Pokemon Pokopia Guide: How To Unlock Paint And Color Your Island
Building an intricate base is completely pointless if you are forced to stare at dull, unpainted walls for your entire playthrough.
The progression system in Pokemon Pokopia operates on a very strict schedule. During your first dozen hours, you are entirely focused on survival, resource management, and understanding the basic crafting and building mechanics. You throw together a few functional structures, maybe rebuild the local Pokemon Center, and try to get your bearings. Eventually, you realize your entire island looks like a massive, gray industrial complex.
Customization is the actual endgame here. Designing vibrant spaces is what separates a functional camp from a personalized island, but the developers locked the entire painting system behind story progression and a shockingly deep crafting grind. You cannot just open a menu and select a color palette. You have to hunt down specific characters, hoard massive piles of fruit, and force giant rock monsters to do your arts and crafts.
I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how to paint my fences. I am going to walk you through exactly where to find the paint unlock, how the crushing mechanic works, and the frustrating reality of farming for rare colors.
Tracking Down Smearguru
You can hoard all the resources you want in the early game, but you will not see a single drop of paint until you advance the story. Your primary objective is to reach Bleak Beach.
Once you unlock access to this coastal area, you need to explore until you encounter an NPC named Smearguru. This character acts as your official introduction to the customization system. Talk to Smearguru, accept the associated questline, and you will finally unlock the ability to craft paint and apply it to your structures.
If you are struggling to even reach Bleak Beach or keep losing track of your party members in the wilderness, take a quick detour and read my guide on finding missing Pokemon to get your exploration team sorted.
The Crush Mechanic And Manual Labor
The actual process of manufacturing paint is hilarious. You do not buy it from a hardware store. You have to capture massive, intimidating Pokemon and force them to smash fruit into a usable paste.
To create paint, you need to enlist a Pokemon that specifically possesses the Crush ability. Heavy hitters like Onix and Tyranitar are perfect for this job. You hand them a specific type of berry, select the paint creation option, and they obliterate it into a bucket of color.
You need to remember that using abilities out in the field or in your camp drains energy. If you plan on painting an entire village, your Tyranitar is going to get exhausted from smashing hundreds of berries. Make sure you read my PP recovery guide so you know how to keep your heavy laborers energized during a massive crafting session.
Farming The Base Colors
The entire painting economy is built on six foundational colors. Every single one of these base paints is tied directly to a specific berry that grows in a distinct region of the map.
If you want a red roof, you have to go farm Leppa berries. If you want a cyan wall, you are trekking all the way to the Sparkling Skylands to harvest Rawst berries. It forces you to actually engage with the map instead of just sitting in your base.
The Miserable Grind For Black And White
The six colors listed above are easy to acquire because they follow a logical rule. One specific berry equals one specific color. The game throws that logic completely out the window when it comes to black and white paint.
There are no black or white berries to harvest. These two highly desirable colors are obtained entirely through a random number generator. Whenever you have a Pokemon crush one of the standard berries, there is a very small, random chance that you receive a bucket of black or white paint as a bonus drop.
Hiding the most neutral, versatile colors behind a random drop rate is a genuinely cynical design choice. If you want to paint your house white, you have to go farm hundreds of random blue or yellow berries and just pray the RNG rolls in your favor. It turns customization into a massive grind. You can eventually unlock the ability to purchase paint directly once you upgrade Palette Town, but you are still forced to engage with this random drop system early on.
Mixing Colors With Paint Balloons
The six base colors and the two random drops give you a palette of eight options. However, Pokemon Pokopia actually features around 18 distinct shades.
To unlock the rest of the color wheel, you have to keep progressing through Smearguru's questline until you unlock Paint Balloons. This mechanic finally allows you to mix your foundational colors together to create entirely new options. Smashing Red and Yellow together gets you Orange. Combining Red and Green gives you Brown.
This mixing system is where the true depth of the customization lies. Once you unlock the full spectrum of 18 colors, you can completely transform your island. You can color coordinate specific zones to match the Pokemon living there. If you are trying to build the perfect biome, check out my habitat guide and my breakdown of the humidity environment system to ensure your painted decorations actually match the functional needs of your creatures.
It takes a lot of legwork to get your paint pipeline fully operational. If you are feeling overwhelmed by all these overlapping systems, I highly recommend stepping back and reading through my ultimate beginners guide to get a firmer grasp on the basics.
