Technologies

Struggling in Pokemon Legends: Z-A? Here’s How to Catch Strong Dragon Pokemon Early

Dragon-types are extremely powerful in this Pokemon game. Here’s how to catch them early and strengthen your team.

The latest Pokemon game, Pokemon Legends: Z-A, has a revamped battle system compared to earlier games in the series, swapping out slow turn-based combat for real-time fights. Having strong Pokemon with hard-hitting moves on your team is one of the best ways to make quick work of its storyline battles as well as compete online in Z-A Battle Club. Picking powerful Pokemon is key.

If you’re new to this roleplaying series, dragon-type Pokemon are some of the strongest you can find. Many of them are colloquially called pseudo-legendaries by players because their impressive stats are second only to those of legendary Pokemon. Consequently, their base forms — the first versions you can find that grow into supremely powerful evolutions — are typically difficult to find, hard to capture and extremely time-consuming to level up.

We’ll leave you to do the training for your party of six, but here’s a simple guide with locations and tips to find and capture strong dragon-types to add to your squad in Pokemon Legends Z-A.

Get Dratini by scaling rooftops in Vert Sector 6

The first of the powerful dragon types we’ll help you track down hails from the original (Gen 1) Pokemon games. Dratini is the base form of Dragonite, a dragon- and flying-type pseudo-legendary, and is the easiest to find on this list. To capture one, fast-travel or find your way to Restaurant Le Nah in Vert Sector 6. Once you’re there, face the restaurant, turn right and climb the ladder attached to the building next to it. Once you’re on the roof of this building, you’ll want to turn left and then roll onto the roof of the restaurant. That’s where you’ll find Dratini waiting for you.

Now, Dratini is skittish. It’ll run away the moment it spots you, so you’ll want to be prepared. Save your game before approaching it and ready a Pokemon that can either knock it out with one attack or stock up on Quick Balls and Dusk Balls. I’ve had a lot of success with Dusk Balls in this game, so I recommend trying to catch Dratini at night.

Dratini evolves into Dragonair at Level 30 and then Dragonite at Level 55, gaining the flying-type with its final evolution. With this dual-typing, Dragonite is strong against dragon, grass, fighting and bug-type Pokemon. However, its strength isn’t limited to type advantages; it also learns hard-hitting moves like Hurricane and Outrage that can get you out of a pickle. It has wide-coverage attacks, like Earthquake, in its move pool to damage multiple Pokemon in one go. You can also Mega Evolve Dragonite in Pokemon Legends: Z-A, although its Mega Stone becomes available after you complete Main Mission 32.

Note: You can also find Dratini or Dragonair on a rooftop in Bleu Sector 9 and Dragonite in Wild Zone 20 after you’ve completed the main storyline.

Capture Gible in Wild Zone 8

If you’ve already got a flying-type Pokemon on your team and want to widen the type matchups you cover, capturing Gible and evolving it into its final evolution, Garchomp, is one of the best things you can do.

You can find Gible in one of Wild Zone 8’s many holes — keep an eye out for its blue fin popping out to show that it has spawned. Depending on your luck, you might find one right away, or it’ll take a few bench resets to spot one among the many Drilbur of this Wild Zone. So, once you’ve spotted the blue fin, save your game and head right into the battle.

Gible isn’t skittish and won’t run away, but Wild Zone 8 can quickly become a fighting fest that’s difficult to manage. Bring a Pokemon that’s fast or can use moves that deal damage over a wide area — think water-type Pokemon. Also bring Great Balls, Ultra Balls, and Dusk Balls; these will be your best bet for capturing Gible, since it has a low capture rate like Dratini.

Gible will evolve into Gabite at Level 24, and then Gabite evolves into Garchomp at Level 48, so be prepared for a long leveling grind to get this top dragon. However, the effort is well worth it because adding the dragon and ground type Garchomp to your team lets you effectively use moves like Earthquake — more so than Dragonite — dealing damage quickly over wide areas, while defending against similarly strong attacks, thanks to its well-distributed stat total. You can also Mega Evolve Garchomp early in the game because its Mega Stone — Garchompite — is easy to get. You can buy it for 70,000 Pokemon Dollars from the Stone Emporium after completing Main Mission 10.

Find Goomy in Vert Sector 9 while it’s raining

Goomy is the third powerful dragon-type Pokemon that you can find early in Pokemon Legends: Z-A. To catch one, you will need to wait for rain in Lumiose City — it only comes out in wet weather.

The weather doesn’t have a fixed pattern in this game, so sitting on a bench to change the time of day is how you’ll get it to start pouring. Once it’s raining, Goomy is easy to find but a little tough to capture.

Goomy spawns in Vert Sector 9. The easiest way to get there is to fast-travel to Vernal Pokemon Center. Once you’re there, enter the alley right before the nearby hair salon and follow the path until you see an arched gateway. The gateway is opposite a battle court and may have boulders blocking your passage. Once you’re past it, take a quick look towards the bridge down below and you’ll see a Goomy waiting for you. This area is also a fixed spawn location for Eevee, if you’re trying to get every Eevee evolution in your playthrough.

