Pokémon Pokopia Players Are Turning Towns Into Sweatshops

You know how everyone jokes that Pokémon is essentially dogfighting and that humans are subjecting these little guys to slave labor? Well, in Pokopia, humans are gone, and players are still managing to subjugate Pokémon and make them do their bidding by essentially creating sweatshops where Pokémon toil away to produce resources.

In Pokopia, different Pokémon you meet and make homes for have specialties that let them help you craft resources. Scorbunny can heat up ore until it’s usable for building equipment, Scyther can cut up wood into lumber, and Mareep sheds its wool for fluff that you’ll use to craft some items. Normally this is done by either taking a Pokémon to an appliance, handing them materials to alter, or just picking up the “litter” they leave behind in their homes. But resource farmers have found a much more efficient way of collecting these items: locking Pokémon in facilities made to create and gather these materials.

Here you can see a player who has “locked away” all the fire-type Pokémon in one of their towns to run the local incinerators, melting down ore and other materials in a facility without sunlight or regular Pokémon contact. The workshop is attached to Charmander and Charmeleon’s home, so they basically live here.

Another example is the “friendly” facility a player created for harvesting littered materials like Mareep’s fluff, Grimer’s garbage, and Venusaur’s leaves. They’re definitely not trapped in there, though. It’s absolutely not a prison used to keep their valuables in one easy-to-find place.

Some of these are basically just visual gags for social media and don’t really help your overall productivity, but @nanapercent on Twitter created an entirely automated facility that uses water flow to collect and funnel littered resources for easy collection. Which, you know, if you ignore the whole forced labor part, sure sounds efficient. I’m sure some crooked corpo is looking at this and thinking Pokopia players have some ideas worth emulating.

No word yet on if any of these Pokémon get overtime pay, food, or lodging. Given that Pokopia tracks Pokémon’s comfort and hunger levels, I imagine maintaining these kinds of facilities does require some attention and care to make sure the Pokémon don’t tire themselves out and can do the work. I’m still trying to make nice houses for these guys and some folks put all their resources into making labor camps. Pokémon escape one form of servitude only to be handed another by Ditto. It turns out Pokopia can be both post-apocalyptic and dystopian if you want it to be.