POKEPAGEANTS
Hearthome City is the proud home of Pokemon Super Contests, where people with too much time and money attempt to impress a bunch of stuck-up judges for a boost to their fragile egos. Since you're already the national champion of pokemon battling, why not assert your dominance over the show circuit as well?
While you can enter Pokemon Super Contests anytime after you first reach Hearthome, we recommend waiting until you've finished the game before chasing after pageant glory. You'll have a bigger pool of Pokemon and skills to choose from, as well as a wide variety of different berries.
In order to get started in your Super Contest career, you'll first need lots and lots of berries. You've no doubt seen berry trees throughout Sinnoh, and perhaps you've picked and used a few to give your pokemon a boost in battle. But the real purpose of berries is to boost your Pokemon's abilities for the Super Contests by baking them into a food called Poffin.
Just picking the berries you find won't give you enough for baking - you'll need to find soil patches scattered throughout Sinnoh and plant berries to grow yet more berry-yielding plants. It takes a couple of days for the plants to grow and produce more than just a handful of berries. By using the Sprayduck Can to water your berry plants a couple times a day, you'll eventually get larger berry yields (sometimes over 20 berries at once if you're really lucky!) A lady in a house west of Hearthome also sells various types of mulch which can affect speed and amount of berry growth.
Once you've got a good berry harvest going, you can take them to the bakery in Hearthome to make poffins. Poffins are treats that can be fed to Pokemon to increase their ability in certain categories for the Super Contests. By using the Check Tag option on a berry, you can see what sort of flavor they have, and what attributes they will enhance when baked into poffin. Here's a quick chart for you:
Spicy = Coolness
Dry = Beauty
Sweet = Cuteness
Bitter = Smartness
Sour = Toughness
Poffin baking is pretty simple. Choose the berry you want to cook, and then follow the onscreen prompts as you stir the mix using the DS touchscreen and stylus. Stir quickly, but not too fast - if you're too speedy with the mixing, the batter will overflow and the poffin will lose some of its potency. Don't hesitate for too long, either, as poffins will burn if they aren't stirred fast enough. When the batter begins to dry and change color to a darker brown, however, you can start stirring as quickly as you'd like to finish it off. Poffins can also be cooked in a group with up to 3 other players to increase their quality, but make sure you don't use more than one of the same berry in a single mixture - if you do, you'll all wind up with nasty-tasting Black Poffin. Yecch.
The quality of poffin is determined by the amount of time it took to cook (the shorter, the better), the berries mixed into the batter, and the amount of times the poffin mixture overflowed or was burned. You can see how good a poffin is by its level - the higher the level, the more potent the poffin.
Once you're done cooking, you can feed poffin to your pokemon to permanently boost their contest attributes. Keep in mind that pokemon all enjoy different types of food. Feeding a pokemon poffin in a flavor it likes will increase its happiness, while feeding it poffin it dislikes will make it angry. If you're trying to evolve a pokemon that has a happiness-based evolution, you might want to watch what you feed it. Even if it does like what you give it, you can only feed a pokemon so many poffins before it won't eat any more, so try and give it the highest-level snacks you possibly can.
Before going on a feeding spree, you should look at your pokemon's move list. Go to the Summary screen for a pokemon, and move over a few tabs to find information on how the pokemon's skills are classified for the Super Contests. The category the skills fall under are displayed, as well as the effects the moves will have when performed. Knowing what sort of skills your poke has should give you an idea of what kind of Poffins to give it. For example, if you see a lot of Cute skills, give it sweet poffins to raise its Cuteness stat. You'll want to enter this pokemon into Cuteness contests. If a poke has lots of Tough moves, give it sour poffin and prepare it for Toughness contests.
As a side note, there is a pokemon that evolves based on what you feed it. Feebas might be something of a weakling as an ugly little fish, but bringing out its inner beauty by feeding it Dry Poffins can transform it into Milotic, one of the strongest Water types. Give it some treats and see what happens!
