Honey Trees

One of the most annoying features of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum are the various golden, sweet-smelling trees scattered around the region, which can be slathered with Honey in order to attract a Pokémon six hours later. But how do they work and how do you use them efficiently?

The Trees

There are 21 honey trees in the game, located on Routes 205-215 (with one on each side of Routes 205, 210 and 212), 218, 221 and 222, as well as in Floaroma Meadow, Valley Windworks, Fuego Ironworks and Eterna Forest. They are a peculiar golden color, and if you check them with the A button, you will be told that "There is a sweet scent in the air..." If you have the item Honey, you will then be given the option to slather the bark of the tree with honey. The Honey item is found in various locations around Sinnoh, but it can also be picked up after battle with a Combee's Honey Gather ability, and a man on the left side of Floaroma Meadow will sell it to you for P100. In Diamond and Pearl, you can only buy one at a time, but in Platinum you have a choice of buying one or ten, which saves a lot of time.

After you have slathered a tree once, it is possible to slather the same tree with more Honey, but this does not affect anything; the second slathering simply overrides the first. After six to twenty-four hours of real time (not gameplay time), you can then return to the tree to find it shaking; if you then check the tree with A, you will be sent into battle with one of several possible Pokémon, most of which cannot be found anywhere else in the games.

What the game doesn't tell you is that the trees are split into two types, normal trees and Munchlax trees. Munchlax trees produce rarer Pokémon more often than normal trees as well as having a chance to produce Munchlax, which normal trees do not have. Only three or four of the 21 honey trees in the game are Munchlax trees, and which ones they are depends on your trainer ID number and the hidden "secret ID", both of which are set at the start of the game. There are almost always four Munchlax trees, but due to a bug in the way that the game tries to ensure it picks four different trees, there is a small chance (about 0.93%) that two of the four designated Munchlax trees will actually be the same, resulting in there effectively only being three.

While your secret ID can't be seen during normal gameplay and thus the trees that depend on that are most likely going to have to remain a mystery to you, your normal trainer ID can be seen easily on your trainer card, and that should give you two of your Munchlax trees, which is plenty. To find them, first take your trainer ID number and divide it by 256; one of your trees will be determined by the result (rounded down), while the other will be determined by the remainder. For each of them, divide the outcome by 21 and look up the tree corresponding to the remainder in the list of honey tree locations below (the numbers in parentheses beside the location of each tree). Alternatively, just enter your trainer ID into this calculator and it will tell you your trees:

Trainer ID number: Get my Munchlax trees!

Barring the normal/Munchlax tree distinction, the trees are functionally completely interchangeable; if you read something about, say, the Floaroma Meadow or Valley Windworks tree being special, that is only true if those happen to be Munchlax trees on your game.

Honey Tree Locations

Route 205, Floaroma Town side (0)

Head right from Floaroma Town until you get to the bridge. Go up it and the tree is just on the left.

Route 205, Eterna City side (1)

Fly to Eterna City and head left. Instead of going over the bridge, go up when you get near the lake, and the honey tree will be there, with a convenient grassless path leading up to it.

Route 206 (2)

Requires Cut. Fly to Oreburgh City and head up onto Route 207. Get on your Bicycle, go into the pit on the right and then up the mudslide. Head straight up until you get to Route 206 and go down the first set of stairs, then right to where the Cuttable bushes are. Cut the left one and then simply cycle straight upwards; you'll end up at the tree. Unfortunately you'll have to go through several grass tiles on the way, running the risk of encountering wild Pokémon.

Route 207 (3)

Fly to Oreburgh City and head up onto Route 207. Get on your Bicycle, go into the pit on the right and then up the mudslide. If you keep going up a bit, the tree will be just on your right by the mountainside.

Route 208 (4)

Fly to Hearthome City. Go out through the west exit onto Route 208 and then go down around the grass; there is a neat grassless path leading straight to the tree.

Route 209 (5)

Fly to Solaceon Town. Head down from the town, down the mudslide into the first pit on your way and up from it again, past the next pit on your left, and then turn left. The tree will be just there.

