Like every live-service game, Pokémon Go isn’t immune to game-breaking bugs, and while it isn’t bizarre to see minor issues pop up, the situation seems to be at its worst currently. With the game’s latest update 0.281.2 deployed on Sept. 1, some of the most popular mechanics, including Routes and Research, are not working as intended—and players are losing their patience.
Routes are a wonderful way to connect with nearby Trainers in the vast Pokémon Go community. Offering player-created courses to embark on, Routes were added recently during the Season of Hidden Gems in July. As exciting as it sounds, unfortunately, the feature hasn’t been giving players the best experience, thanks to all the bugs plaguing it since its release.
According to numerous player reports, the Pokémon Go app crashes upon choosing a route to access, and players have been unable to dismiss the Routes tab once they expand it.
As gamers, we all hate it when our favorite games freeze, and we’ve to force-close it and open it again. Well, restarting is the only known workaround to fixing the prevailing Routes crashing Pokémon Go issue.
Right after Routes was released, players reported multiple bugs affecting the feature, including ones that paused the navigation randomly. According to the official page for the game’s known issues, Niantic has managed to fix all issues affecting Routes, except for the one causing the Routes tab to become unresponsive.
Niantic has acknowledged the highly condemned ‘Routes tab not dismissing’ issue and is presently investigating it. While an official fix is awaited, you can try restarting the game to see if it fixes the problem.
Not just the one plaguing Routes, but plenty of other issues are still begging the developer’s attention.
On Sept. 3, a player shared an experience on Reddit, indicating a wording issue with one set of Pokémon Go’s latest Field Research tasks. It may not be a game-breaking bug, but it sure sounds confusing and will lead to a lot of players losing their calm over completing it.
Apparently, the Snapshot Field Research tasks, which ask players to click three pictures of Pokémon of a particular type, aren’t worded correctly. The player took three snapshots of the Galarian Zigzagoon for the “Take 3 snapshots of wild Dark-type Pokémon” task, but the game counted it as one. Later, they realized that the task wanted three snapshots of different Dark-type Pokémon.
“It should really be worded as ‘Take snapshots of 3 different species of wild Dark-type Pokémon,’” another player aptly pointed out.
Another bug is particularly affecting players on the iPhone, causing phantom vibrations when the Pokémon Go app is running in the background. So, if you’ve been spooked by your phone vibrating randomly, it’s probably that Pokémon game you play every day.
But that’s not it. If your Trainer avatar has suddenly turned black and you’re unable to see the Routes in Map View, or you’re seeing notifications or in-game text in garbled font, Niantic is yet to fix those glitches as well. Hopefully, the next patch will be less chaotic.
