Safari Zone guide for Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen
With Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen coming to Nintendo Switch, we have a dedicated guide for the Safari Zone.
The Safari Zone is its own unique brand of evil. It’s home to Chansey, Kangaskhan, and Tauros, who cannot be found via any other means. Scyther appears here in FireRed, as well as Pinsir in LeafGreen, though they can also be purchased as game corner prizes in Celadon City. There’s also Dratini and Dragonair, which can be fished up with the Super Rod. All of these Pokemon are difficult to catch – if you don’t know this already, the Safari Zone prevents you from weakening wild Pokemon with paralysis or sleep, which would normally make catching them much easier. Wild Pokemon also love to run away – for instance, I spent well over 6 hours catching all of these rare Pokemon just today. Here’s everything we learned about the best ways to catch rare Pokemon in the Safari Zone.
For those unfamiliar, here’s a quick rundown of how the Safari Zone works. You’ve got Ball, Bait, and Rock as your options. Ball is obvious, Bait makes Pokemon more likely to stay (and not flee) but lowers their catch rate, and Rock makes Pokemon more likely to be caught but more likely to flee. It’s also just really rude to throw rocks at Pokemon, but luckily, we don’t have to do that unless we’re in dire circumstances. Most of the time, throwing Safari Balls at your average Pokemon will eventually catch them. But with Chansey, Kangaskhan, Tauros, Dratini, and Dragonair, that’s not really going to work. Chansey is a 4% encounter rate in Area 2 (northwest of the main area), Kangaskhan is a 4% encounter rate in Area 1 (the rightmost map), Tauros is 4% in Area 4 (left map), and Dratini and Dragonair can be fished up anywhere. Scyther and Pinsir are 4% encounter rates in the main area, but honestly we found it easier to just buy them from the game corner.
Needless to say, these rare Pokemon have low encounter rates, and they will very often flee from you. In fact, the second you encounter one of these rare Pokemon, it is immediately decided whether they flee or stay on the first turn before it’s even happened. This means that even if you use Bait to make them stay, the effect of the Bait won’t kick in until the turn after. Long story short, if you’re trying to catch one of the Pokemon we listed, here’s what you should do: throw two servings of bait, throw three Safari Balls, and then repeat the process by throwing two more servings of bait. This gives you the best odds of keeping the Pokemon around to catch them. Due to an odd quirk, throwing bait at Chansey specifically will actually raise its catch rate rather than lowering it as it’s normally supposed to. Kangaskhan, Tauros, Dratini, Dragonair, Scyther, and Pinsir’s catch rates also do not go down when you use bait on them, making this the best strategy. The only time you should ever throw a rock is when you’re on your very last Safari Ball – it’s a last-ditch attempt to raise their catch rate that probably won’t work, but is worth a shot.
Even with the best possible strategies, it can be very difficult to get these Pokemon to stay. Many of them, like Chansey and Tauros, have a 50% chance of fleeing the battle on turn one no matter what you do. It took me almost 4 hours of straight gameplay to catch Tauros in Area 4 even with these strategies, and there is no other way to get Tauros in this game. So I’d highly recommend watching a YouTube video in the background (or multitasking in some other way). Another good tip – pretend not to care when you’re trying to catch rare Pokemon. It definitely, definitely works.
