Anyone who’s played Pokemon Go for a while will know that distance traveled while playing is used for a few things, such as hatching currently incubated eggs, so it pays, in the long run, to enable the adventure sync setting and let your time outside of the game help boost your gameplay too.
How to Enable Adventure Sync in Pokemon Go
Enabling Adventure Sync in Pokemon Go is a pretty easy process. You’ll just need to take a visit to the settings menu of the game to flip the switch for it on, and perhaps connect a Google account if you haven’t already done so.
- Make sure you’re logged in, and to the correct account.
- Press the red and white Pokeball icon in the middle of the bottom of your gameplay screen
- Tap the Settings icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen
- You can access a lot of settings from here, such as how to mute volume.
- Scroll down a little if you can’t see the option already due to a smaller screen, and then
- Tick the Adventure Sync box to enable the setting.
This setting doesn’t actually use location permissions while the game is closed though.
It actually gets the data from other programs, typically via Google Fitness stats. This is actually why you can use a program like DeFit to cheat in Pokemon Go by modifying your fitness data there and then having Pokemon Go read it later on via Adventure Sync when it “catches up” to what you’ve been doing while it was closed.
With Pokemon Go then taking those modified values as fact, you get an extra boost to how much progress you made while the game was closed.
If this is your first time connecting to Adventure Sync, you may be prompted to connect to a Google account to allow the app to use Google Fitness data, which is the backbone that makes Adventure Sync functional.
Why You Should Use Adventure Sync
So, now that you know how to enable Adventure Sync in Pokemon Go, there’s a good chance you’ll be wondering why you should enable it.
The answer to that is relatively simple. Adventure Sync allows you to make progress on Pokemon Go even while the game is closed or logged out. The core idea here is that Adventure Sync keeps track of what you had when you stopped playing and then compares those values to what Google Fitness says you’ve done when you next log in or load up the game.
If you don’t want to have to bother making sure Pokemon Go is open each and every time you go out for a walk with your phone, or head out for business, this means you can do that without losing out on progress for it as well.
Google Fitness data likely won’t be as pinpoint accurate as the game having current and ongoing access to your location data while playing, but the Adventure Sync setting is only relevant while the game has been closed and therefore does not have access to ongoing location data, so the comparison here is between slightly less accurate data that might miss a fraction of a kilometre or outright having no progress data recorded whatsoever.
Of course, you might have some concerns that it makes your account less legitimate, given that some programs as mentioned above can influence Google fitness data and effectively use it to cheat, but that decision is ultimately up to you.
The only other major concern is whether or not Niantic can be trusted with your Google fitness data, but realistically, if you’re playing Pokemon Go then they’ve already got more data from the game itself about where you are and where you normally travel than they would gain from Google fitness, making it a somewhat mute concern.