Spotlight hour

How it works

The format is a start clock time, an end clock time, and a local time zone. Sixty minutes after 6:00 p.m. is 7:00 p.m. on the same civil evening, unless a daylight-saving step sits inside the window, which an evening hour usually avoids. The window is not “around 6.” It is not “when you get off work.” It is 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. where the device’s local time is set.

Spotlight hours, in the Pokémon GO sense, are repeating one-hour events: a featured Pokémon spawns more often, and a bonus may run for that same hour. The bonus and the species rotate. This page will not invent this week’s species. Read the notice that names the date. The format stays: one hour, local clock, listed bonus.

The weekday has not been a single eternal fact. The event has been run on Tuesdays in many stretches, and later notices have also used Thursday. Treat the weekday as part of the current schedule, the same way you treat the species. The hour-of-day format, 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. local, is the stable piece across those notices.

Local time, not a travelling hour

Local time means the zone the phone is using. 6:00 p.m. in one city is not 6:00 p.m. in a city six time zones away. If you open the game in a new zone, the spotlight hour follows that new local 6:00 p.m., when the event is running. It does not leave you a remainder of minutes from the city you left at lunch.

Write the window in 24-hour form if you need to file it: 18:00–19:00 local. In 12-hour form keep a.m./p.m. explicit: 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. “6 to 7” without a meridian is how a morning alarm and an evening event trade places on a sticky note.

Read the event date and weekday from the current notice. Set the device zone to the place you will actually be at 18:00. Mark 18:00–19:00 local, not “after dinner.” Treat species and bonus as payload inside that hour, not as a second clock.

If a daylight-saving change falls on the event date, evening 18:00–19:00 is usually after the spring-forward or fall-back step, which in many regions happens in the small hours. Still, if you are on a date when the offset changes, confirm the local civil time that evening. The format is civil local time, not “six hours after noon” in solar language.

One hour is sixty minutes

An hour is 60 minutes, 3,600 seconds. Spotlight hours are that duration with a name attached. They are not a 90-minute raid window and not a whole evening. If you arrive at 6:50 p.m. local, ten minutes of the window remain. The hour does not extend because the spawn list was interesting.

A weekly hour is not the same as “how many hours in a week.” A week is 168 hours. One spotlight hour is 1 of those 168 when the event is scheduled that week. Skipping a week, or a week taken by another event, is a schedule hole. It does not change the length of an hour.

A spotlight hour is sixty local minutes. Leftover daylight after 7:00 p.m. is just evening, not bonus hour. If you needed the format for a different “spotlight hour” — a theatre cue, a radio segment — the same writing rule holds: name the start, name the end, name the local clock. The Pokémon GO event is the search meaning that made the phrase common. The clock work is the same work.