Route 210, Solaceon Town side (6)

Fly to Solaceon Town. Head upwards on the "breeding route", turn right once you're past all the extra-tall grass, and turn down into the convenient gap in the grass by the edge of the forest on the right. The tree is down in that gap.

Route 210, Celestic Town side (7)

Fly to Solaceon Town. Head straight upwards on the "breeding route" and up through the gap in the trees at the top, all the way until you get to the extra-tall grass. Get off your bike and run straight up through all the grass, then head on up until you get into the misty part of the route. Go right there, where the Black Belt is, and walk a bit farther up to find the honey tree.

Route 211 (8)

Fly to Celestic Town and go out the left exit onto Route 211. The tree is in the grass patch (no convenient grassless path up to it this time) by the mountainside above.

Route 212, Hearthome City side (9)

Fly to Hearthome City and take the south exit. If you keep left after exiting the gatehouse, the honey tree is in the first pocket of non-forest there on the left.

Route 212, Pastoria City side (10)

Fly to Pastoria City and head west into the marsh. When you get to the grass, go left through where there are only two tiles of grass, go one tile into the bog, and then follow the right edge of the muddy area up all the way until you get to the tree; this will get you straight to the honey tree without getting stuck in the bog at all. On Platinum you can take some shortcuts, but since they are visible as lighter tiles, I'll leave you to figure that out.

Route 213 (11)

Requires Rock Smash. Fly to Pastoria City and head out the east exit of the city. Head straight right from the gatehouse, through the grass, and then go down onto the beach. Go left just above Dr. Footstep's house and smash the rock in the narrow path there. Then simply go on left and the tree will be there.

Route 214 (12)

Fly to Veilstone City and go down onto Route 214. Head down the route whichever way you like, but when you're about to get to the exit to Valor Lakefront, get into the grass on the left, go a little down and then right to get to the tree.

Route 215 (13)

Fly to Solaceon Town. Get on your bike and head up the "breeding route", then head right onto Route 215. Go up the first stairs, up the bridge there, down the stairs, and then up. The tree will be there.

Route 218 (14)

Fly to Canalave City. Take the right exit out of town and head straight right from the gatehouse. You'll go right past the tree.

Route 221 (15)

Fly to Pal Park. Go down the little stairs and then head straight leftwards until you get to the tree above you.

Route 222 (16)

Fly to Sunyshore City. Go out the west exit and then go straight up from the gatehouse to find the tree.

Valley Windworks (17)

Head straight right from Floaroma Town until you get to the cliffside. The honey tree will be just a bit above you.

Eterna Forest (18)

Requires Cut. Fly to Eterna City and head west out of town. Go over the bridge, but then continue straight left instead of following the path upwards to where you would ordinarily think you're supposed to enter Eterna Forest. Go down; there will be two Cuttable bushes in your way. Cut one of them and continue onto the narrow mountain pass that leads downwards until you can go down into the forest again. The road there will fork, with a row of trees separating an upper path and a lower path which both lead west; take the lower one and you will reach the honey tree where the path turns down.

Fuego Ironworks (19)

Requires Surf. There are three ways to get to this tree. My preferred one is to slather it just after slathering the Eterna Forest tree; follow the instructions to get to that tree, head downwards from there, Cut one of the Cuttable bushes in your way, and head on downwards onto Route 205. Go down past the house and then down the stairs on the right there. Head on down and jump off the ledge, then turn left under the bridge there and Surf into the water, following the river upwards from there until you get to Fuego Ironworks, where the honey tree is right near the bank where you get off. This has the advantage of not requiring any walking through grass, though of course you might encounter some wild Pokémon on the short swim upstream. Alternatively, however, you can also simply head right from Floaroma Town and Surf into the river above pretty much as soon as you can, or you can run up the bridge there, go up through the grass on your left, again down the stairs just above to the right, up through the grass above you to the right, and then Surf into the water a bit above when you've gone under the bridge. It all depends on how the possibility of encountering wild Pokémon weighs in for you compared to how long and twisted the actual path to the tree is.

