Characters / Pikmin Species

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Playable Characters: Captains (Main Characters) | Pikmin
Creatures: Pikmin 1 | Pikmin 2 | Pikmin 3 | Pikmin 4

The titular species native to the distant planet that Olimar found himself on. The Pikmin are a strange hybrid of plant and animal that work like colonial insects. When Olimar found them, they were on the verge of extinction, being unable to defend themselves against the onslaught of beasts that they share the planet with. In a way, both Pikmin and Olimar developed a symbiosis with each other in order to survive.

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In General

• All in a Row: Occasionally, in Pikmin 3, the Pikmin will follow the captains in a single file line (which occurs more frequently with leaf Pikmin due to them being slower), as opposed to the circular formation they use in past games. During boss battles, though, where getting your Pikmin out of the way of attacks is critical, this trait is notably absent...
• Ambiguously Evil: A common fear that Olimar has expressed in the series is that one day the Pikmin will turn on him and feed him to the Onion. That's without even mentioning the Leafification process that turns people into Leaflings, which he believes is done for the purpose of securing permanent leaders for themselves. The Pikmin are entirely benevolent, however, as they never do any of those things to Olimar or anyone else. The one time they do Leafify someone, it's done for the sake of saving Olimar, and he's the one who spends the game Leafifying individuals in order to save them.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
  • Only 100 Pikmin can be on the field at a time, despite you often being able to amass several hundreds more that stay as reserves in the Onion. Olimar postulates that this is a defense mechanism by the Onions that make sure the species isn't completely wiped out in case an expedition goes wrong. In Pikmin 4, this limit starts greatly reduced at 20, but can be increased by 10 each time you feed the Onion a similar bulb called Flarlic, and is ignored when exploring caves.
  • Pikmin 4 on top of the 100 max limit also limits how many types of Pikmin can be on the field to only three, which is ignored when exploring caves.
• Arch-Enemy: According to Pikmin 4, the Puffstool and Pikmin are natural enemies, with the former evolving its Pikmin controlling spores as a direct anti-Pikmin measure.
• Artificial Human: One of the earlier castaways you can recover in Pikmin 4, Pitunia, theorizes that the Pikmin were intentionally crafted by the Onions, citing them being in separate families and the precision that they eject Pikmin seeds with as possible evidence. There isn't really anything else supporting it, though.
• Artificial Stupidity: While they're generally easy to handle while under your control, and they get better about not getting distracted or rushing into dangerous situations as the games go on, they're not exactly the brightest plant-animal creatures in the gaming world... they'll gladly follow you into hazards that can one-shot them, will often get distracted by such things like grass and pellet posies while trying to run away from enemies, and will often attempt to take the most dangerous route back to the ship, even if there's a much quicker and safer route they could take.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: If the shorts are any indication, their time with Olimar has given Pikmin a fascination with shiny objects, and they'll often run off to go get it.
• Badass Adorable: Very much so. Seriously, just look at them. Of course, being cute doesn’t mean that an army of them won’t demolish predators several dozen times their size.
• Badass Army: Especially when in a group of 100 Flower Pikmin. Get the to swarm all at once, and they can kill most enemies inside a couple seconds with no losses on their own part.
• Big Guy, Little Guy: The entries after the first game introduce Pikmin this way, with a burly and strong Big Guy and a weak but versatile Little Guy:
  • Pikmin 2 introduces Purple and White Pikmin. Purples are heavyweight with a lot of attack power and the strength of ten Pikmin, while Whites are frail and tiny, but move fast and can dig up treasures hidden from view.
  • Pikmin 3 Has Rock and Winged Pikmin. Rocks are, well, rocks, which deal a lot of impact damage and can crack armor, while Wings can fly and bypass many obstacles, but are very weak as a trade off.
  • Pikmin 4 plays around with the trope with Ice and Glow Pikmin. Ice Pikmin are big and have strong combat utility by being able to freeze enemies, but deal pitiful amounts of damage, while Glow Pikmin are small wisp shaped Pikmin that are a Master of All, with access to every elemental resistance and even being immune to death.
• Big, Thin, Short Trio: With Pikmin 4, all nine available Pikmin types can be sorted into these categories:
  • Purples, Rocks, and Ices are the "Big", having bulkier frames and excelling in combat but not much in more basic tasks.
  • Reds, Yellows, and Blues are the "Thin", posessing average frames and generally average traits.
