Seedot

It shares a trade with Pineco: spending the day hanging from a branch, perfectly still, pretending to be something else. What each one imitates is different. Pineco is a pine cone; this is a half-metre, four-kilo acorn with a grey cap topped by a short stem that grows from the top of its head. That stem is the hook. Its body hangs below, with two beige feet and a mask of the same colour around a pair of enormous black eyes.

Pokédex entries keep coming back to two habits. The first is drinking: while it is hooked on, it draws moisture from the tree, and the more water it absorbs, the glossier its body looks. The second is startling things. It stays still until it looks like a real acorn, then suddenly moves to scare off Pokémon that come over to peck at it. Emerald adds a domestic detail: it polishes itself with leaves once a day.

It falls off, too. When strong winds blow, it lets go of the branch, and that appears both in Ruby’s entry and in the Scarlet and Violet entries, twenty years later.

It is the first step in a line that ends a long way from here. The round, motionless ball becomes Nuzleaf, bipedal, big-nosed and Dark-type. Official category: Acorn Pokémon.

220 points spread across six slots give you what they give you. Its highest figure is Defense, 50, followed by 40 HP, 40 Attack, and a triple 30 in Special Attack, Special Defense and Speed. It gives 1 Defense EV when defeated, which is the most useful contribution it makes to someone else’s team.

Chlorophyll doubles its Speed in sunshine, which means moving as if it had 60 when starting from 30. It still moves late. Early Bird halves the time it stays asleep, and Pickpocket, its Hidden Ability, steals the item from whoever hits it — the only one of the three that does something unrelated to its stats. With 40 Attack, it is not going to get much out of Explosion either, which it learns at level 33 and which becomes little more than a gesture with those numbers.

As a pure Grass type, it comes off badly against Fire, Ice, Poison, Flying and Bug, and what it has to offer offensively is the usual Grass movepool, which bounces off half the Pokédex. Absorb at level 3 has 20 power. Mega Drain at 15 has 40. Sucker Punch, at 30, is the closest thing it has to a play: priority if the opponent attacks, even if it is coming off an Attack stat of 40.

Where it does work is in the first half of a normal playthrough, and as a tool: with its catch rate and the level at which it appears, a Seedot with False Swipe and Leech Seed can hang on just long enough to leave something else at one HP.

It belongs to the Field and Grass Egg Groups, two of the most populated, so almost anything terrestrial or plant-based makes a suitable partner. The gender split is a clean 50% female, without the starter Pokémon catch.

Fifteen incubation cycles come out at around 4080 steps, on the short side. Six moves can come from the Egg, and two of them are worth having on the early routes: Leech Seed, which drains HP every turn and makes up for its poor defenses, and Worry Seed, to lower the Attack of whatever it is facing. The other four are Take Down, Quick Attack, Night Slash and Defog.

Its evolution has no strange conditions: at level 14 it becomes Nuzleaf, and Nuzleaf needs a Leaf Stone to reach Shiftry. No friendship, time of day or held items. It grows at a Medium Slow rate.

Its habitat is the forest, and it sometimes carries a Miracle Seed. Its catch rate is 255, the top of the scale: it can be caught with the first Poké Ball thrown at it, almost without lowering its HP.