What Is Minior Showers: Geminids 2026?

This is the third entry in Niantic’s recurring Minior Showers series, timed to the real Geminids meteor shower. The event runs from December 11, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. to December 16, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. local time, and during the window you’ll find Minior in its Meteor Form in the wild, with increased Stardust for catching it. Each catch pays out 1,000 Stardust, which is a solid reason to run it for six straight days rather than just once.

Full details are on Leek Duck’s event listing, which is the most reliable source for confirming any last-minute Niantic changes before the event starts. If you followed the earlier editions, the structure matches the Orionids and Leonids showers almost exactly, just with a new twist on the core colours.

Minior Showers Geminids Spoofing: Spawn Times Dec 11-16

Niantic’s own event page confirms the increased chance to encounter Minior starts from 5:00 p.m. local time each day, running through to 11:59 p.m. when the day’s window closes. It doesn’t print an explicit end time for the boosted rate itself, but several community trackers tracking the Orionids and Leonids editions reported the heaviest spawn density falling between 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. local time on every day of a Minior Shower.

Practically, that means your most efficient Minior Showers Geminids spoofing sessions should land in that early evening block rather than spreading catches thin across the whole six-hour window. Set a timer for 5 PM local in whichever time zone your spoofed location sits, work a dense urban loop for the first few hours, then taper off.

The Hemisphere Split: Two New Core Colours in One Event

Minior has seven possible core colours and the series is built to debut one per shower, except this one. Green Core Minior already debuted during Orionids in October, and the core colours for the remaining meteor showers have not been announced ahead of time, which is normal for this series. What makes Geminids different is that one core colour will debut in the Northern Hemisphere and a different one in the Southern Hemisphere, the only way seven colours fit into six scheduled showers. If you want both of December’s new colours in your Pokédex, a single-hemisphere trip won’t get you there, you need encounters registered from both sides of the equator before the event ends on the 16th.

Best Coordinates for the Northern Hemisphere Core

For the Northern Hemisphere leg, pick a dense urban park with heavy PokeStop clustering so Minior has plenty of spawn slots to compete for. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens in London (51.5073, -0.1657) work well for UK-based accounts since you won’t even need to cross a time zone to line up with 5 PM local. Yoyogi Park in Tokyo (35.6716, 139.6948) is another solid option if you want a second account running a different local evening window. Spoof in, let the app settle for a minute before moving, then walk a slow loop rather than teleporting pin to pin, which keeps your account’s movement pattern looking closer to a real walking player.

Best Coordinates for the Southern Hemisphere Core

For the Southern Hemisphere debut, Hyde Park in Sydney (-33.8732, 151.2110) or the Royal Botanic Garden nearby both have strong PokeStop density and sit well within a normal evening spawn window once you adjust for local time. Cape Town’s Company’s Garden (-33.9249, 18.4174) is a good alternative if Sydney’s local 5-9 PM clashes awkwardly with your other spoofing sessions. Since this is the only Minior Shower with a hemisphere split, it’s worth planning both legs on your calendar now rather than scrambling on December 15th when you realise you’ve only logged the Northern core colour.

Minior’s Typing, Stats & Battle Mechanics

Minior begins every battle in its Meteor Form, which carries higher Defense and lower Attack, and the exposed core state flips that to higher Attack and lower Defense. Initially, Minior will only be able to change forms when battling Team GO Rocket, team leaders, or in the GO Battle League, so wild-caught Meteor Form Minior won’t show off the form change outside those specific battle contexts.

One extra bit of trivia worth knowing if you’re chasing a tournament-ready roster: Minior will not be eligible for the 2027 Latin America International Championships, so don’t bank on it for competitive play even once it’s fully released.

Stardust Payout: Why This Shower Is Worth Grinding

Every Minior caught during the event hands you 1,000 Stardust, which is a meaningfully higher per-catch rate than most wild spawns outside of dedicated Stardust events. Across six days and two hemisphere legs, a focused Minior Showers Geminids spoofing run can net a genuinely useful Stardust stockpile for powering up whatever you’re saving for in the new year, Mega Evolutions especially. Catch rate matters more than XL candy here since Minior isn’t a long-term investment pick, so don’t burn Ultra Balls chasing curve-ball bonuses, a plain Poke Ball spam approach is fine.

Rooted Android Setup for Hemisphere-Hopping

Jumping between a London coordinate and a Sydney coordinate in the same session is exactly the kind of long-distance teleport that trips location-based detection if you do it carelessly. Use a GPS joystick app with a built-in cooldown timer, and don’t fire off a raw teleport the moment you want to switch hemispheres.

A properly configured VPN alongside your spoofing setup helps mask the jump further, since your IP geolocation ideally should roughly track your GPS coordinate rather than staying fixed while your pin leaps across the globe. Rooted Android is non-negotiable for this kind of multi-location session, since the location-masking tools that make hemisphere hopping viable need root access to work reliably.

Avoiding Soft Bans While Jumping Hemispheres

A hemisphere-to-hemisphere teleport is thousands of kilometres in a single jump, so your cooldown timer needs to be long enough to look plausible, which in practice means minutes, not seconds. Check our cooldown time calculator guide before you plan the jump, since the safe wait time scales with distance and getting it wrong is the single most common cause of a soft