  • Whites, Winged, and Glow Pikmin are the "Short", being physically smaller than all other Pikmin and are often the most agile and fastest yet fragile and frail of the team.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Pikmin reproduce by bringing plant matter or insect corpses to Onions, which take in the nutrients and produce Pikmin seeds which plant themselves and spout.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: In Pikmin and Pikmin 4, the Puffstool's spores can mind control them.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": In-universe. The Pikmin are so named because they remind Olimar of pikpik carrots, and their nests are referred to as Onions because they resemble Hocotate's onions. When Olimar finds an actual onion as a treasure in Pikmin 2, he names it the "Onion Replica". His Voyage Log does the same for Flarlic in Pikmin 4.
• The Cameo:
  • They appear as a random trophy in Melee.
  • In the Animal Crossing series (starting with Animal Crossing: Wild World), some Pikmin in a plant pot can be obtained as furniture.
  • Hit a ball into a flower garden in Mario Golf Toadstool Tour and, if you look carefully, you'll see a bunch of Pikmin get knocked around by it.
• Character Development: In the first game, they start out as extinct, with the dormant Onions needing to be woken up by Olimar. By the end, it's implied that they've learned to survive without his guidance, as they fend off an approaching Bulborb unprompted. Later games often show wild Pikmin wandering around outside their onions while fending off the local wildlife.
• Chromatic Arrangement: The Pikmin from the first game are red, yellow, and blue.
• Cloudcuckoolander: The entire species can count. All of them sing childish tunes, make quirky poses, and dance whenever resting idly, are often oblivious to the dangers around them and gleefully wander straight into their line of fire with a cheery attitude, and overall frequently do things that make one question what in the world goes on in their minds.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Each Pikmin species has its own distinctive color and physical features, making it easy for players to tell the different types apart in the confusion of the squad.
• Colourful Theme Naming: Pikmin from the first two games are named after their colors. Starting from the third game, new Pikmin stop using this naming pattern and are instead named after distinguishing parts of their anatomies. Somebody on the game's staff seems willing to poke fun at this change as Olimar points out on at least one occasion that he considered calling Yellow Pikmin "Ear Pikmin". That said, it wasn't until the third game that we started to get Pikmin with anatomical features that significantly differed from that of humans anyway.
• Creepy Good: In-Universe, some characters express fear towards the Pikmin, and it's not hard to see why. They can kill creatures larger than themselves by swarming and beating them to death, their family has a few members that are parasitic in nature, and their Onions have the ability to transform other creatures into Dandori-obsessed Leaflings with no recollection of their pasts. Despite that, the Pikmin are loyal to a fault, and never do anything to harm their captains.
• Determinator: These little guys will follow you into the worst dangers possible for the sake of helping you, even if it means getting eaten by the many dangerous creatures in the world.
• Dumbass No More: The Pikmin are noticeably smarter in the animated shorts than in the games. Their AI also gets better with each game, though they're still not the smartest tools in the shed.
• Elemental Powers: Or at least Elemental Motifs, depending on how much they can use them. Red Pikmin are associated with fire, Yellow Pikmin with electricity, Blue Pikmin with water, Purple Pikmin with gravity, White Pikmin with poison^note (rendered as darkness in Super Smash Bros.), Rock Pikmin with earth, Winged Pikmin with air, Ice Pikmin with... well, take a guess, and Glow Pikmin appear to be ghosts. Unusually, they cannot actively control their respective elements, but are immune to them instead (so Blues don't drown, Reds don't burn, Whites are immune to poisoning, etc). There have however been exceptions to this — White Pikmin, for instance, can poison enemies that eat them, Yellow Pikmin redirect electrical currents and Ice Pikmin can freeze water and enemies. Glow Pikmin are immune to all elemental attacks, though they can still be defeated.
• Fastball Special: One of your two methods of attack with Pikmin is just to pick one up and hurl it at something, where it'll latch on and keep attacking (unless it's a Rock Pikmin, in which case it bounces off).
• Good Is Dumb: Pikmin are very sweet and utterly benevolent, but they're rather lacking in smarts and very good at making you despair for their safety if you're not babysitting them.
• Happiness in Slavery:
  • Seems to be type 3 with parts of type 1. They do all the heavy lifting with no direct reward, sure, but they do get the nice indirect reward of greatly propagating and preserving their species. And, as hinted at the end of the first game, they have retained some of their survival skills even after Olimar has left. They also seem to act entirely out of their own volition, too, so technically it isn't slavery. Pikmin 4 supports this, as their survival strategy amounts to imprinting on whatever plucks them and serving them with the goal of propagating their own species.
  • This is the message that comes across in the Image Song used in the first game's Japanese commercial, "Ai no Uta", which is about the Pikmin musing that every day they will be torn to pieces, but they will follow you 'till the end.
