Pokemon Go Is Increasing Trading Distance For January's Community Day

Pokemon Go's January Community Day event takes place today, January 16. The featured Pokemon this month is the Fighting type Machop, and Niantic is making it a little easier for players to evolve it during the event.

From January 15-18, Niantic is temporarily increasing the game's trading distance to 40 km, allowing you to trade Pokemon with a friend from farther away than usual. This should help make it a bit easier to evolve Machoke into Machamp, as it's one of a handful of Pokemon that can essentially evolve by trading, just as in the mainline games.

If you receive select Pokemon like the aforementioned Machoke in a trade, its Candy requirement to evolve will be completely removed, effectively allowing you to evolve it for free. Considering that it normally costs 100 Candy to evolve a three-stage Pokemon into its final form, this is a nice alternate means of evolving some monsters.

If you do manage to evolve a Machoke into Machamp up to two hours after January's Community Day ends, it'll learn the event-exclusive move Payback. The Community Day runs from 11 AM to 5 PM local time, which means you have until 7 PM local time to evolve Machoke and learn the event move.

January's Community Day isn't the only event happening this weekend in Pokemon Go. The Sinnoh Celebration is underway until January 17. A variety of Gen 4 Pokemon are appearing more frequently as part of that event, and the Legendary Heatran has returned to Raids. A Hoenn Celebration event is scheduled to follow from January 19-26.