Floaroma Meadow (20)

Fly to Floaroma Town and enter the meadow in the northwest corner of the town. Follow the narrow flowerless path up past the guy who sells you Honey and then east. The honey tree is right next to the house where the path ends.

Honey Tree Pokémon

The Pokémon found on honey trees are the following, all found at a random level between 5 and 15 inclusive:

• Wurmple
• Silcoon (Diamond only)
• Cascoon (Pearl only)
• Combee
• Burmy
• Cherubi
• Aipom
• Heracross
• Munchlax

But despite what some websites would have you believe, it's not as simple as that. The way honey trees work is that there are three "columns" and six "rows" of honey tree Pokémon for each game:

	Diamond/Pearl			Platinum
Rarity	Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
40%	Wurmple	Combee	Munchlax	Combee	Burmy	Munchlax
20%	Silcoon/Cascoon	Burmy	Munchlax	Wurmple	Cherubi	Munchlax
20%	Combee	Cherubi	Munchlax	Burmy	Combee	Munchlax
10%	Burmy	Aipom	Munchlax	Cherubi	Aipom	Munchlax
5%	Cherubi	Heracross	Munchlax	Aipom	Aipom	Munchlax
5%	Aipom	Wurmple	Munchlax	Aipom	Heracross	Munchlax

If the tree is a normal tree, there is a 70% chance that the Pokémon to be found will be picked from column 1, a 20% chance that it will be picked from column 2, and a 10% chance that no Pokémon will be found at all. If the tree is a Munchlax tree, there is a 20% chance that the Pokémon will be picked from column 1, a 70% chance that it will be picked from column 2, a 1% chance that it will be picked from column 3 (which obviously means that it will inevitably be a Munchlax), and a 9% chance that no Pokémon will be found at all. The row the Pokémon will come from is also determined randomly, in accordance with the rarity percentages listed in the above table.

The result is basically the following overall rarities for the individual Pokémon:

	Diamond/Pearl		Platinum
Pokémon	Normal tree	Munchlax tree	Normal tree	Munchlax tree
Wurmple	29%	11.5%	14%	4%
Silcoon/Cascoon	14%	4%	0%	0%
Combee	22%	32%	32%	22%
Burmy	11%	16%	22%	32%
Cherubi	7.5%	15%	11%	16%
Aipom	5.5%	8%	10%	12.5%
Heracross	1%	3.5%	1%	3.5%
Munchlax	0%	1%	0%	1%
No Pokémon	10%	9%	10%	9%

Naturally, if you don't know whether the tree you are currently slathering is a Munchlax tree, you will have to approximate the actual percentage chance of finding each Pokémon in any given tree as being somewhere in between, if considerably closer to the value for normal trees, depending on how many Munchlax trees you don't know of.

However, this is still not the full story, because in fact, if you slather a tree immediately after fighting a Pokémon in that same tree (or in fact at any point after fighting a Pokémon in that same tree if you have not fought Pokémon from or slathered any other trees in between), the tree will have a 90% chance of picking a Pokémon from the same column as before. In the other 10% of cases, the column will be determined randomly. Note that this only goes for the column - it will still randomly generate a row just like normal. What this means is that if you do happen to get a Munchlax on a tree and slather that tree immediately afterwards, you will have a 90% chance (90.1%, in fact, since it might also randomly land on column 3) of getting another Munchlax to appear! It also means that if you are playing D/P and you just found a Silcoon or Cascoon, or if you are playing Platinum and just found a Wurmple, go slather some other tree first if you were hoping to get a Heracross from this one.

Mechanics

When you slather a honey tree, a value X is randomly generated in accordance with the column percentages discussed above: if you're slathering a new normal tree, X has a 10% chance of being 0, a 70% chance of being 1 and a 20% chance of being 2; if you're slathering a new Munchlax tree, X has a 9% chance of being 0, a 20% chance of being 1, a 70% chance of being 2 and a 1% chance of being 3; and if you're slathering the last tree you battled a Pokémon from without slathering any other trees in between, it will have a 90% chance of taking the same value as it did last time and a 10% chance of being determined as if you were slathering a new tree of the same type.

