Pokémon Pokopia: How to power up Rock Smash

Pokémon Pokopia is arguably the first real Nintendo Switch 2 sensation, but it doesn’t spell out everything about its various systems right away.

Case in point: upgrading abilities. Pokopia showers you with a handful of important abilities during its tutorial, and then doles out some more over the course of its story, but what it doesn’t make clear up front is that you can upgrade those abilities to make them much more useful.

Rock Smash is one of them. At first, you can punch through most types of materials to clear them out and collect what’s inside of them, but you’ll also encounter some harder or bigger types of rocks that can’t be smashed. What gives? Keep reading to find out how to fix that problem.

How to upgrade Rock Smash in Pokémon Pokopia

Upgrading your abilities in Pokopia is kind of an involved process if you’re starting from the beginning. The main thing you need to know is that it’s done through cooking, as different types of dishes upgrade different abilities. Specifically, you want to cook a hamburger steak of any kind because eating one will upgrade Rock Smash for you.

If you don’t already have the ability to cook, you’ll need to simply progress through the main story until you unlock the Rocky Ridges area. Keep doing the story and eventually you’ll meet a friendly Greedent who teaches you how to cook. Sorry for being somewhat vague about this, but it really is just a matter of doing what the game says until you unlock cooking.

In order to make a hamburger steak, you need a frying pan and some beans. The former is what you use to cook hamburger steaks, and the latter is the primary ingredient for them. Once you have both of those, plop the frying pan down over a flame, put beans and another ingredient in it if you like, and then you’ll have what you need. Eat your creation and Rock Smash should upgrade itself.

Once it’s upgraded, you can punch through those troublesome rocks and collect rare ores from them. Congratulations!