#poffins

Easy Fast Berries: Level-14, 19-Smoothness Poffins + Correct Nature.

Obtain Razz (Beauty) / Bluk (Cute) / Nanab (Smart) / Wepear (Tough) / Pinap (Cool) berries. You will need 14 of the relevant berry per Pokémon you intend to feed.

If you don't have enough, plant some and grow more. With no fertilizer they take 8 hours to grow and should be watered every 2 hours.

Once you have enough, go to the Poffin House in Hearthome and save the game. That way you can reload if you fuck up a poffin instead of wasting berries.

For high stats, you are going to need to mix some good ass poffins. At around 40s, you should be able to get a level-14 poffin. If you get less than that reload the save and try again.

(tips: you want to be spinning just fast enough that the dough is JUST at the edge without spilling over. Once it turns that dark red, you can spin like your life depends on it without it spilling. Aim for about 40 seconds. You can get a level-15 poffin if you get good + lucky, but it's WAY more reliable to just aim for 14.)

Make sure the Pokémon's nature likes the flavor you want, then feed that baby your poffins until it is full (14 poffins).

With the correct-nature boost, it should get +15 of the relevant stat per poffin. This will yield a total of 210 points in that stat. (Only 196 with an incorrect nature.)

That's enough to evolve Feebas (170) and receive the respective Scarf (200). If you don't have the Scarf already, get it now from an NPC at Pastoria City.

This score + the scarf + the max sheen from all the poffins will yield a pre-judging score of 370, which is equivalent to 2 hearts in the Master Rank. If you want to do better...

Slightly More Time Consuming: Level-21, 24-Smoothnes Poffins + Correct Nature.

Same approach as above but with better berries that take longer to grow.

Obtain Figy (Cool) / Wiki (Beauty) / Mago (Cute) / Aguav (Smart) / Iapapa (Tough) berries. You will need 11 of the relevant berry per Pokémon you intend to train.

Plant & grow if you need more. With no fertilizer it will take 20 hours and should be watered every 9 hours.

Same mixing strategy: save first, aim for 40-second mixing for level-21 poffins. HOWEVER! If you want a fully maxed stat, you must mix at least two level-22 poffins (38 seconds).

Feed all 11 to a Pokémon with the correct nature, for +23 stat boost each (+24 for the level-22 poffins). This will max out the stat at 255, or yield 253 if all poffins are level-21.

This score + the scarf + the max sheen from all the poffins will yield a pre-judging score of 420, which is equivalent to 3 hearts in the Master Rank.

(Note that even the non-maxed stat of 253 yields 3 hearts also, so that extra +2 is just if you want to feel like a gamer for maxing it out.)

And that's as good as you're going to get. Unless...

Super Rare Berry Bullshit: Level-42, 39-Smoothness Poffins + Correct Nature.

This effectively gets you one 3-heart stat and one 2-heart stat on the same Pokémon. However, there is a catch.

Procure Liechi (Cute-Cool) / Ganlon (Smart-Beauty) / Salac (Tough-Cute) / Petaya (Cool-Smart) / Apicot (Beauty-Tough) berries. You will need 7 of the relevant berry per Pokémon you intend to train. Focus on the first listed stat, as that is the one that will receive the biggest boost.

...But these are not possible to obtain in-game. You have to trade them in. Sources to trade from legitimately include: Gen III events that stopped over 20 years ago; doing some crazy grinding on your Pokéwalker you definitely still have and transferring to HGSS first; doing some crazy grinding on Pokémon Colosseum then trading to Gen III first.

Therefore, this option is for either people who miraculously have access to the above, or don't mind just hacking that shit in.

Once you have at least one, if you want/need to obtain more #authentically by planting them: without fertilizer it will take 4 days to grow, and need to be watered every 24 hours.

Same poffin strategy. Mix like a gamer & aim for at most 40s. This should yield level-42 poffins (with the other stat at level-27).

Make sure the Pokémon's nature likes the primary flavor, and get feeding!

Now, to further complicate this, there are actually 2 feeding strategies for this one.

The "I don't care" method:

Feed 7x the relevant poffin to the Pokémon. It will end up with the main stat maxed out, and the other stat at 203. These two attributes do not complement each other in contests and can be considered separate.

The "If I'm doing all this I might as well optimize" method, a.k.a.:

Super Rare Berry Bullshit Deluxe!!!!

Make & feed 6x the relevant poffin to the Pokémon. It will max out the main stat and give you 174 in the other stat.

Then, feed 1x a different poffin pertaining to the two contest stats adjacent to the primary one. These factor into Contest pre-judging scores!

