Caterpie

Climbing. That’s what it spends most of the day doing: scaling forest trunks in search of food, clinging on with legs the Pokédex describes as ending in suckers that stick to any surface. The rest is eating. The entries go on about its appetite so much that they even put a number on it — a hundred leaves a day, including leaves larger than its own body, dispatched in the blink of an eye. For an animal 30 centimetres tall and weighing 2.9 kilograms, that figure only makes sense because all that food is going to one place: the metamorphosis that comes next.

It can’t defend itself. Bird Pokémon hunt it regularly, and its only response is the red antenna on its head, which releases a strong odour and drives away anything that gets too close. The yellow rings scattered along its sides complete the trick: from a distance, they look like eyes.

The official category, Worm Pokémon, is literal. It occupies the first rung of a three-stage line that is completed before level 10 — at 7 it seals itself inside Metapod, and at 10 it emerges as Butterfree. Two of its Pokédex entries talk about how quickly it develops, and another recommends it to inexperienced Trainers. This stage is designed to be brief.

195 base stat points, split between 45 HP, 30 Attack, 35 Defense, 20 Special Attack, 20 Special Defense and 45 Speed. That 20 Special Defense is the lowest figure in the game, tied with a handful of species including Weedle, which also shares the exact total of 195. There’s no kind way to read the spread: nothing reaches 50.

Shield Dust, its regular Ability, negates the secondary effect of the move that hits it. On paper, that’s useful — no burns, paralysis, flinches or added stat drops — but it requires surviving the hit, and with 45 HP and 35 Defense, that almost never happens. Run Away, its Hidden Ability, only helps it escape wild battles.

Offensively, it has three moves and no TMs. Tackle at level 1, Normal type, 40 power. String Shot, also at 1, which lowers the opponent’s Speed. Bug Bite, at level 9, is the only one with a respectable figure: 60 power, Bug type, and it also eats the Berry held by the target. With 30 Attack, those 60 amount to very little.

A Caterpie reaching level 9 means someone has decided not to evolve it, and by then it could already be a Butterfree. Its real use in a normal playthrough comes down to two things: String Shot to slow down a wild Pokémon you want to catch, and surviving until level 7. Pure Bug hits Grass, Psychic and Dark effectively, and leaves it exposed to Fire, Rock and Flying — and Flying types, Pidgey first among them, share its route.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Bug, which lets it breed with the rest of the Pokédex’s arthropods and not much else. The gender split is 50%, so any two specimens are enough to get started, without the hunt for females required by the starters. Its 15 Egg cycles work out to roughly 4080 steps, among the shorter stretches in the game.

No exclusive move comes from the Egg. Its Egg Move list is empty, as are its TM and Move Tutor lists: everything it can learn is one of the three moves it gets by level.

It evolves into Metapod upon reaching level 7 and into Butterfree at 10, with no items, stones, friendship requirements or time-of-day conditions. With the Medium growth rate and the 39 base Exp. it gives when defeated, level 7 is reached in two or three battles.

Its habitat is the forest, and its catch rate is 255, the top of the scale: a Poké Ball thrown on the spur of the moment catches it almost half the time, and the Pokédex itself acknowledges this by calling it easy to catch. Defeating it gives 1 HP effort point, and its base friendship is the standard 70.