Pokemon Sword & Shield Poke Jobs can earn XP and rare items by putting box-sitters to work

(Image credit: The Pokemon Company)

Poke Jobs are coming in Pokemon Sword and Shield, and they're your chance to make even your most dedicated benchwarmers into productive members of society. Though the new Pokemon Direct video didn't make time to address the new feature, the game's official site revealed how Poke Jobs will work and why you'll be eager to send your little monster companions off on assignments.

Every Pokemon Center in the Galar region will have a Rotomi, a new kind of Poke-computer that helps you manage your legion of monsters. One of its tools is a sort of digital help-wanted section which will list a number of currently available Poke Jobs. Each one will tell you who is making the request, how many Pokemon you can send, roughly how many experience points the job will reward to your Pokemon, and a short message that will indicate what kind of Pokemon may be best suited to the task.

You can choose which Pokemon to send and for how long, and you can even send them straight from the box without messing with your battle team. All the Pokemon you volun-tell for the jobs will receive rewards like experience or base points, and if they do extra good work, they may even get some bonus rewards such as rare items. It doesn't sound like you'll follow them and watch them sowing crops or doing data entry or whatever - they just go off for however much time you choose, then you pick them back up when they're done.

On top of making your perpetual box-sitters useful, Poke Jobs could be an easy way to keep levelling up your mains when you don't have much time to play. Just make sure you keep a decently powerful contingent on hand at all times, because it would be way too embarrassing to get caught with a skeleton crew and lose to Team Yell.

Check out all the Gen 8 Pokemon we know about so far and start planning on who you're going to send work on what.