WIP 2020-11-03

Foreward

People often ask how much area a worker can cover for various modes. Due to the many factors, there is no definitive answer, but you can help determine if you providing sufficient coverage with a little knowledge. Do you want 100% coverage with mons that have greater than 29 minute alert times or are you fine with 20 minutes? So much is up to your criteria, so you should define it prior to proceeding further or at least after the second read of this writeup.

A few assumptions:

• For frame of reference, this guide will also assume you are not running the quest enhancer on pogodroid. I have not used it, so can't advise anything beyond do your research.
• I will use freedom units instead of metric, as that is what I work in. Metric is best used for "niner" jokes...
• Basic grep commands are given, you can feel free to learn more to expand upon them further yourself, I am only pointing you in a basic direction to get started. Google is your friend.

My town is situated on a grid. It makes logical ways to start laying out fences, but may not be the best. Since I scan the area I lived and played, I had boots on the ground to help influence choices. I also have a river splitting areas of town, so areas got divided up by that geographic feature as only pos spoofers seem to have helicopters, the rest of us have to use streets and bridges.

Leveling

The question with leveling is how much effort you are willing to put into it and get faster rewards. If you aren't bothered by slower times (3 days or so), by all means use routefree. Routed takes more effort to setup, but the results speak for themselves here. I have made over 60 level 30 accts, that extra day to reach level 30 adds up over a quantity of accounts being generated.

Pokestops

For quests, assume 50-60 pokestops spun and subsequent quests obtained per hour per device as a starting point. A dense downtown area will have more quests obtained per hour than a sparse suburban to rural area due to higher proportion of transit times and subsequent cooldowns.

Starting with the low end of 50 quests per hour. So if you have 600 quests, you will need roughly 12 questing hours to complete. Say you want quests to start at 2am and finish by 4 - that is 2hrs time. You will need roughly 6 questers running during that period. If they finish before that, you can lower the count. If they take longer to finish that 2hrs, increase the count of workers. As I had learned in the past, do be cognizant of what the questers are doing prior to questing, so you aren't wasting time burning up cooldowns instead of actively questing.

Raids / Invasions

You will have to experiment, but it will be likely on the order of many square miles. Your mon scanners will likely be getting the eggs, raids and invasions in their sight radius before your raid worker gets them. So observe your discord alerts and if you like the times, leave the area the same size. If it is too slow, shrink the area and/or remove outlier gym(s) that cause higher wait time for data.

One thing to consider also is what raids you are interest in finding quickly so you can mobilize to it. As long as there is only one T5 boss and as long as you get the egg you can get the rest of the data from just that. If there is 2 T5 bosses and you are more interested in one, decisions become more critical, as you must pass the gym more often in order to get the proper raid in a timely manner than you would for just one T5 boss.

Do note that the raid boss comes across in data about 90 seconds before the egg hatches. Amaze your local simpletons by knowing the raid boss before even egg even hatches.

Monsters

This guide considers mon_mitm mostly, which should be doing the bulk of your iv work. As of July 2021, all species in your iv list get checked for each spot and assume they take 15sec a piece discord.

If you are tempted or find yourself trying to do super clever things in workers such as multiple areas on periods to cover disparate areas, just buy more devices or stop reading further. KISS.

Mon areas that are not covered well can be changed by reducing area covered and/or adding more workers. Also consider your shape when using PrioQ, as transit time for a half square mile area shaped like a square will be less than a half square mile area that is a long sliver.

For example, I run two workers on the park nearest my house as I want near perfect coverage. It is fairly monster dense and the area is 1/4 square mile. I used to cover my downtown area (<1/8 square mile), which is pretty dense for spawns (for my area), with two workers. I tested with one worker and found it only missed a few PrioQ points per hour and I only farm the area for stops, so don't give a damn if I cover it perfectly like my park. Say a mon spawning was missed, it is likely to be picked up the next time near it as there is just that many spawns, although with a crap time until despawn. So player on my discord with the nickname GrumpyCat (who works downtown), get less service but he doesn't even know it and I get to cover another area, so we both win. Basically, my unit area of geographic coverage is different than yours, so you have to determine how many devices will satisfy your coverage needs.

For lap mode of mons, I consider it the mode where one prioritizes quantity of mons over quality of spawn times, i.e. less mons with higher remaining times for spawns you get with PrioQ. Basically you want your route to be completed in less than 30min, as that is the shortest spawn time. You can find it by watching the terminal or issuing the following command (or some variation there of) in the MAD/logs directory: grep "reached the first spot again" LogFileName.

For PrioQ, you will have to watch discord alerts for times and the logs for the data. As a starting point to work from, I usually aim for a route length of 40-50 in the MAD status page. If you alert times aren't near 30 or 60 minutes (minus the delay_after_prio_event value), consider the prior methods of area and worker count modification. Instead of watching the logs fly by in the terminal, you can issue the following command (or a variant there of) grep "AreaNameToQuery.*skipped" LogFileName.

There are several settings to influence how PrioQ works. If you get to this point and don't know how to evaluate the effects of your choices, just keep the stock values.