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A Detailed Guide to Pokemon Sorting

In your Pokemon storage, there are several ways to sort your Pokemon:

  • Recent – Pokemon are sorted by when they were caught (or hatched) with the most recent on top.
  • Favorite – Favorited Pokemon appear before those that are not favorited.
  • Number – Ordered by Pokedex number
  • HP – Percentage of HP remaining with Pokemon with the most HP on top.
  • Name – Alphabetical Order.
  • Combat Power – CP order with the highest CP on top.

Sorting by Name

From top to bottom, sorting by name goes:

Symbols- ! # $ % & ( ) * , . / : ; ? @ _ ~ + ♀ ♂ etc.
Roman CharactersWhen letters are the same, upper case goes before lower case
JapaneseWhen kana is the same, katakana goes before hiragana
Korean-
ChineseWhen radical is the same, traditional Chinese goes before simplified

Tested on a Galaxy S6 device and an Iphone 6s Plus.
Note that when - (the hyphen/minus symbol) is used as the first character, it does not always sort to the beginning.

What if my Pokemon are the same in the sort method?

For all methods of sorting other than CP, the game first sorts by CP and then applies the sorting method. So if you sorted by HP for example, all of your Pokemon with 100% of their HP will be sorted by CP within that group.

If Pokemon have the same CP, the order within a CP group is the last applied sorting method applied during that viewing of the Pokemon storage. So if you sorted by HP and then CP, all of your full health CP10 Pokemon will go before your damaged CP10 Pokemon. If you sort by Number and then by HP and then by CP, your full health CP10 Jigglypuff will go before your full health CP10 Ditto but both will appear before your zero health CP10 Caterpie. It can be a bit confusing but hopefully, you can find your Pokemon without complex sorting methods.

Pokemon Modification

To throw another layer of complexity into sorting, whenever one of your Pokemon is modified, the order within a CP group becomes sorted by when they were last modified. Most recently modified Pokemon appear last within a CP group. The following causes your Pokemon to be modified:

  • Pokemon was just caught, hatched, evolved or powered up
  • Favorite being added or removed
  • Changing the Pokemon’s name
  • Adding a Pokemon to a gym or having it sent back from a defeated gym
  • A potion or revive was used to heal the Pokemon
  • Pokemon was part of a team used to battle a gym. The Pokemon does not need to actually participate in the battle but if you are kicked out from the gym due to GPS drift or other reasons before the first battle begins, Pokemon are not modified.

Example

You just caught a CP 10 Caterpie. In your Pokemon storage, you sort by Number and then sort by CP. The CP 10 Caterpie goes before your CP 10 Magikarp. You click on the Caterpie to check its moves and then go back to the storage. Nothing has changed. You catch a Pokemon with a GO+ (or incubate an egg, modify another Pokemon in any way, etc). Your Caterpie is now after your Magikarp because the Caterpie was modified after the Magikarp. You sort by number and then CP again which causes the Caterpie to come before your Magikarp and then close the menu. After opening your storage again, the Caterpie comes after the Magikarp because only the CP sort is applied and Caterpie was the last modified.