A lot of trainers out there have the same blank spot in their Pokédex. Unown has been one of the rarest Pokémon in Pokémon GO ever since it was released, back when the trees were young. It's a weird sort of thing: there are 28 in total, each one shaped like a different letter of the Roman alphabet. Not the cutest Pokémon in the world, but a real goal for the most avid collectors out there: getting all 28 is near-impossible, but we'll be damned if we're not going to try. Right now, however, even less committed players have a chance to grab the ultra-rare creature. Here's how to get your very unown, with hatch rates and how to find it in the wild.
I myself have a ton of Unown, but that's because I am, as I have noted here before, very special.
Pokémon GO just started the first week of "ultra bonuses", which are big drops of special spawns and such that we earned through completing research tasks over the summer. For many people, the biggest announcement will be that Unown will be hatching from 10 km eggs in 5 forms: U-L-T-R-A. The announcement is pretty clear that these are rare spawns, and as usual the community has done some crowdsourcing to figure out just how rare. Note that this is early anecdotal information, and so it's liable to change a little bit as we start hatching some more Unown. But there are a ton of people on the Silph Road subreddit, and even early info gives you a pretty good idea of what the actual rates are.
With that in mind, we're currently looking at a 17/152 hatch rate. So not common, but not as bad as it could be. It's made harder by the fact that these are limited-time hatches, however.
Update: With a little more data we've got some better information. Right now, Silph Road is saying that the hatch rate for Unown out of a 10km egg is approximately 12/332. So in order to have a 50% chance to hatch an Unown you've got to hatch 19 eggs. At 63 eggs, this raises to 90%. At 100 eggs you're up to 97.5%, which means there's gonna be some poor sap out there that hatches 100 eggs and doesn't get one.
So that's the best way to get an Unown right now. The other way is how I got my big stack: Unown will spawn at most real-world events, whether that's Pokémon GO Fest or something else, always spelling out something related to the event. I got a bunch in Chicago at the two GO Fests's I've attended, and also a bunch at GDC, where they spawn in the letters that you would expect. It's a funny sort of thing with this game: when you're at an event Unown instantly goes from being the most prized spawn in the world to a sort of annoying nuisance spawn. Once you've got 5 of each letter you can sort of back off.
Unown does spawn in the wild outside of events, but it's incredibly rare. And that's still the only way to get some of the rarest letters in the game, though they'll likely show up at an event sometime in the future.
So if you don't have an Unown, get walking. As always happens with these things, however, it's made a little bit easier by the fact that there will now just be more Unowns in the trading ecosystem, so even if you don't hatch one you might be able to cajole one out of a fellow trainer.
