Definitive Guide to Armorite Ore: Earning and Spending

Don’t forget to grab your code for 8 Armorite Ore alongside your Shiny Zeraora in the Pokémon Home mobile app before July 6.

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The Isle of Armor brought many things to the Galar region and enhanced our Sword and Shield experience in quite a positive way. One of the additions was the introduction of the Armorite Ore resource, a new commodity that allows you to do quite a few things on the Isle of Armor. I’ll be going over first how to earn it quickly so that you can use it, and also the various ways how you can spend it on the Isle of Armor. Armorite Ore can be somewhat slow to get if you aren’t aware of the best ways to get it so it’s important to know.

Aside from the three options listed here for earning Armorite Ore, there is also the Armorite Ore given to you as you progress through the storyline of the Master Dojo. I’m going to assume that most of you looking for Armorite Ore have already completed this story and I won’t mention it here. Besides, that isn’t a repeatable way to get Armorite Ore anyways.

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Earning Armorite Ore

Option 1: Digging Ma

Digging Ma is the most well-known way of getting Armorite Ore currently in the Isle of Armor. However, she does prove to be somewhat unreliable. After each encounter with her, she will respawn in another random location of the Isle of Armor (she has 15 set locations that she could randomly spawn at) for you to go hunt down. As well, everytime she digs for more Armorite Ore there is a fairly high chance her shovel will break and you will lose all the Armorite Ore she was collecting. She still teleports away somewhere else even if her shovel breaks. There’s a small chance that she will go on a digging rush when her shovel breaks and instead collect more Armorite Ore instead of losing what she had, but I would not rely on this as a reason to gamble multiple times as I’ve dug with her about 20 or so times and I haven’t gotten a digging rush once. (Maybe I’m just unlucky, but the chance is small regardless.) If you say no before she asks you to save, she will just give you the 1 Armorite Ore “to commemorate our reunion,” but I personally let her dig once and take that risk. Most of the time I end up with that second piece of Armorite Ore and I walk away with 2 per visit. The good news is that methods of quickly tracking her down have been created and I’ll share with you the method I use.

Watch the videos in the order they’ve been linked. The first video shows all the spots she can appear so that it’s much easier to digest the speedrun shown in the second video. I tried to skip the first video and I was very lost right away, so I had to go back and watch it. But this speedrun is very quick and tackles areas with multiple spawns first so that you have a higher chance of finding her quickly, leaving hard to reach one-off spots for last. You fall into the groove of the path as you do it multiple times and it gets easier and easier as you go. The important thing to look out for during the speedrun, as the video says, is the shovel. The shovel is always rendered in whereas Digging Ma herself won’t render unless you get closer. It saves you a lot of time to just look for the shovel and move on if you don’t see it. Of course, that requires you to learn where the shovel spawns but the videos show all of the spawns so it’s just about memorizing where the shovel is to look for it. Once you have this track down, you can reliably get Armorite Ore at a steady rate for your needs. However, if you don’t like having to run around everywhere to find her, and you don’t want to waste your time if she has a good chance of failing and not giving you anything, Option 2 might be better for you.

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Option 2: Max Raid Battles

As I’m sure you all know, the Isle of Armor came with a whole new slew of Raid Dens for you to use, a decision I’m very glad Game Freak decided to make. The Raid Dens in the Isle of Armor provide you with great rewards at the end that pertain to the new DLC. As well as the usual XP and Dynamax candies (which they are pretty generous with) and the TRs, you also can receive anywhere from 1 to 4 pieces of Armorite Ore PER raid. You are guaranteed at least 1 piece, and most of the time I usually get 2. I didn’t expect to be able to receive Armorite Ore from raids, never mind being able to get as much as 4 per raid. And that includes even easy 3 star raids. Although, with my Pokémon now in their early level 80s, they are able to get through most 5 star raids even with the NPC partners (who aren’t terrible). It would’ve been nice if the Isle of Armor had a Nursery but that isn’t a big deal; it takes two seconds to fly to Bridge Field in the Wild Area for their Nursery. It’s important to note that Raid Dens from the Wild Area will not give you Armorite Ore; the Raid Dens need to be on the Isle of Armor in order for this to happen. It isn’t worth your time as an Armorite Ore hunter to raid in the Wild Area.

Given that I was able to do pretty much every raid except for some really hard 5 star ones, with mid-80s Pokémon, you can too if you have similar levels or higher. If you have level 100 Pokémon it should be doable for sure. So you can use this method instead if you’d like, just going around the Isle of Armor doing Raid Battles. The great part that I forgot about is that when you finish all the raid spawns on the Isle of Armor, it gives you a bunch of new ones to do. I forgot it wasn’t just however many there are in one batch per day. So you can reliably grind Armorite Ore with Raid Dens in the Isle of Armor for as long as you’d like, and you’ll get plenty of XP candy and Dynamax candy as well as good TRs and occasionally a valuable sell item.

