Getting Max Friendship in Pokémon Platinum (Best Methods)

There are many ways to raise your Pokémon’s Friendship to the maximum stat of 255, and truthfully there is no one single best approach. But these are the fastest and most efficient things you can do to reach max Friendship quickly:

Catch the Pokémon in a Luxury Ball
Give your Pokémon a Soothe Bell to hold
Walk or ride your Bicycle frequently
Level up your party
Take your Pokémon to get massages
Feed Berries to your Pokémon

This guide dives into each of these methods with details on how to find the various items, locations, and NPCs required to get them going. We will also provide the exact numerical boost to Friendship for each method.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Passive Methods
- 1. Use a Luxury Ball
- 2. Give Your Pokémon a Soothe Bell
Active Methods

Passive Methods

Before you get started, it’s good to be aware of two types of bonus modifiers you can add to every boost in Friendship.

Rather than rely on you taking an action to improve Friendship, these methods use special items to boost it automatically.

1. Use a Luxury Ball

If you haven’t yet caught the Pokémon whose Friendship you’d like to raise, consider using a Luxury Ball to do it. Any increase to a Pokémon’s Friendship will gain a 1-point bonus if it was caught using a Luxury Ball.

Using a Luxury Ball to catch a Budew and evolve it to Roselia more quickly.

There are two shops in Sinnoh that offer Luxury Balls, which are purchasable for 1,000p each. These shops are:

The Sunyshore Poké Mart
The Poké Mart inside of the Pokémon League

Both of these locations only open up toward the end of the main game, but they’re the only way to obtain Luxury Balls in bulk. And since Luxury Balls have the poor catch rate of a regular Poké Ball, you’ll probably want to carry a lot of them.

2. Give Your Pokémon a Soothe Bell

The Soothe Bell is the best held item you can give to a Pokémon that you need to befriend.

Every time a Pokémon holding a Soothe Bell gets a Friendship boost, the amount of the increase gets a 50% bonus.

The in-game description of the Soothe Bell.

There are two Soothe Bells in the game, and they can be found in the following locations:

No.	Method
1	Received automatically from Cheryl after escorting her through Eterna Forest on the way to Eterna City
2	Inside the Pokémon Mansion on Route 212; received from the maid in the second-to-last room down the left wing

Active Methods

As long as you treat them kindly, keeping Pokémon in your team guarantees their Friendship will rise over time.

However, the following actions will give you the biggest Friendship returns for your effort.

1. Journey with Your Pokémon

The most consistent way of actively raising your Pokémon’s Friendship is simply to keep them in your party as you adventure across the Sinnoh region. There are two actions you can take while doing basic exploring that will rack up Friendship points the most:

Walking or riding your bike frequently
Leveling up your Pokémon

Staying on the move

The easiest way to continuously raise your entire party’s Friendship is to simply move around, either by walking or by riding your Bicycle.

For every 128 steps you take, there is a 50% chance that every Pokémon on your team will get a +1 increase in Friendship.

Riding up and down Solaceon Town’s main road to boost Friendship.

Strengthening Your Team

Another good way of raising your Pokémon’s Friendship while out exploring is to level them up in Pokémon battles.

This is especially effective when training them from a low level, when level increases are a constant occurrence.

Raising Budew’s Friendship by raising its level.

The amount of the increase to a Pokémon’s Friendship using this method depends on how high its Friendship already is—the more your Pokémon likes you, the lower its Friendship will increase per level gained.

This is explained by the following table:

Friendship Boosts From Gaining Levels
Increase From Current Friendship
0 to 99	100 to 199	200 to 255
+5	+3	+2

Note: None of this applies to leveling Pokémon up with Rare Candies, which are considered Vitamins. Vitamins also raise Friendship, but they’re too rare and/or expensive to be efficient as Friendship boosters.

2. Give Your Pokémon a Massage

Getting your Pokémon groomed is always a reliable way to get them to like you more. In Platinum, this is done by taking them to get massages.

There are two places in Sinnoh where your Pokémon can get massaged:

The Massage Girl’s house in Veilstone City
The Ribbon Syndicate in the Resort Area of the Battle Zone

The Massage Girl

The first place where you can get a massage is the southwestern-most house in Veilstone City, where an NPC known as the Massage Girl will ease your companion’s aches and pains.

