Grinding rare materials in a cozy life sim should not feel like a second job. For a while, that's exactly what Pokemetal and Rare Pokemetal farming felt like in Pokemon Pokopia , a slow, painful process that had players spending entire days clearing out Dream Islands for a handful of the stuff. Then content creator Austin John Plays posted a video, and suddenly 1,200 units in 90 minutes became the new normal.
What Pokemetal is actually used for
Pokemon Pokopia leans hard into its crafting systems, and Pokemetal sits near the top of the material food chain. Players need it for late-game recipes, 3D printer projects, and Cloud Island construction , the kind of builds that require serious quantities. The problem is that the standard approach to gathering it, surface-level Rock Smashing and casual exploration, produces a trickle rather than a flood.
Rare Pokemetal is even more scarce, gating some of the most desirable craftable items in the game. Before this farming method surfaced, players were spending full sessions on Dream Islands and walking away with modest hauls at best.
The Minecraft DNA hiding inside Pokopia's terrain
Here's the thing: Pokemon Pokopia has always borrowed liberally from Minecraft's design philosophy. The game already features a riff on Redstone, water physics that players have compared to Mojang's notorious liquid behavior, and now it turns out the terrain generation follows similar depth-based ore logic.
The old Minecraft diamond-mining trick , dig to a specific depth, mine horizontally, repeat , translates almost directly. In Pokopia, the sweet spot is six blocks underground on a Dream Island, specifically the Dragonite doll island, which players have identified as the most metal-dense option available.
From the beach near spawn, facing directly downward and using the Rock Smash ability to dig six blocks down puts you right in the ore-rich layer. From there, Rollout carries you straight through until you hit Pokemetal. Turn right, repeat the column. As Austin John Plays describes it: "We're not doing strip mining. We're excavating."
Rock Smash at the six-block layer
The community reaction: a lot of "I wish I'd known this earlier"
The response in the comments tells the whole story. One player reported mining 1,200 Pokemetal and 150 Rare Pokemetal in roughly 90 minutes using the method. Another simply called it "perfection." A third wrote, "Man, I wish I had seen this before I spent the entire day clearing out a couple Dream Islands for Pokemetal" , which, honestly, is the kind of comment that stings a little to read if you've been doing it the hard way.
The numbers are hard to argue with. 1,200 units in 90 minutes represents a rate that would have taken multiple full play sessions using conventional gathering. For players deep into Cloud Island projects or 3D printing late-game items, that difference is significant.
What this says about Pokopia's player base
The speed at which the Pokopia community reverse-engineered the game's terrain logic and cross-referenced it with Minecraft mechanics is worth paying attention to. This is a player base that arrived already fluent in sandbox game systems, and they're applying that knowledge aggressively.
This isn't an isolated incident either. The same community has already built working calculators inside the game, engineered Redstone-equivalent contraptions, and organized Cloud Islands that function like Animal Crossing: New Horizons treasure islands for rare item distribution. The Pokemetal farm is just the latest example of players treating Pokopia's cozy exterior as a puzzle to be optimized.
The key here is that none of this requires a patch or developer intervention to be useful right now. The method works with tools players already have access to. Whether the development team eventually adjusts ore distribution to account for this kind of targeted farming is a separate question, but for the moment, the community has effectively solved one of the game's more tedious resource bottlenecks on its own. Make sure to check out more:
