Battle Pike Guide

The Battle Pike is a run of rooms, not battles. You bring three Pokémon, pick one of three paths at each step, and try to get through 14 rooms per challenge. Pike Queen Lucy waits at the end of your 2nd challenge (room 28) for the silver Luck Symbol and your 10th (room 140) for the gold. HP, PP and status carry over from room to room, so the facility is about managing damage and reading the hints.

How the Battle Pike works

You enter with three Pokémon and choose Level 50 or Open Level. At each step you stand in front of three paths and choose one. Behind each path is one of eight events, and each event is equally likely:

• a Single Battle against a Trainer
• a Double Battle against two Trainers with one Pokémon each
• a hard Single Battle against a tougher Trainer, after which your whole party is fully healed
• a wild Pokémon battle
• a status room, where a Gentleman’s Kirlia or Dusclops tries to give your Pokémon a status condition
• a partial heal, where one or two of your Pokémon are fully healed
• a full heal for all three Pokémon
• an empty room with an NPC who only makes small talk

The game also removes events that would do nothing. You won’t get a healing room when your party is already at full health, a status room when every Pokémon already has a status condition, or a Double Battle when you have fewer than two Pokémon left standing. The Battle Pike rooms explainer covers each event in detail.

Before you choose, the attendant at the top of the room names one of the three paths and gives a hint about it. Each hint matches two possible events, and the other two paths are guaranteed not to be either of them. That’s the core skill of the Pike: the hint tells you something about all three paths, not just one.

Three more rules shape every run:

• No healing between rooms. Damage, lost PP and status stay with you until a healing room or the end of the challenge.
• You can’t reorder your party. The order you enter with is fixed for the whole challenge, so choose your lead before you go in.
• Held items are a resource. A Berry or other held item that gets used or stolen stays gone for the rest of the challenge. Your original items come back once the challenge ends.

Rules and bans

Standard Battle Frontier rules apply: three different Pokémon holding different items, and no Mew, Mewtwo, Lugia, Ho-Oh, Celebi, Kyogre, Groudon, Rayquaza, Jirachi, Deoxys or Eggs. You can’t use items from your Bag during the challenge.

Pike Queen Lucy

Lucy appears at the end of your 2nd and 10th challenges in a row. After the gold, she comes back every four challenges (the 14th, 18th, 22nd and so on).

	Silver (room 28)	Gold (room 140)
Lead	Seviper (Quick Claw)	Seviper (Focus Band)
Second	Shuckle (Chesto Berry)	Steelix (BrightPowder)
Third	Milotic (Leftovers)	Gyarados (Chesto Berry)

• Silver: Shuckle stalls with Toxic, Sandstorm, Protect and Rest behind its huge defences, and Milotic has Recover, Mirror Coat, Surf and Ice Beam. Bring a strong physical attacker for Milotic and something that can break Shuckle before Toxic wears you down.
• Gold: Steelix hits hard with Earthquake and Rock Slide and can Explode, and Gyarados sets up with Dragon Dance. A strong Electric- or Water-type special attacker handles both.

Before Lucy’s room, all three paths give the same “dreadful presence” hint. One path heals two of your Pokémon, one heals one, and one heals none. You can’t tell which is which, but you always get a chance at some healing before the fight.

Full movesets and counters will be on the Pike Queen Lucy page.

Strategy: building a Pike team

The best Pike teams aren’t the hardest hitters. They’re the ones that come through 14 rooms with HP to spare.

Prioritise status protection. The status room picks one of your Pokémon in challenges 1–5, two in challenges 6–10 and all three after that, so it gets more dangerous the longer your streak runs. It uses Toxic (35% of the time), Ice Beam to freeze (25%), Thunder Wave (20%), Hypnosis (10%) or Will-O-Wisp (10%). A Pokémon with a matching immunity simply shrugs it off:

Status	Immune types	Immune abilities
Bad poison	Poison, Steel	Immunity
Freeze	Ice	Magma Armor
Paralysis	Ground, Electric	Limber
Sleep	none	Insomnia, Vital Spirit
Burn	Fire	Water Veil

Electric types are immune to paralysis from this room, even though they can still be paralysed normally in Emerald. Beyond immunities, Shed Skin, a Lum Berry and Rest all help.

Bring recovery. Leftovers, plus moves like Rest, Recover, Softboiled or Wish, let you heal without relying on healing rooms. A Pokémon that can recover is worth more here than one that hits slightly harder.

Plan for the wild Pokémon. Every wild room can bring Seviper or Milotic, both of which carry Toxic, plus one more Pokémon that changes as your streak grows: Dusclops, then Electrode (rooms 281–560, watch for Explosion), then Breloom (Spore), then Wobbuffet. A Steel or Poison type on the team blunts most of it.

Choose your lead carefully. Since you can’t reorder, your lead takes the first hit in every battle. Put a bulky Pokémon with recovery or a status immunity in front.

Reading the room hints

The hints are the skill part of the Pike. In short:

• Healthy team: any path is fine.
• Hurt team: the “presence of people” hint is a coin flip between a Single Battle and a full heal, and the “aroma of Pokémon” hint is a coin flip between a wild battle and a hard battle that heals you afterwards. Both are better bets than they sound.
• Low and statused: avoid the “nostalgia” hint, which is either a status room or a partial heal, if one more status condition would end the run.

The full hint table and what each one rules out for the other two paths is in the Battle Pike rooms and hints explainer.

Common mistakes

1. Bringing three glass cannons. Frail attackers win the first rooms and then collapse after one status room. Bulk and recovery matter more than raw power.
2. Picking the wrong lead. You can’t change your order mid-challenge, so a frail lead takes chip damage in every single battle.
3. Reading a hint as being about one path only. The hint also tells you what the other two paths can’t be. Use that.
4. No answer to sleep, freeze or bad poison. One sleeping or frozen Pokémon for ten rooms is effectively a lost team member.
5. Wasting held items. A Lum Berry used in room 2 is gone until the challenge ends.

BP rewards

BP is paid per challenge and grows slowly with your streak. Lucy’s challenges pay 10 BP extra.

Challenge	1	2 (Lucy)	3–5	6–8	9	10 (Lucy)	11–12	13	14 (Lucy)
BP	1	11	2	4	8	18	8	10	20

The amounts are the same for Level 50 and Open Level, and they settle at 15 per challenge (25 with Lucy) from the 27th challenge on. See the Battle Points guide for what to spend BP on.

FAQ

How many rooms are in a Battle Pike challenge?

14. The tracker’s Pike counter goes up once per room, and Lucy appears at room 28 and room 140.

Is the Battle Pike just luck?

Partly. Every event is equally likely, but each hint narrows down all three paths, and a team built for status and recovery survives the bad rooms that do happen.

Do I get healed after each challenge?

Your Pokémon are restored when a challenge ends, and any held items you lost come back, so each set of 14 rooms starts fresh.