Shellder lives in two Bubbly Basin habitats. One of them costs 2 material units to build. The other costs 6. Serebii, Nintendo Life and game8 all tell you where Shellder spawns, and I read all three on 11 August 2026 without finding a single unit cost between them.
That is the gap. Location data is everywhere. What you actually spend to reach that location is nowhere, and it is the number that decides your build order.
The numbers that fall out once you price everything
There are 50 Pokemon in Bubbly Basin. Phione and Manaphy do not come from a habitat at all, which leaves 48 that do.
29 of those 48 come from exactly one habitat. For most of the Basin there is no route to compare, no saving to hunt, and nothing to optimise. The advice "pick the cheaper habitat" is unactionable for 60% of the roster, which is worth saying plainly rather than burying under a comparison table that mostly has one row.
The choices that do exist are small and clustered. Shellder has the biggest spread at 4 units between its cheapest and dearest source. Corphish and Corsola are next at 3. After that the gaps stop mattering.
Four species tie for cheapest at 2 units: Corphish, Crawdaunt, Shellder and Totodile. The dearest is Starmie at 13, via Mermaid's Gym, and nothing else spawns it. If Starmie is on your list, that 13 is not negotiable, and it is better to plan around it than to discover it halfway through a build.
Why the value ratio and the unit count disagree
The habitat table on the same site ranks habitats by Pokemon per distinct material type, and it is explicit that four units of one material cost it nothing. That is the correct measure when you have a full inventory and you are deciding what to spend it on.
It is the wrong measure when you are the one out gathering, because what you collect is units, not categories.
The two rankings pull apart at both ends. Bubbly bathtub asks for the fewest units in the Basin, 2, and comes 20th of 36 on the value ratio. Basin tall grass tops the ratio at 4.00 and sits 16th on units. Neither ranking is broken. They answer different questions, and which one you want depends entirely on whether your bottleneck is inventory or gathering time.
The thing neither measure can see
None of this knows where the materials are found. The dataset has habitat costs and no gathering locations in it.
That matters more than the unit gaps do. A 2-unit habitat whose one material only appears in a far corner of the map can easily take longer than a 5-unit habitat built from things lying around your base. Until someone maps material spawn points, unit cost is a proxy for effort rather than a measure of it, and anyone telling you otherwise has not gone and collected them.
I would rather say that out loud than let a tidy sorted table imply a precision it does not have.
How to use it anyway
Work backwards from the species you actually want. Look up each one, note whether it has a choice at all, and only spend thinking time on the handful with a real spread. Then total the materials for every habitat on your list at once rather than building them one at a time, because the overlaps are where the genuine savings are, not in swapping a 3-unit habitat for a 2-unit one.
The full table, all 50 species with their source habitats priced in total material units and sortable by cheapest source or biggest saving, is at Pokemon locations in Bubbly Basin. It also flags which species have no alternative, so you can stop looking for a cheaper route that does not exist.
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