Companion Expeditions: Which Duration to Actually Pick
4, 12, 24 or 48 hours, at roughly 2,500 steps per egg. Here's how the caps work, why the longest option isn't always best, and when to start one.
Expeditions are the one part of EggVentures that rewards a small amount of thought. Everything else runs itself; this has a decision in it.
The decision is duration, and most people get it wrong in the same direction.
How it works
You send a grown companion out for a chosen length of time. While it's running, your steps fill it — at roughly 2,500 steps per egg — up to a cap set by the duration you picked:
| Duration | Egg cap | Steps to max it |
|---|---|---|
| 4 hours | 1 | ~2,500 |
| 12 hours | 2 | ~5,000 |
| 24 hours | 3 | ~7,500 |
| 48 hours | 5 | ~12,500 |
The eggs are of the companion's own family, which is what makes expeditions the main way to deliberately accumulate more of a family you're working on.
Three things follow from that table, and they're not obvious.
Longer is not automatically better
The cap scales with duration, but your walking doesn't.
A 48-hour expedition caps at 5 eggs, needing about 12,500 steps across those two days. If you actually walk 6,000 in that window, you'll collect 2 — the same as a 12-hour trip would have given you, except you spent two days getting it instead of half of one.
Pick the duration you can fill, not the one with the biggest number on it.
Rough guide by daily step count:
| Your typical day | Best default |
|---|---|
| Under 4,000 | 12 hours |
| 4,000–7,000 | 12 or 24 hours |
| 7,000–12,000 | 24 hours |
| Over 12,000 | 24 or 48 hours |
The 4-hour one has a specific use
At one egg and ~2,500 steps, the 4-hour trip looks strictly worse per hour. It isn't, in one situation: you know you're about to do a big block of walking.
A long walk, a hike, a day out, a treadmill session. Start a 4-hour expedition, fill it inside the hour, collect, and start another. Three deliberate 4-hour trips across a heavy walking day beats one 24-hour trip you'd max out anyway.
Since only one runs at a time, this is the only way to convert a genuinely big day into more than the daily cap.
When to start one
Morning, most days. A 24-hour expedition started when you get up captures everything you walk that day — the commute, the errands, the after-dinner walk — rather than only what happens after you remember.
That's the case for making it the twenty-second thing you do before leaving the house. Not because it's urgent, but because starting it late means the morning's steps went into nothing.
The one exception: if you're about to do something unusually big, use the 4-hour trick above instead.
Common mistakes
Leaving a finished one uncollected for days. Nothing is lost, but nothing new can start either. That's the real cost — a finished expedition sitting there is a stopped clock.
Always picking 48 hours. Covered above. It feels like the generous option and is usually the wasteful one.
Starting one at bedtime. A 12-hour trip begun at 11pm spends most of its window while you're asleep. Match the window to your waking hours.
Expecting it to finish during a walk. It won't — the shortest is four hours. Expeditions are a day-scale loop, not a per-walk one. If you want something that responds to a single walk, the streak and the weekly card are the mechanics for that.
Where it fits with everything else
Expeditions are the deliberate part of the game; everything else is passive.
- Hatching and evolving happen from your steps regardless. No action required.
- Streak milestones at 3, 7, 14 and 30 days need a claim but no planning.
- The weekly card is a 4×4 board of sixteen mixed objectives, redrawn each week — a weekly step total, one big day, walking on three, five or all seven days, hatching, evolving, collecting an expedition, catching an encounter, walking in a park. Two of its squares want a collected expedition, so the habit above fills the board as a side effect.
- Expeditions are the one thing where a decision changes the outcome.
If you only do one thing daily, do this one. Twenty seconds in the morning, collect when it's up.
New to the app? Start with the beginner's guide. Count not moving? It's nearly always one permission.
Frequently asked questions
How long should an expedition be?
Match it to how much you'll realistically walk while it runs. Each egg costs about 2,500 steps, and the cap scales with duration — 1 egg at 4 hours, 2 at 12, 3 at 24, 5 at 48. Picking a 48-hour trip when you'll only walk 6,000 steps in that window wastes the cap.
Do I have to be walking for the expedition to progress?
Your steps during the window are what fills it, so yes — but they're the steps you were taking anyway. It reads from Apple Health or Health Connect in the background; you don't need the app open or the phone in your hand.
What happens if I don't collect it straight away?
Nothing is lost. It waits until you claim it. The only cost of leaving it is that you can't start the next one until the current one is cleared.
How many steps per egg?
Roughly 2,500. So a 12-hour expedition capped at 2 eggs needs about 5,000 steps in that window to max out.
Can I run more than one expedition at a time?
No — one at a time. Which is why picking the right duration matters more than it first appears.
Your next walk could hatch something
EggVentures turns the steps you already take into pets that hatch, grow, and evolve — no GPS staring, no battles. Open it for twenty seconds before you head out, and there's a payoff waiting when you get back.