    We'll work together, fight, and be eaten/But we'll follow you forever
• Inexplicably Speaks Fluent Alien: Despite all the protagonists being aliens, the Pikmin seem to perfectly understand what their whistle commands mean and what to do in response to them.
• Killer Rabbit: They may look cute, but Pikmin are extremely vicious in combat, and if any creature gets too close while they're idle, their first reaction is to immediately attack it.
• Kill the Cutie: Try not to get too attached to them, for you'll likely be seeing dozens of them get killed by monsters throughout your adventure. In very morbid ways to add.
• Meaningful Name: The name Pikmin sounds a lot like "Pick me," as this Ask the Developers article reveals. Pikmin also evolved from "Ippiki", which means "one small animal".
• No Biological Sex: The Pikmin themselves have no role in active reproduction; the only way they reproduce is by providing organic nutrients to their respective Onions.
• No Mouth: None of the Pikmin types barring Blues (if those are mouths and not gills anyway, the games can never agree on which is which) have mouths. How they manage to eat nectar is a mystery.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: They have great offensive capabilities when they work together as a group, but possess absolutely no defense whatsoever. Every hazard and enemy attack is instantly, or at least very quickly, fatal to them.
• Planimal: They're Ambuloradicis, creatures that exhibit traits of both plants and animals. They walk and eat like regular animals, and have muscles and neural networks, but they follow a plant-like lifecycle by starting of burried in the ground and maturing from leaf to bud to flower. The Piklopedia postulates that they're basically root vegetables that managed to transform their root systems into mobile bodies through millennia of evolution.
• Plant Person: They're tiny humanoids with leaf, bud, or flower stems growing from their heads, and sprout from seeds.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: They're small, candy-colored humanoids with exaggerated proportions and soft, high-pitched voices. As a result, they're so cute and cuddly that you wouldn't want them to fall into a disgusting predator's gaping maw, and their depictions in merchandise and spinoff material openly play off of their cute looks.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Yellow Pikmin could wield Bomb Rocks in the first Pikmin; in Pikmin 3, all Pikmin can use them regardless of color.
• Super Drowning Skills: Any Pikmin outside of Blue Pikmin, Bulbmin, and Ice Pikmin immediately start to drown if they even so much as touch a drop of water.
• Too Dumb to Live: Pikmin have absolutely no self preservation and will gladly walk into bodies of water, fire, predators, and other hazards without question or hesitation. They also take the shortest path back to base when carrying things, regardless of how dangerous said path is though they at least know to run away from lit Bomb Rocks. This is probably why they're near extinction at the start of the first and third games.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Pikmin species was nearing extinction in the first game, with Olimar finding each of their Onions buried in the ground in hibernation. Ever since then, the species has learned from the captain and become more independent, with Onions often found already active with groups of Pikmin wandering around in the wild. Pikmin 4 shows this the most with tons of wild Pikmin roaming underground and holding their own against other creatures.
• Undying Loyalty: They're loyal to just about anyone who plucks them from the ground, and are not picky about who that is, readily allying with just about any other species in order to further the survival of the Pikmin as a group.
• Use Your Head: When not thrown at an enemy, they repeatedly ram into their opponents head-first to deal damage.
• Vocal Evolution: In the first two games, all types of Pikmin except Bulbmin had the same voice. In 3, Yellow, Rock, and Winged Pikmin had their own voices, while Red, Blue, Purple, and White Pikmin all still shared the default. In Pikmin 4, all nine types of Pikmin have their own voice.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In Pikmin 4, they turned Olimar into a Leafling to keep him from dying when his life support fails. However, it's also theorized that they did this to find a permanent leader, as they are notably reliant on Olimar and other leaders to survive. Luckily, Moss seems to take up this role by the end of the game.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Pikmin will freak out at the sight (or, apparently, scent) of Mitites. Except Purple Pikmin. Which just so happen to be the best tools for crushing Mitites all at once.
• Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: When a Pikmin dies, a small ghostlike spirit will float up from where it fell, wail, and fade away. These spirits retain the color they were in life and, in Pikmin 3, the Rock Pikmin will maintain their blocky, jagged shape and the Winged Pikmin their insect-like wings, making the latter literal examples of winged souls.
• Zerg Rush: One of the two primary offensive options — you can command all your active Pikmin to swarm a target at once.