For Beauty: use Liechi (cute-cool). Cool: Apicot (beauty-tough). Tough: Petaya (cool-smart). Smart: Salac (tough-cute). Cute: Ganlon (smart-beauty).

Full Example: for a Beauty Pokémon, use a Pokémon who likes dry poffins (beauty boost), feed it 6x poffins made from Apicot (beauty-tough), then 1x poffin made from Liechi (cute-cool).

Why? Because the "adjacent" stats factor into the pre-judging scores. Cute and Cool factor in for Beauty, Which means in the pre-judging, combined with the Scarf, this Pokémon will actually end up getting you that 4th heart in its main category in Master Rank pre-judging!

(The other categories will suck, but like I said, we're minmaxing here.)

So There You Have It! But is that all...?

Now, these numbers, as I said, all assume around a 40-second poffin mixing speed. What if you are consistently able to pull out 38-second poffins? 36 seconds?

The thing that makes this hard to optimize is that your poffin speed impacts things a LOT, but in varying amounts for different recipes. Bigger numbers are impacted more by multiplication.

Like, the difference between the wiki baseline for a razz berry (9 dryness) and my observed reality (14 dryness) is already significant. It's the difference between—assuming a correct nature—a max stat of 150 and one of 210. That's the difference between not evolving Feebas, not getting a colored Scarf, and going from zero hearts in the pre-judging at Master rank to two.

So I did all this math around 40 seconds, but if your mixing is insane, who knows?

Like. To get that 4th heart, you need a score of 440. The score is calculated as follows:

[ (Primary attribute score) + (half of both secondary attribute scores) + (half of sheen) ] (* 1.1 if wearing appropriate scarf.)

Your sheen is going to max out if you're doing literally anything optimal, so assuming the sheen and primary attribute are both maxed, that only gives a score of 420 (blaze it).

So you'd need a total of ~40 in the secondary attributes, which would then get halved to 20. That's why from my reckoning, it's only doable with the poffins from the stupid rare berries, but probably not otherwise.

But let's say you wanted to do it with the Figy family?

Those yield, at the 60 seconds, 14 stats for 24 smoothness.

At the 40-second speed, you get 21 (which is effectively 23 after the x1.1 flavor preference boost.)

If we wanted to get 4 hearts with these Poffins...

We are hard limited by the 24 smoothness to give exactly 11 of these Poffins and no more.

But if you somehow mix them all at 32 seconds, they will be level-26 poffins. That means they yield a whopping 28 when paired with the appropriate nature (x1.1 boost), which means you can nearly max out your pokemon's main stat with just 9 poffins! Then you could put two of those towards a secondary stat, whichever one isn't disliked based on the Pokémon's nature.

So that would give you:

Max smoothness

252 in the main stat

56 in a secondary stat (assuming it's not a disliked flavor)

Which maths out to...

...447 (Scarf included). It's just barely enough.

I have never in my life mixed a 32-second poffin solo, though. But if you think you can mix 11 of them, you can get a 4-heart Master-Rank Contest Pokémon without the super rare berry bullshit. Although at that rate, if you're THAT good, you might actually be able to make some insane kind of well-rounded Pokémon using some of the dual-flavored berries?

You might have to math this out yourself at that point. The multiplier is x60/(your poffin bake time in seconds).

Hell, if you are really fast at mixing AND using the super rare berries, you can probably get really stupid poffins. Like if you mix these poffins at 35 seconds, you'll be cranking out level-48 poffins with level-30 in the secondary stat. That actually grants 52 and 33 after the nature bonus! That means you max out the main stat in just 5 poffins! Now you have 2 more of these insanely OP poffins to work with before maxing out sheen, rather than 1.

With that kind of speed you might actually be able to make something resembling a well-rounded Pokémon instead of minmaxing.

Do you see the power of speed when compounded with the powerful berries??!!!

The takeaway is really that the math changes dramatically if you are way speedier than the 60-second baseline, which basically everyone is. I'm solidly around a 40, so I know what that gets me. If you're in the same boat: here you go. I did the math for you.

Except for when I didn't, because it's a lot of math.

I sourced basically all of the numbers in this guide from Bulbapedia:

Here is the Liechi berry page for reference so you can see what the berry stats look like. Scroll down to "Ingredient -> DPPt" for its baseline 60-second stats in poffin recipes. Similar stats are available for each berry.

Here is a list of all berries. It includes the drain rate for watering.

Here is a list of all the berries by growth time.

Here is an overview of the Visual Competition, including the score threshold needed for pre-judging hearts.