Another great reason why you may want to choose Option 2 is that doing raids will allow Max Mushrooms to spawn either in the Forest of Focus or in one of the three caves on the Isle of Armor. Every 3 successfully completed raids (doesn’t matter if you caught the Pokémon or not) spawns a Max Mushroom in one of those four locations, and there is a maximum of 6 Max Mushrooms that can be on the Isle of Armor at any given time. So after every 18 raids you complete you might want to go around collecting them so that you aren’t wasting potential Max Mushroom spawns. You can use those Max Mushrooms to give your Pokémon the ability to Gigantamax (given it has a Gigantamax form) even if it wasn’t caught from a Raid Den. I’m very happy Game Freak did this as it was very frustrating to learn as I was playing through the main game that I couldn’t Gigantamax my team despite 5 out of the 6 having Gigantamax forms, because I didn’t catch them in raids.

Option 2 is currently the method I’m using. It’s the most reliable, and you get great rewards on top of the Armorite Ore. I need plenty of Max Mushrooms for various Pokémon so these raids are helping me out with that as well.

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Option 3: Hidden Items

This obviously would not be a reliable method on its own but I highly recommend you all apply this method no matter which one of the previous two you use! Whether you’re chasing around Digging Ma or going around doing Raid Battles, you should definitely be picking up the hidden items you see along the way. I’m glad they finally decided to abandon the actual invisibility of hidden items and add a shiny star where they are. There’s no way we would’ve been able to find any of the hidden items in the Wild Area or the Isle of Armor, being such large open spaces, if they didn’t make this change. The hidden items on the Isle of Armor are all useful. Some are various Poké Balls, some are valuable sell items, some are Wishing Pieces which are very nice to find, and some are Armorite Ore. I’d say it’s a relatively low chance to find them, and I’m not sure if they’re findable everywhere in the Isle of Armor or just in certain areas, but I know I found a few in the Potbottom Desert and maybe in Warm-Up Tunnel. (Interestingly, Honeycalm Island has XP Candies as hidden items.) Even if you aren’t always finding Armorite Ore, you’ll occasionally find some but you’ll always get a nice item that can actually help you and be practical.

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Spending Armorite Ore

Option 1: Digging Pa

Digging Pa is much more reliable than his wife and will always give you a bang for your buck. Unlike his nomadic wife, Digging Pa stays put right outside of Warm-Up Tunnel in the Training Lowlands, as pictured above. This location is right where you land when you fly to the Training Lowlands, and he’s there at all times. As well, unlike his wife there is never a chance of failure and losing all of the rewards you’ve earned. The only downside is that while Digging Ma is free, Digging Pa charges you 7 pieces of Armorite Ore in order to go digging, so that’s either a few visits to Digging Ma or a few Raid Battles. (Or 7 hidden items, if you’re that lucky.) But you will not regret spending those 7 pieces of Armorite Ore. Digging Pa has quite the reputation already as being a fantastic source of Watts even though the Isle of Armor has been out for only a few days. The only other method of Watt farming that is even comparable is the Raid Den date exploit that you use a Wishing Piece for, and that’s not even something Game Freak intended to be in the game. That exploit is still doable, so if you want to grind Watts but don’t like hunting down Armorite Ore that can still be a good method of getting 2000W every 20 seconds or so if you’re paying attention to your Switch.

That said, Digging Pa blows all legitimate Watt gathering strategies out of the water. You get Watts and Watts and Watts and Watts and Watts and Watts, man. On average, you’ll get anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 Watts per dig, but every so often at the end of a dig he’ll get an insanely huge dig adrenaline rush and you’ll end up with hundreds of thousands of Watts or even more than a million, just from one go. These rushes are definitely more common than Digging Ma’s, because I’ve gotten the rushes from him a few times while having visited him about the same amount of times as Digging Ma, maybe even a little less. This is great because you are gonna need those Watts if you want to upgrade the Master Dojo to its full capacity. I’m sure the Master Dojo upgrades are the reason Game Freak adder Digging Pa, because otherwise you would have to RIDICULOUSLY grind to get the 3.2 million Watts you need for the total amount of upgrades (barring exploits). When Honey asked me for Watts I figured I’d get all the upgrades right away because I had 100,000 Watts and I thought that would be more than enough. Boy was I wrong. But I am working on getting those Watts for the final upgrade right now and hopefully I’ll complete it soon.

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Option 2: Master Dojo Move Tutor

Another addition to the Sword and Shield DLC are a bunch of moves that seem to have good potential for competitive. There’s a base 130 Steel-type move that only works if a Terrain is up but it will destroy the Terrain if so, a Water-type U-Turn, a Ground-type Scald, a Psychic-type move that effectively doubles in power in Psychic Terrain, and more. It’s a really interesting slew of new moves. They were all leaked a few weeks ago so we already knew about them going into the Isle of Armor release, but nonetheless the moves are cool. I was considering making a Create a Move challenge on PA but I wasn’t sure how to make it a substantial event. I mean it takes 30 seconds to say “base 100 psychic type move that has a chance to paralyze” or something like that, and I’m not sure how that could be transformed into a format that would lead to lengthy posts. Regardless, what’s interesting is that 18 moves were added. There’s one new move for every type, so that’s cool.