Now, if X is 0, the tree will not attract any Pokémon; otherwise, the Pokémon that appears will be chosen from the column denoted by X. If a Pokémon is to appear, another random number between 0 and 99 is generated, yielding the Pokémon from a randomly selected row of that column with the odds listed in the first table above (40% chance of the first Pokémon in the column, 20% chance of the second, 20% chance of the third, 10% chance of the fourth, 5% chance of the fifth and 5% chance of the sixth). Finally, yet another random number between 0 and 99 is generated in order to determine the so-called shake value, which determines how much the tree should shake when the Pokémon appears in the tree: if X is 1, the shake value has a 20% chance of being 0, a 59% chance of being 1, a 20% chance of being 2, and a 1% chance of being 3; if X is 2, the shake value has a 1% chance of being 0, a 20% chance of being 1, a 75% chance of being 2, and a 4% chance of being 3; and if X is 3, the shake value has a 1% chance of being 0, a 1% chance of being 1, a 5% chance of being 2, and a 93% chance of being 3. This is all stored.

There is one more important thing to note at this point. The determination of the column, Pokémon and shake value is all happening when you slather the tree. This means that if you save the game before checking a honey tree, restarting will not change what Pokémon appears or how much it shakes - there is no way to just reset until the Pokémon in the tree is a Heracross or Munchlax. On the flip side, it also means that if X is 0 - that is, if no Pokémon appears - the game knows that right away, and by simply checking the tree again, you can make sure you're not waiting six hours for nothing: if it says "The bark is slathered with Honey...", an actual Pokémon has been generated and is waiting to appear in six hours, but if it says "There is a sweet scent in the air..." just like before you slathered the tree in the first place, it means that X is 0 and no Pokémon is going to appear. Then there is nothing stopping you from simply slathering the tree again and rechecking it until it does say "The bark is slathered with Honey...", thus guaranteeing you an actual Pokémon when you return to check the tree in six hours.

A countdown timer, initialized at 23 hours and 59 minutes, is also started when you slather the tree. When this timer reaches 17 hours and 59 minutes - six hours after slathering the tree, that is - the tree will be ready to let you encounter your Pokémon and begin to shake (or not) in accordance with the shake value: a shake value of 0 means the tree will not shake at all, a shake value of 1 means it will shake a little, a shake value of 2 means it will swing emphatically back and forth, and the rare shake value of 3 means it will shake especially fast. Basically, what this means is that the intensity of the shaking is on average proportional to the rarity of the Pokémon in the tree: column 1 Pokémon are the most common and most commonly take on a shake value of 1, column 2 Pokémon are somewhat rarer and usually take on a shake value of 2, and Munchlax, the rarest of all, will nearly always result in a shake value of 3. Nonetheless, this is not a reliable indicator of anything: statistically, it is much liklier that a tree that's shaking fast simply has a column 1 or 2 Pokémon but happened to generate an unlikely shake value than that it's a Munchlax.

When the timer reaches zero, you've missed your chance: the Pokémon disappears, the tree stops shaking, and the honey you slathered it with is gone. Assuming, however, that you check the tree while it is shaking, the game will generate the level, IVs and personality value (the value that determines things like gender, nature and Wurmple's future evolution) for the Pokémon and lets you battle it. In other words, these values will be regenerated if you save in front of the tree and restart, allowing you to save and reset for a female Combee or a particular gender of Burmy, for instance, provided the tree has a Combee or Burmy.

Strategy

To get the Pokémon you want from honey trees, it is best to slather all your trees at once. This can be managed fairly easily within the space of ten to fifteen minutes if you're familiar with the locations of the trees, use the bike and save time by slathering close trees in the same trip without Flying, even allowing for occasional short wild Pokémon encounters and checking to make sure each tree is getting a Pokémon and reslathering where needed. I suggest taking the following trips, in any order:

