'Pokemon Go' Update Teases Upcoming Winter 2018 Event

Pokemon Go will unsurprisingly have a new event to celebrate the upcoming arrival of winter.

Earlier today, Pokemon Go quietly started the rollout of its newest 0.129.1 update for Android devices. And as is tradition at this point, dataminers quickly cracked into the game's code and pulled out some intriguing clues about the future of the game.

The biggest news is that Pokemon Go is planning a "Winter 2018" event for sometime in December. While the update didn't provide any details about this event, we now know that Pokemon Go has at least one more event planned past December's weekend-long Community Day event.

Pokemon Go also added a new move, Power-Up Punch. While players don't know what the move will be used for, it certainly indicates that January's Community Day could involve a Fighting-type Pokemon.

Developers also added additional forms for the Bug-type Pokemon Burmy. Burmy has three different "cloaks" that vary based on where players catch it in the main series games, and it looks like Pokemon Go will be trying something similar. Whether its tied to the weather or tied to the game's biomes remains to be seen.

There's also an intriguing bit of code related to "geofencing." Geofencing is a type of in-game boundary that can trigger certain types of events or notifications for individual players. We've seen Pokemon Go use geofencing on a limited basis to send notifications to players that are close to a local Niantic event, but we might see more support for the future.

The other improvements were mainly quality of life improvements. Players will soon get an indicator of when their Pokemon were caught, which will help for players who trade Pokemon in the hopes of scoring a Lucky Pokemon. Players will also be able to finally reverse sort their friends and Pokemon, which is a much needed improvement for those who have lots of friends...or lots of Pokemon.