with 178 base experience it is not an interesting source of points for the rest of the team.

The evolution itself has no trick to it: Silcoon becomes Beautifly when it levels up to level 10, with no items, no time requirements and no friendship involved. The filter comes one step earlier. Wurmple turns into Silcoon or Cascoon at level 7 depending on an internal value assigned to the individual that the game does not show on any screen, so breeding for Beautifly means breeding and checking what comes out.

Its habitat is the forest. Its catch rate, 45, is that of a Pokémon that is difficult to catch in the wild, although the usual approach is never to catch it and instead evolve it from the caterpillar. Wild specimens may be holding Silver Powder or Shed Shell.