Piloswine

A metre and ten centimetres at the shoulder for 55.8 kilos. That is not much weight for a creature the Pokédex describes as covered in thick fur and long bristles capable of withstanding polar cold, and the explanation is that much of that volume is wool. Underneath, there is a short-legged wild boar.

The design brings together two animals that do not completely overlap: the wild boar and the woolly mammoth. The Japanese name, イノムー, says it plainly, joining “inoshishi” to “mammoth”. English changed the front half to “pilo”, the hair, and left “swine” at the back.

What defines its behaviour appears repeatedly in several entries: it cannot see. Its fur covers its eyes, so it attacks blindly and keeps attacking even if the first charge has missed. It makes up for that with its hearing, and the entries insist that it is extremely sensitive to sound; when it charges at an enemy, the hair on its back stands on end. Its tusks are not just weapons: it uses them as shovels to dig up food trapped beneath the ice. Its short, sturdy hooves also let it grip the frozen ground without slipping.

It occupies the middle rung of a three-stage line. It evolves from Swinub at level 33, and during Generations II and III that was where the line ended, until Generation IV placed Mamoswine above it.

450 points spread out without surprises: 100 HP, 100 Attack, 80 Defense, 60 and 60 on the special side, and 50 Speed. A slow physical attacker, solid head-on and made of paper on the special side.

The ability that changes the maths is Thick Fat, the hidden one, which weakens Fire- and Ice-type attacks. On an Ice/Ground type, that erases one of the five doubled weaknesses it carries — Fire, Water, Grass, Fighting and Steel — and lets it stand in front of other Ice types without ruffling its fur. The other two do much less: Snow Cloak raises Evasion in snow and that is it, while Oblivious only prevents infatuation and Taunt. Electric attacks, at least, do nothing to it.

Offensively, Ice and Ground cover each other well: you need a Flying-type Steel Pokémon, or something with Levitate, to resist both halves. It gets Earthquake at level 51, and it has 100 power. Ice is the problem, because its best level-up attack is Blizzard at 58, with 110 power coming off 60 Special Attack, which means practically nothing. The answer is in the egg moves: Icicle Crash, with 85 physical power. Without it, there is Avalanche at 60, or the Ice Fang it already knows from the start. Stealth Rock and Curse, both via TM, point to the other way of using it: setting hazards and powering up at the cost of a Speed stat that was already poor.

And that is the brake. With 50 Speed and five weaknesses spread across common types, almost everything that can hurt it moves first. It performs well in a normal playthrough, from the middle of the game onwards, as a wall against Flying-, Dragon- and Electric-type routes. Once the line reaches Mamoswine, with 130 Attack and 80 Speed, there is no reason to stay here.

A single Egg Group, Field, the most populated in the Pokédex, which opens breeding up to half the list of four-legged Pokémon. The gender ratio is fifty-fifty, so there is no need to hunt for females or rely on Ditto. Twenty Egg Cycles come out at around 5355 steps.

Of the seven egg moves, two justify the effort. Icicle Crash, with 85 physical Ice-type power, is the best attack it will ever have given its stat distribution. Ancient Power is directly the key to evolution: Mamoswine does not evolve with a stone or at a specific level, but by gaining any level while knowing that move. In Scarlet and Violet, it is already on the level 1 list, so all you need to do is remember it at any Pokémon Center. Fissure, Freeze-Dry, Bite, Double-Edge and Curse complete the list.

Before all that comes Swinub, which evolves at level 33. The line grows at the Slow experience rate, so both evolutions arrive later than the number suggests.

Its habitat is the cave. A catch rate of 75 leaves it in no-man’s-land: neither the 45 of the difficult ones nor the 255 of the ones that fall to the first Poké Ball. Defeating it gives 1 HP and 1 Attack, and in the wild it may be holding a Chesto Berry, Soft Sand or Never-Melt Ice.