• Fly to Eterna City, go west and slather the Route 205 Eterna City side tree, go on from there to the Eterna Forest tree, from there head my preferred way to the Fuego Ironworks tree, Surf straight over the river and enter the north end of Floaroma Meadow to get to its tree, exit the meadow into Floaroma Town and head straight east from the city and slather the Route 205 Floaroma Town side tree on the way before heading on east to the Valley Windworks tree.
• Fly to Oreburgh City, go north onto Route 207, get on your bike and go up the mudslide from the pit, slather the Route 207 tree by the mountainside above, and then go on north to the Route 206 tree.
• Fly to Hearthome City, take the west exit to slather the Route 208 tree, go back into the city and then down the south exit to the Route 212 Hearthome City side tree, head back up and go on straight through the east exit until you get to the Route 209 tree, then head on up through Solaceon town, go west to the Route 210 Solaceon Town side tree, then a bit on west onto Route 215 for its tree, and finally back east onto Route 210 to head north to where the Route 210 Celestic Town side tree is.
• Fly to Celestic Town and go west to the Route 211 tree.
• Fly to Pastoria City, go west into the marsh for the Route 212 Pastoria City side tree, then go back through the town and out the east exit to head to the Route 213 tree.
• Fly to Veilstone City and go down to the Route 214 tree.
• Fly to Canalave City and go east to the Route 218 tree.
• Fly to Pal Park and run west to slather the Route 221 tree.
• Fly to Sunyshore City and slather the Route 222 tree just outside the west exit.

Always remember to check every tree after slathering it to make sure there's a Pokémon in it. Nothing is more annoying than waiting six hours only to find the tree was never going to have a Pokémon in the first place.

When checking the trees six hours later, make a similar trip; be sure to have a Pokémon with plenty of PP in offensive moves to save you the trouble of going to the Pokémon Center in between, since most of what you find will be the same old Wurmple or Combee that you'll have caught already and you'll want to dispose of them quickly to save time. Note, however, that you should not slather each tree immediately afterwards unless you are absolutely certain that the Pokémon you just fought in it came from the column you want, thanks to the 90% chance of sticking with the same column; otherwise your trees could end up stuck with the wrong one. Even though it wastes time, you're better off making two separate round trips, one to check and fight the Pokémon in all the trees, and then another to slather them all afterwards. This also has the advantage of not wasting your time reslathering half of your trees only to find that the next one ended up getting you the last Pokémon you want so that you won't actually need to slather any more trees.

It can be surprisingly helpful to write down somewhere what Pokémon you get from each tree, since it will take you a while to get at least Munchlax and Heracross, and it is enormously advantageous if you can begin to suspect some of your trees of being Munchlax trees (which have a better chance of getting you both of these most elusive of the honey tree Pokémon); if you're starting to tire of slathering every single tree, or if you're only looking for Munchlax, it can be nice to be able to at least narrow it down somewhat more (but do remember that since you only get to slather each tree once every six hours anyway, it's generally worth it to slather every tree rather than just sticking with the Munchlax trees you can determine from your trainer ID).

The final tip I can give you is just to be patient. Six hours seems like a mind-numbingly long time to wait for one Pokémon, but you can manage at least three slatherings a day, and three slatherings of all the trees in the game means sixty-three honey tree encounters within one day. You have a good chance of getting Heracross within two days this way. And the inevitable subset of twelve Munchlax tree encounters every day, if considerably slower, will be quite likely to end up getting you a Munchlax within a couple of weeks. Sooner if you're lucky, for both of them. It's not as hopeless as it seems.

To give credit where it's due, the basic mechanics of honey trees were uncovered from the game program by Sabresite and SCV. After I disputed their nonsensical rarity tables on Bulbapedia, a_magical_me was the one who looked at the code again and found their mistakes to confirm my experimental data from Platinum, as well as discovering the difference in column 1 and column 2's rarities between normal and Munchlax trees. Much later, xfix e-mailed me a tip about the possibility of having only three Munchlax trees and how two Munchlax trees can be determined from the visible trainer ID. This section would not exist or have accurate information without their hacking expertise.

Page last modified June 23 2017 at 02:38 UTC

Comments

No comments on this page as of yet.

Post comment

Name

E-mail

Website address

Website name

Comments

Please type the name of the above Pokémon into this box: Fun fact: The above sprite has a 1/8192 chance of being shiny. Feel free to brag if you get one.