The Massage Girl giving Budew a massage.

The Massage Girl will treat one of your Pokémon per day, resulting in a base increase to your Friendship of +3. As a bonus, she’ll also find a fashion Accessory to give you.

The Ribbon Syndicate

The second place to get massages won’t be available until after you’ve entered the Pokémon League Hall of Fame and received the National Pokédex upgrade. This will allow you to visit the Ribbon Syndicate in the Battle Zone’s Resort Area, where a whole team of masseuses will give one of your Pokémon a total spa treatment once per day.

Outside of the stately Ribbon Syndicate mansion.

Keep in mind that the Ribbon Syndicate will only massage your Pokémon if you’re a member, and you can only become a member if you show them a Pokémon that has earned at least ten different kinds of Ribbons.

A Banette with twelve Ribbons.

The Ribbon Syndicate takes a lot of effort to get into, but it’s worth it for the amazing massages its team of professionals can offer your Pokémon.

A Ribbon Syndicate massage boosts Friendship to a far greater degree than what Veilstone City’s Massage Girl can offer. The amount of the increase is randomly selected from three different amounts, but you can figure out how much it is based on the comment one of the staff members gives after the massage is over.

The table below explains this further:

Friendship Boosts From Ribbon Syndicate Massages
Comment		Friendship Increase
“Our treatment has made your pampered baby […] friendly to you.”	“much more”	+30
	“more”	+10
	“a little more”	+5

Remember to visit both massage locations every day for the best results.

Note: Unlike the Massage Girl, the Ribbon Syndicate masseuses will massage a Pokémon Egg, allowing it to be born with an elevated Friendship stat.

3. Feed Your Pokémon Berries

Finally, several Berries will raise Friendship by a considerably high amount. But there’s a catch: these Berries will also lower the Pokémon’s EVs (Effort Values) in a particular stat, depending on which Berry it eats.

Perusing the Friendship-raising Berries in the Bag.

The following Berries will increase Friendship:

SCROLL

Friendship Boosts From Berries
No.	Image	Name	Effect	Sources
21		Pomeg Berry	Raises a Pokémon’s Friendship stat, but lowers its HP EV points	Route 208 (the Berry Master’s House), Pal Park (3,500-4,150 point prize), Battle Frontier (Scratch-Off Card)
22		Kelpsy Berry	Raises a Pokémon’s Friendship stat, but lowers its Attack EV points	Route 208 (the Berry Master’s House), Pal Park (3,500-4,150 point prize), Battle Frontier (Scratch-Off Card)
23		Qualot Berry	Raises a Pokémon’s Friendship stat, but lowers its Defense EV points	Route 208 (the Berry Master’s House), Pal Park (3,500-4,150 point prize), Battle Frontier (Scratch-Off Card)
24		Hondew Berry	Raises a Pokémon’s Friendship stat, but lowers its Special Attack EV points	Route 208 (the Berry Master’s House), Pal Park (3,500-4,150 point prize), Battle Frontier (Scratch-Off Card)
25		Grepa Berry	Raises a Pokémon’s Friendship stat, but lowers its Special Defense EV points	Route 208 (the Berry Master’s House), Pal Park (3,500-4,150 point prize), Battle Frontier (Scratch-Off Card)
26		Tamato Berry	Raises a Pokémon’s Friendship stat, but lowers its Speed EV points	Route 208 (the Berry Master’s House), Pal Park (3,500-4,150 point prize), Battle Frontier (Scratch-Off Card)

As is the case when boosting Friendship through leveling up, the amount of the Friendship increase depends on how high the Pokémon’s Friendship already is.

Use the table below to calculate the increases:

Friendship Boosts From Consuming Berries
Increase From Current Friendship
0 to 99	100 to 199	200 to 255
+5	+3	+2

Keep in mind that even though this is a handy way to raise Friendship, you run the risk of reducing all the EVs of a stat to 0 if you rely on it too much.

Budew getting a boost to its Friendship after consuming a Qualot Berry.

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Chris Haygood

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Chris is an American freelance writer and lifelong gamer. RPGs have been his genre of choice ever since he got Pokémon Blue in 1867, but if he finds a good rhythm game, he will prioritize playing it over both eating and breathing.

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