Pokemon Go's Valentine's Day event: Chansey, Clefable and Porygon will appear more often

Pokémon Go's first global themed event of 2017 will spread the love in time for Valentine's Day, with a slew of timed features that developer Niantic and The Pokémon Company hope will lure players back to the hit mobile game.

The headline feature of the Valentine's Day event is that between 8 and 15 February players will be much more likely to see and catch a Clefable, Chansey or Porygon – three Pokémon that are otherwise quite rare.

Other unnamed Pokémon will also feature more heavily. Clefairy, which evolves into Clefable, is a likely candidate to be one of them.

Three Pokémon will also have a higher chance of being hatched from eggs. Cleffa (the first in the Clefable evolution line), Igglybuff (which evolves into Jigglypuff and Wigglytuff) and Smoochum (which evolves into Jynx) will hatch more often.

This increase in spawn-rates will be coupled with double the amount of Candy for players catching, hatching and transferring Pokémon and a sped-up rate for buddy Pokémon finding Candy, which they will do twice as quickly.

The length of time that Lure Modules will attract Pokémon to PokéStops has also been increased twelve times over. When a player deploys a Lure, all players in the vicinity will benefit for a full six hours, as opposed to the standard thirty minutes.

The event runs from 7pm GMT today (8 February) until 7pm GMT on Wednesday 15 February.

Pokémon Go launched last July and proved an instant favourite. The free-to-play iOS and Android game was downloaded millions of times around the world and became a global phenomenon that has generated an enormous amount of money through microtransactions.

Go uses real world location data to populate Earth with critters from the beloved franchise most commonly seen on Nintendo handheld devices. Players catch them, evolve them and battle them for control of Gyms, which are located on real-world landmarks.

In December Niantic added the first Pokémon from the series' second generation of creatures. These handful of Pokémon hatch from eggs, and are likely to be followed by the rest of Gen 2's critters later this year.

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