Now, Goomy evolves into Sliggoo at Level 40. However, to evolve Sliggoo into Goodra, you’ll need to first train it to Level 50 and then wait yet again for rain in Lumiose City. You’ll only be able to evolve Sliggoo in wet weather — try to time leveling up to 50 or beyond while it’s pouring.

Unlike Dragonite and Garchomp, Goodra is a pure dragon-type and doesn’t have a Mega Evolution, but its extremely high Special Defense stat makes it a great Pokemon to have. Also, if you have the Mega Dimension DLC, then you can also find Hisuian Goodra in five-star hyperspace zones. It’s similar to a traditional Goodra in many ways, but has an added steel-type, giving it an edge in some battles.

More pseudo-legendary dragon-types in Pokemon Legends: Z-A

Apart from Dratini, Gible and Goomy, Pokemon Legends: Z-A features two other pseudo-legendary dragon-type Pokemon: Bagon and Frigibax. Unfortunately, getting them early isn’t possible and for the latter, you need to buy and complete the storyline of the Mega Dimension DLC.

But if you want to add them to your party, Bagon can be found in Wild Zone 18, which unlocks after completing Main Mission 30. You can also catch an Alpha Salamence (Bagon’s final form) right in front of where Bagon spawns, a small test that allows you to start using Salamence right away.

For Frigibax, you’ll need to collect 25,000 Hyperspace Survey Points, activate a special scan by talking to Philippe in Rust Syndicate’s office building and then hope to roll a five-star hyperspace zone which spawns Frigibax. This five-star zone is likely to have its entire evolutionary line, too, so you can also capture Arctibax and Baxcalibur.

Both Salamence and Baxcalibur can also Mega Evolve. To get a Salamencite, collect 360 Mega Shards and head to Quasartico Inc. headquarters to trade for it. And Baxcalibrite was first offered as a reward for reaching Rank S in Pokemon Z-A Ranked Battles Season 4. However, at the time of writing, Ranked Battles Season 6 also offers it as a reward for reaching Rank V.

Other pseudo-legendaries in Pokemon Legends: Z-A

Before we leave you, if you’ve got your fill of dragon-type Pokemon but still have a spot in your party, there are two other pseudo-legendaries worth capturing in Pokemon Legends: Z-A; Larvitar and Beldum.

Larvitar can be caught early in the game, but it requires some precise movement control. I recommend waiting until you’ve started Main Mission 16 and unlocked Roto Glide to catch Larvitar. As for Beldum, you will need to wait until Main Mission 35.

For Larvitar, head to the point marked in the screenshot below; it’s located in Vert Sector 2. Once you’re there, climb up the nearest ladder, turn left and walk along the rooftop. Once you’re at the end with the boxes, use Roto Glide to cross the gap and you’ll find Larvitar waiting to be captured.

Capturing Beldum is much simpler, but you’ll need to complete over half the main storyline before you get a chance to capture one. Beldum always spawns on floor B1F in Lysandre Labs. After you unlock the location, head to the room marked in the screenshot to find one. Beldum tends to spawn in pairs.

Occasionally, you’ll also find a Metang in the same Lysandre Labs basement. This one is even harder to capture, so make sure to have Dusk Balls handy and a Pokemon that can afflict status conditions like sleep or paralysis. You should also try to perform a manual save right after you knock out Beldum or Metang in battle so that you can soft reset and get another shot at capturing it.

You’re now set to power up your team in Pokemon Legends: Z-A with strong dragon-types and other pseudo-legendaries that are available. So head out there and capture these Pokemon to tackle the brand-new battle mechanics and online players.

Technologies

Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options

The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.

Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: «3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.»

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

«I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,» Kapps said.

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: «When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.»

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

«It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,» said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. «It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.»

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

«There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,» she said. «This closes that gap.»

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.

«And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,» Carls said. «Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.»

Technologies

Dog Health Goes Digital With New AI Chatbot

Fi Intelligence allows you to ask questions of a specially tailored pet health chatbot, but it’s not meant to replace vet visits.

It might be time to rethink what it means to be sick as a dog. On Tuesday, Fi, a smart pet technology company, announced a new AI-powered chatbot to help owners stay on top of their dog’s health using a blend of personal information and generalized dog breed data.

The AI agent, which the company is calling Fi Intelligence, is integrated directly into the Fi app. It has access to all the information gathered about your dog across the entire suite of Fi products, including the Fi Series 3 Plus and Fi Mini dog collars, as well as information and documents uploaded by the pet owner. The service is for dogs only (not cats, rabbits or other pets).

If you already own a Fi smart collar, existing data will be incorporated into the AI agent’s dataset to help it answer your questions.

When creating Fi Intelligence, the company identified a multitude of common questions that dog owners have, including whether their animal friend is walking or sleeping enough, or scratching more than usual. The chatbot was created to help owners find answers to these questions quickly and easily, according to Fi.

Fi designed its agent to answer these questions using a mix of general information about a dog’s breed, personal information and biometric data gathered by Fi smart pet collars.

