One of the (stangely many) food-based Pokémon introduced this generation is Alcremie, the Fairy-type ‘mon that seems to be a pile of flavored whipped cream with cute toppings. Predictably, it evolves from a Pokémon that resembles a glob of unwhipped heavy cream, Milcery— but much like the real-life process of preparing whipped cream, the exact method you use to evolve Milcery determines the color and flavor of the resulting Alcremie.
So, let’s get into it: where can you find a Milcery, and how do you evolve it into the desired flavor of Alcremie?
Finding Milcery
Thankfully, Milcery is not as rare as some of the other new Pokémon. It’s found as a fairly common encounter in Route 4’s hay fields that lead into Turffield. You won’t find it wandering around in the overworld, though— Milcery only shows up through surprise encounters where a portion of the grass shows an exclamation mark before rustling vigorously.
You’ll have to weave your way through the Galarian Meowth clawing up your legs and the Electrikes gnawing at your ankles to get these encounters. However, if you’re planning on getting a boxful of them to evolve as many forms of Alcremie as possible, it might be faster to pop female Milceries in the two daycare centers to hatch them en masse.
Evolving Milcery Into Alcremie
Milcery, unlike most Pokémon, doesn’t evolve via levelling up, but through holding certain items and performing an action unique to Sword & Shield: Leon’s Charizard victory pose.
You pull this off by spinning the motion stick around rapidly until your character starts spinning in place like a figure skater— once you let go of the stick, your character falls into the signature pose. If you have a Milcery holding one of its evolutionary items in your party, it will evolve into the Alcremie form corresponding to the accessory and the way you spun.
There are seven accessories Milcery can use to evolve that change the topping on the resulting Alcremie: the Berry Sweet, Clover Sweet, Flower Sweet, Love Sweet, Ribbon Sweet, Star Sweet, and the Strawberry Sweet. These sweets can be won as prizes from the Battle Cafes— though, since you can only battle once a day at each location, it might take a while to collect them all.
The color and flavour of the Alcremie, on the other hand, is determined by a few factors: the direction, time of day, and duration of your spin.
- Vanilla Cream: clockwise, daytime, less than five seconds
- Ruby Cream: counter-clockwise, daytime, less than five seconds
- Caramel Swirl: clockwise, daytime, more than five seconds
- Ruby Swirl: counter-clockwise, daytime, more than five seconds
- Matcha Cream: clockwise, nighttime, less than five seconds
- Salted Cream: counter-clockwise, nighttime, less than five seconds
- Lemon Cream: clockwise, nighttime, more than five seconds
- Mint Cream: counter-clockwise, nighttime, more than five seconds
- Rainbow Swirl: any direction, 7pm in-game (dusk), more than ten seconds (confirmed by KyleAye on Youtube and Serebii.net)
(Note: because of the way day/night works in Sword & Shield, nighttime/dusk evolutions performed before the end of the game must be done in the Wild Area where you can visually confirm the time of day.)
With seven toppings and nine possible flavors, there are a whopping 63 possible forms of Alcremie. Time to get spinning!