Pokémon Go Fans Use Government Maps to Hunt Snakes

Pokémon Go fans are wrestling with U.S. government geographic data to find a newly-released creature: Silicobra, the sand snake Pokémon.

This week saw the release of Silicobra into Pokémon Go, as one of the few species locked to a very specific real-world habitat. Outside of this habitat, your chances of encountering Silicobra seem to be close to zero — a situation seen before with Wigglet, the barnacle-like version of Digglet, that requires players find a local beach.

For Silicobra, though, the situation is even less obvious. Pokémon Go developer Niantic has advised players they need to head to areas it classes as “desert” — which is fine if you live near the Sahara, but not so useful if you’re in Seattle or South London.

So, as is often the case, Pokémon Go fans are now banding together to try and work out what’s going on. Niantic typically uses open-source location data to create its own overworld map, but again, Silicobra seems to be bucking the trend by using a fresh dataset not seen previously.

Over on top Pokémon Go reddit TheSilphRoad, players have spent the past 24 hours narrowing down the map system that Niantic may have used to program Silicobra’s availability, with the U.S. government Geological Survey’s World Terrestrial Ecosystems 2020 data currently the lead candidate.

To cut a long story and a lot of map overlay experimentation short, fans reckon they’ve now found the right combination of map tags to deduce where Silicobra will spawn, and crosschecked this with reports of where the snake has already been spotted, in and around the New Zealand capital of Christchurch.

Thankfully, it’s mostly good news for those who don’t live in an actual desert (or in New Zealand, for that matter) as it appears that Silicobra can be found — rarely — in sssspecific locations across most countries. But fans are still surprised at just how rare these map locations seem to be.

“My local community found a nest in London,” wrote SilverGoon. “I went there on my lunch break and caught 11 within 20 minutes.” IGN has cross-checked the location with the USGS map data tool, and found it fits the expected criteria exactly. (For those in the British capital, the location is Stave Hill Park, in Rotherhithe.)

“Copenhagen has not had any Silicobra spawns, and I do not see any areas tagged with ‘Land Cover: Sparsely or Non-Vegetated,'” said Temporal_Bellusaurus, confirming that the USGS data once again fitted with expectations — and that Silicobra have seemingly skipped the Danish capital completely.

“Malmö in Sweden has Silicobras in one very tight location near Hyllie Station,” they continued. “Looking at the map, there is a single spot tagged with ‘Land Cover: Sparsely or Non-Vegetated’ right next to the station. I cannot see any other places in Malmö with the tag.”

For the dedicated Pokémon Go players out there, the USGS map data seems to be a good indicator to find whether there are any Silicobra near you, and TheSilphRoad thread has easy instructions on how to perform a data check for yourself. Whether anywhere nearby actually qualifies, though, is another matter.

“It spews sand from its nostrils,” reads Silicobra’s Pokédex entry from Nintendo Switch game Pokémon Shield. “While the enemy is blinded, it burrows into the ground to hide.” Maybe this is why it’s so hard to find.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social