Pet owners can ask the chatbot questions in plain English and get back detailed responses. Fi Intelligence is equipped to answer general questions, contrast your dog’s current data to previous time periods and compare your dog’s data to other dogs of the same breed.

Fi says its chatbot is different from general-purpose AI agents because it has been trained on a proprietary dataset containing «the largest repository of real-world canine activity, sleep and behavior data in the world.»

Fi Intelligence doesn’t replace a trip to the vet — and the company stresses it’s not supposed to. Rather, the agent is supposed to grant owners «informed confidence» about their dog’s health and can help them «show up [to the vet] with specific, documented observations drawn from weeks of continuous data.»

«The strongest signal from our beta was that owners aren’t using this to replace their vet,» said Fi’s Vice President of Product Darrell Stone. «They’re using it to show up better prepared.»

According to Fi, the Fi Intelligence integration will provide the most complete dog health profile available in the app so far. Fi Intelligence is available to all Fi members immediately.

Technologies

Nvidia Teases DLSS 5 and Gamers Aren’t Impressed

The new AI technology is making some big changes to video game graphics that hardly anyone seems to like.

Nvidia opened its GTC conference with a keynote by CEO Jensen Huang, revealing the company’s latest tech. Among the raft of the company’s AI developments, gamers were treated to the imminent version of its AI-powered upscaling and optimization technology, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), touted as the «biggest breakthrough in computer graphics».

Nvidia published a video illustrating how DLSS 5 can enhance graphics in Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield and other games, showing before-and-after takes. But gamers weren’t thrilled. In fact, the response to DLSS 5 resembles more of a collective backlash, replete with memes, ridicule and outrage.

Gamers were quick to point out that DLSS 5 transformed the original graphics into something vastly different. Some called the visuals «AI slop» because they look like «yassified» AI-generated filters.

Many worry that DLSS 5 could deviate from a creator’s specific artistic vision. Critics also fear that if this technology becomes the industry standard, video game graphics might start to look the same, losing their unique visual identity.

«Everything about this is a betrayal of these game’s artistry,» said YouTuber The Sphere Hunter in a post on X Monday. «Painting over handcrafted, intentional 3D art with shiny, wrinkly, sunken-in, porous, puckered, fraudulent, filtered nonsense is deeply disrespectful. If you want this, just watch gen-AI videos all day.»

Countless memes mocking the tech’s exaggerated features flooded the internet. Others on social media parodied the effects DLSS 5 could produce in other games.

Ok, you convinced us, NVIDIA DLSS 5 is coming to «Copycat» too 😅 pic.twitter.com/WT2qRRz9EC

— Copycat // OUT NOW 😻 (@GameCopycat) March 17, 2026

In a Q&A on Tuesday, Huang addressed the backlash from gamers, calling them «completely wrong.» Huang underlined that DLSS 5 «enhances and adds generative capability, but it doesn’t change the artistic control» and that «it’s in the direct control of the game developer.»

The team at Digital Foundry, which specializes in game technology and hardware reviews, called it «disruptive and transformative» but was generally positive about it, though they saw some hiccups.

«[The images] looked a little bit uncanny, I would say, but definitely the overall portrayal of those characters is much more sophisticated,» said Oliver Mackenzie, video producer and writer for Digital Foundry.

Bethesda’s official X account replied to comments from members of Digital Foundry about Starfield and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, both published by Bethesda.

«This is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game. This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players,» the publisher said.

DLSS 5 is set to be released sometime in the fall.

What is DLSS?

Nvidia first released its DLSS tech back in 2018 with its RTX 2080 card: The RTX architecture introduced the Tensor cores, which are essential for accelerating the calculations used by the DLSS AI. The deep learning technology was designed to upscale images and video from low resolution in real time to achieve higher frame rates.

Gamers weren’t impressed at first, but later versions of the technology did perform better in games that supported it. DLSS 4, released last year and tweaked to 4.5 as of January, made significant improvements to detail rendering, reducing motion artifacts, boosting frame rates, and generating more realistic lighting via path tracing (which incorporates interactions with ray-traced lighting).

What does DLSS 5 do?

DLSS 5 works a bit differently than previous versions of the technology. According to Nvidia, DLSS 5 shifts from processing simple pixels to understanding 3D elements. By deconstructing characters into specific components — such as skin, hair and clothing — the AI can render them more consistently. This results in faster performance and much more realistic details, especially for textures and lighting.

Game developers control how DLSS 5 enhances images and to what degree, ensuring it matches the game’s aesthetic. The demo video showcased some positive enhancements, but others looked like sweeping changes to the characters and the environment.

Which games will support DLSS 5 at launch?

On Monday, Nvidia released a list of games slated to support DLSS 5:

AION 2
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Black State
Cinder City
Delta Force
Hogwarts Legacy
Justice
Naraka: Bladepoint
NTE: Neverness to Everness
Phantom Blade Zero
Resident Evil Requiem
Sea of Remnants
Starfield
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
Where Winds Meet

What cards will support DLSS 5?

Nvidia has yet to provide a list of GPUs that will support the new technology. In an FAQ, the company says it will release a list of supported cards closer to its release.