There’s no doubt that Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl are very faithful to their origins. This means, much like in Pokémon Diamond & Pearl, honey trees can be frustrating to work with. Luckily, many of the rare Pokémon that were formerly exclusive to the honey trees can now be found in the Grand Underground! Despite that, there are still some Pokémon that will necessitate the use of honey trees to add to your team, so we’ve gathered as much information as possible on these sugar-coated natural landmarks!
Honey Tree Mechanics & Encounters
There are quite a few honey trees scattered around the Sinnoh region. At any time, you can open your town map and press the + button to check the status of all the Honey Trees in areas you have already visited. There are 21 total trees, and in order to have the best odds of finding rare Pokémon, you’ll want to try to slather all of them every single day. Six hours after you slather a tree, it will be shaking and you can then encounter a Pokémon.
Do note: changing your system time will NOT work in speeding up honey trees. In fact, any change to your system clock will freeze all honey trees for 24 hours. With that in mind, here’s a list of the Pokémon you may encounter:
- The most common Pokémon you can find is Wurmple. It has roughly a 40% encounter rate per honey tree.
- Silcoon (Brilliant Diamond Exclusive) and Cascoon (Shining Pearl Exclusive) are also very common with a 20% rate.
- Combee shares a 20% chance to appear similarly to the aforementioned cocoon Pokémon. Do keep in mind, if you save your game before checking the tree and find a Combee, you can soft reset your game until you get a female, it will be a Combee every single time!
- Burmy is a somewhat uncommon find, only being found 10% of the time.
- Cherubi boasts a very low 5% chance of being your encounter, however it can also be found in the Grand Underground, so don’t worry about adding it to your Pokédex.
- Aipom, much like Cherubi, is another 5% encounter rate that can be found in the Grand Underground instead, what luck!
- The single rarest Pokémon in these games: Heracross. It can only be found from honey trees, and only at a 5% chance of appearing. On top of this, that 5% is exclusive to the Rare Tree encounter slot, which is another 20% chance per tree. This means that in reality Heracross has around a 1% chance of appearing per honey tree!
- Munchlax is infamous in the original Diamond & Pearl for being one of the rarest Pokémon one could find. It has a mere 1% chance of appearing, and only on four specific honey trees. These honey trees are determined by your Secret ID, which cannot be checked by the player, so you have no way of knowing which four trees are your Munchlax trees. Luckily in Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, Munchlax can also be found in the Grand Underground, so it loses the title of rarest Pokémon in the game.
And that’s it! As a quick summary: You want to slather as many trees as you can with honey, and then make sure to come back in 6 hours to check! Be sure to never change your system clock, even if it’s for Animal Crossing. If you intend on spending those 6 hours in-game, there’s plenty of things you can do! Check out our Legendary Pokémon guide or our Shiny Hatching guide for more information. If you need any additional help, feel free to join our Discord server! Thank you so much for reading, and happy honeying!
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