How to Trade or Transfer Meltan in Pokemon GO

As a legendary Pokemon, Meltan should be pretty rare in Pokemon GO. However, between multiple Mystery Boxes and the recent 8th Anniversary Party event, many players have too many of them. If Meltan is clogging up your Pokemon box, can you trade or transfer it away?

How To Get Meltan in Pokemon GO

Meltan is usually available by opening the Mystery Box item in Pokemon GO, which causes Meltan to spawn in the wild for a short amount of time. Players can open one Mystery Box every three days, so if you’re consistently getting them, you can stack up plenty of Meltan pretty quickly.

Meltan can also be featured as a research reward encounter, such as with the 8th Anniversary Party event, which gifted players with eight Meltan encounters. If you caught them all like I did, you’ve now got many Meltan on your hands. So, what to do with them?

Can You Trade Meltan in Pokemon GO?

Unlike most Mythical Pokemon in Pokemon GO, Meltan can be traded to other players. Given its rarity, Meltan can only be traded through a Special Trade.

These limited trades can only be done once per day and cost a good deal of Stardust, especially if one player doesn’t already have Meltan in their Pokedex.

Special Trade cost decreases with friendship, so it’s a good idea to trade Meltan with a friend who is at the Best Friends tier if possible. That way, it will cost only 40,000 Stardust compared with 1,000,000 Stardust for trading a Legendary with a Good Friend.

Can You Transfer Meltan in Pokemon GO?

At first glance, it appears Meltan can’t be transferred to the Professor in Pokemon GO. If you try to select it as part of a multi-Pokemon transfer, even if you just want to get rid of all those extra Meltan at once, the transfer option will be greyed out.

However, I found a workaround for this that will let you transfer Meltan. If you transfer Meltan one at a time by going to the individual Pokemon’s info page and transferring from there, you can transfer Meltan in Pokemon GO.

It’s unclear if Niantic intended this to be possible or if it’s an accident, but as of now, those of us who don’t have friends to trade with can offload some spare Meltan to the Professor instead. Those extra candies will come in handy since you need 400 Meltan Candy to evolve it to Melmetal.

So, if you wind up with multiple Meltan and want to trade or transfer them to clear up space, there are options to turn these Mythical Pokemon into candy. It’s just a little bit more complicated than the more common catches.