Pokemon Crown Tundra Expansion – Release Date, Price, & Everything We Know!

The Crown Tundra is Pokémon Sword and Shield’s second set of DLC (coming after The Isle of Armor), and will be available starting this fall. Here’s everything we know so far about what promises to be a massive expansion to these games, including vast new areas to explore, new Pokémon, and even new ways to play!

Release Date and Price for The Crown Tundra

We don’t yet know when The Crown Tundra will be released, only that it’ll be sometime this fall, following the release of The Isle of Armor in June. Both are currently available for pre-purchase as part of the same Expansion Pass, which can be found on the Nintendo eShop for $29.99 / £26.99. Each piece of DLC on the Expansion Pass can then be downloaded later in the year as soon as it’s made available, but you’ll also receive special outfits for your Trainer as a pre-purchase bonus in advance. Make sure to get the Expansion Pass that matches the game version you own (i.e. the Sword Expansion Pass if you own Sword, or the Shield Expansion Pass if you own Shield), as the two versions of the Expansion Pass aren't transferable!

Exploring The Crown Tundra

You’ll be able to access the Crown Tundra area – a frozen landscape south of Postwick – from quite early in Pokémon Sword and Shield: as soon as you can access the Wild Area in the main game. This lets you explore the Tundra’s icy open-world area even without having completed the game’s main story in advance. The Crown Tundra is more discovery-focused than The Isle of Armor, and its main quest-line will place you in the role of exploration team leader. This will take you to a variety of new locations across the Tundra including temples and other unique landmarks, and will even allow you to explore the interiors of previously inaccessible Pokémon Dens with the help of other players.

Returning Pokémon and a new Pokédex

Like The Isle of Armor before it, The Crown Tundra will reintroduce over 100 older Pokémon previously cut from the Galar Pokédex, including the likes of Garchomp, Aurorus, and Crobat. These can be caught within the Tundra or imported from older games using Pokémon Home, and will contribute to the new Crown Tundra Pokédex – which makes up a separate side-quest from the main Pokédex quest. However, players who don’t have the Expansion Pass will still be able to import these Pokémon into their games using Pokémon Home, as they’ll also be enabled in a free update once The Crown Tundra is released.

Returning Legendaries

Legendary Pokémon are heavily featured among the many returning species, and are likely to be a big draw of the Crown Tundra. We’ve seen various legendaries from every previous Pokémon generation appearing within the Tundra’s Pokémon Dens. This mechanic may work similarly to Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire’s Mirage Spots, and also seems to tie into some of the game’s new multiplayer aspects – especially as many of these Legendary Pokémon are noted to Dynamax in battle. Despite the number of core series Legendary Pokémon shown so far, we haven’t yet seen any pre-Gen 8 Mythical Pokémon in the Tundra, so we still don’t know whether these species will also be making a return.

New Forms

Some of the returning Pokémon will come with new appearances – this includes a Galarian form for Slowking, following up on the Galarian Slowpoke and Slowbro introduced with The Isle of Armor. But we haven’t seen Galarian Slowking yet, and Slowpoke won’t be able to evolve into this form without an item found in The Crown Tundra! We’ve also been shown what seem to be Galarian forms for Kanto’s legendary birds – Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres – but we don’t yet know what types these will be.

New Pokémon

As well as the many new forms for familiar Pokémon, we’ve been teased a few entirely new Legendary Pokémon! Foremost among these is the Psychic / Grass Calyrex, which seems to be central to the plot and setting of The Crown Tundra. One of the Tundra’s temples also appears to contain two new golem-like Pokémon similar to Regirock, Regice, Registeel and Regigigas, but we’ve yet to find out how these relate to the others or what their types are.

A New Co-op Mode

While we still don’t know many of the specifics, The Crown Tundra will introduce a new co-operative gameplay mode allowing Trainers to seek out and capture Legendary Pokémon together. This will involve traversing the Tundra’s underground Pokémon Dens, and may expand on previously established Max Raid Battle features.

Other Features

Like The Isle of Armor, this DLC will add a range of new clothing items for your Trainer as well as other customization options such as new hairstyles. Game Freak have also mentioned new content that'll be unlocked when the main story, The Isle of Armor and The Crown Tundra are all completed!