But these moves were not added as TMs or TRs. Instead, they added a Move Tutor in the Master Dojo for all 18 of the moves. This is the only way to access these moves, as they are not able to be egg moves or level-up moves. It costs you 5 pieces of Armorite Ore to have the Move Tutor teach one of your Pokémon one of these moves. Although that’s less than what Digging Pa charges, it still is a decent amount of Armorite Ore. And if you’re gonna want to teach these moves to a bunch of different Pokémon that’s gonna add up just like Watt grinding for Master Dojo upgrades will. There are 18 moves after all, and they can be taught to a lot of Pokémon. As I said earlier I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of these had strong competitive viability so if you want to use them on your in-game sets you’re gonna have to earn some Armorite Ore. I wonder if they’ll add more new moves to the Crown Tundra and if they’ll have a Move Tutor there. Would it use Armorite Ore there too? I doubt they’ll continue Armorite Ore usage in the Crown Tundra, because it literally has Armor in the name. Maybe Crownite Ore. Or maybe Relics like the ones Unova had.

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Option 3: Lady Clear

Another way you can spend your Armorite Ore is with this girl named Lady Clear. Lady Clear is accessible on a small island in the Workout Sea near Brawler’s Cave. The only annoying part is that she won’t render until you get close to her so until you memorize the small island she’s on you’re gonna have to check island by island. There’s no pre-rendered telltale like Digging Ma’s shovel this time so it’s just luck until you find her and memorize her island (actually a tough task when there are multiple small clear sandy circular islands). When you talk to her, she will offer you her services. Lady Clear will reset the EVs of your Pokémon in exchange for 10 pieces of Armorite Ore. I’m surprised it’s so expensive to do that, but I guess it’s supposed to be like a big thing to do that. Nonetheless, 10 pieces of Armorite Ore isn’t terribly hard to get with a few raids or a few trips to Digging Ma.

There are of course the Berries that lower a specific star’s EVs by 10, but to entirely reset a Pokémon’s EVs would require a lot of those Berries. It’s certainly faster to collect 10 pieces of Armorite Ore than to shake Berry trees or raid in hopes of your Berry as a reward, especially when you can’t guarantee what Berry you’ll get (and there are a lot of different Berries). I can forgive Game Freak for charging 10 pieces of Armorite Ore here considering they finally waived the Heart Scale fee for ing or deleting moves. It was always tough to find Heart Scales in previous games (except ORAS, diving let’s you find plenty of hidden item Heart Scales and they made it look beautiful) so this was a very nice change. It would’ve been nice if she was in the Master Dojo so that it would’ve been easier to access her but at least she still exists. On the topic of long travel distances in the Isle of Armor I wish there were more places to fly. For example, Honeycalm Island would be a great fly location, but instead I have to take a while to bike there and encounter many Sharpedos.

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Option 4: Cram-O-Matic

After publishing this post I realized that there was another way to spend your Armorite Ore after researching the Cram-O-Matic to see if I could use it. So here I am making a post-publication addition. I didn’t expect to see Armorite Ore as a use for it but it makes sense that it is usable when I think about it, since almost every item can be used. If you put in a piece of Armorite Ore in the first, third and fourth slots of the Cram-O-Matic (it doesn’t matter what you put in the second slot, it could literally be any item), you will receive an Elixir. That’s a special recipe though. The way the Cram-O-Matic usually works is that every item has a “type” as well as a point value. The first item’s type will determine the end item’s type, and the total points from all four items will result in an item corresponding to a type and point range. So if you want a result item that has a Fighting-type, and you want something with a decent amount of points, the Armorite Ore could be worth it to put in the first slot. For purposes aside from special recipes, the Armorite Ore is a Fighting-type item worth 28 points. Here’s Bulbapedia’s page on the Cram-O-Matic.

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Conclusion

I have 90 pieces of Armorite Ore at the time of writing this (now 160 at the time of the post-publication edit), because I’ve been doing so many raids. I’d have a lot more but I’ve been spending it at Digging Pa to try and save up for the last Master Dojo upgrade. 3.2 million Watts is no joke. Anyways, someone should count how many times I said Armorite Ore in this post. (Ctrl + F on the desktop version is a copout.) Quite a few to say the least. Anyways, I hope you found this guide helpful and that it improves your Armorite Ore experience. Is there something I missed related to Armorite Ore? I’d appreciate your of any kind in the comments. Thank you for reading.

#RandomDynamics