Pokemon Sleep Players Are Cheating By... Not Sleeping

Pokemon Sleep is barely a week old, and players are already finding exploits that let them skip the need to sleep at all.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Pokemon Sleep is a game that just tries to promote healthy sleeping patterns, but as it turns out, it's a typical mobile game that has things like premium passes and quests to complete. At the moment, if you connect the new Pokemon Go Plus+ accessory to the game, you can unlock a unique quest in Pokemon Sleep that will net you a Snorlax wearing a nightcap. To get it, you need to track sleep using your Pokemon Go Plus+ for seven days--unsurprisingly, a lot of players don't want to do this, so they're skipping sleeping altogether.

As explained by players on the unofficial Pokemon subreddit TheSilphRoad (thanks, Eurogamer), Pokemon Sleep needs you to record at least 90 minutes of sleep a day, so to side-step this players are simply manually changing the dates on their phone to trick the app into thinking it's a new day. All you need to do outside of that is leave your Pokemon Go Plus+ somewhere with the sleep mode on for the required 90 minutes, then once it's done, turn it off and on again, and change the date on your phone. Easy peasy, though the point is obviously to encourage you to sleep.

You can actually get a number of Snorlax's with a nightcap through the quest line, where it's exclusively available, and you can even get a shiny version of the Pokemon. The whole thing would typically take over a month, which is a bit difficult to speedrun.

Pokemon Sleep started rolling out across multiple territories earlier this week, and is now available in the US on iOS and Android.