Introduced in Pikmin

Red Pikmin

Pikminidae rubrus

Pikmin that are red in color. The other notable feature is that they sport noses. They are completely resistant to fire and hot temperatures, and fight with more strength than most other Pikmin. They are consistently the first variety of Pikmin discovered.

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• The Berserker: They fight harder than any other Pikmin, and their strength is only beaten by Purple Pikmin.
• Boring, but Practical: Their secondary ability is easily one of the best, being able to deal more damage than most other Pikmin types. While some argue Red Pikmin are outclassed by Purples in 2, Red Pikmin still have the advantage of being more mobile and replenishable thanks to having an Onion. They're also the first Pikmin type you usually start out with, so you'll likely have more Reds than any others once you start encountering more Pikmin types. As a result, if you're attempting to accomplish a task that doesn't require a specific Pikmin type, expect to be using Reds for the task, and if you're doing a task that requires specific Pikmin types, or going into a cave and you have some extra room for other Pikmin, expect Reds to fill up the leftover space.
• Crutch Character: In the second game, they're pretty useful until you get a sizable amount of Purple Pikmin, which outclass them in combat. Additionally, fire hazards, the other thing they're useful for, are easier to brute-force with the incorrect Pikmin color than other elemental hazards are. That being said, their faster speed over their Purple counterparts makes them important for fast-moving bosses such as the Segmented Crawbster. They lose this status in Pikmin 3 due to Purple Pikmin being absent in story mode and Rock Pikmin being unable to latch onto enemies in exchange for dealing more damage when they're thrown, but regain it somewhat as Pikmin 4 re-introduces Purple Pikmin with the Purples retaining their damage bonuses.
• Fire Is Red: They are red in color and have many attributes associated with fire.
• Gag Nose: Unlike most of the other Pikmin, red Pikmin are the only ones to have a long pointy nose.
• Hot-Blooded: Are noted to be the most aggressive species of Pikmin, with even their shows of affection taking the form of beating their fists on the target in question.
• Immune to Fire: Their special ability is their ability to walk through fire unscathed. Pikmin 3 suggests that is because their nose acts as a vent for the heat, while Pikmin 4 reveals that they do not catch fire due to their bodies being made of a very fire-resistant cellulose.
• Playing with Fire: Pikmin 4 lets Red Pikmin carry burning pine cones to ignite flammable obstacles and damage ice-based enemies. They cause fire damage when they latch onto enemies in Super Smash Bros.
• Red Is Violent: They do more damage than most other Pikmin variants.
• Red Shirt: Literally, given their color. Being the first Pikmin type (second in the third game, but still the first one that "sticks" in the group) you encounter, as well as being the most offensive-oriented Pikmin, you'll likely end up with a lot of these guys in relation to the other Pikmin in-game. As such, they're usually the first ones used for Candypop Buds and are considered the most "expendable" Pikmin in battles. Pikmin 4 even makes this status canon by having the Piklopedia denote them as the most common species of Pikmin.
• Series Mascot: Whenever you see Pikmin marketing, a Red Pikmin is always front-and-center. Because they're almost always the first ones you get, they're essentially considered the "default" variety of Pikmin. Olimar's Notes in the Piklopedia of 4 even lean on this by confirming that they are the most common type, so in a sense they really are the "default" Pikmin.

Yellow Pikmin

Pikminidae auribus

These guys are yellow in color and have ears. Yellow Pikmin can be thrown to very high places, which is especially useful in getting things that are out of reach of other Pikmin. In the first game, they were able to utilize bomb rocks, but this was changed in Pikmin 2 to resistance to electricity. Which is always useful, since electricity is otherwise instantly fatal. In Pikmin 3, their bomb-rock carrying ability has returned, with the other Pikmin sharing in this ability too. Pikmin 3 also made them better at digging than the other types.

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• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Unlike the last two games, they're the first Pikmin type encountered in Pikmin 3. Though Red Pikmin still get their Onion first, and the Yellows merely serve as a tutorial.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Their ability to use Bombs to kill enemies in the first game. It genuinely can have its uses once in a while, especially in the Challenge Mode where you can often find plenty of them lying around to quickly dispatch enemies and collect them before time runs out, and when fighting the Emperor Bulblax. But their rather destructive and glitchy nature, coupled with the Yellow Pikmin's occasional stupid AI when using them, can make them rather risky to use without destroying your entire Pikmin army in the process. This is why it's often a better alternative to just use swarms of Red Pikmin to battle enemies most of the time instead.
• Demolitions Expert: In Pikmin, they were the only ones who could carry and use Bomb Rocks. This was removed in Pikmin 2, where Bomb Rocks are now large environmental hazards rather than tools, until it returned in Pikmin 3 (where all Pikmin can use them).
• Discard and Draw: In Pikmin 2, they can't handle Bomb Rocks anymore but are now immune to electrocution, a trait they kept even when they got Bomb Rock handling back (along with everyone else).
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Because the first game never had electrical harzards, Yellow Pikmin were only used for collecting bomb rocks.
• Elemental Absorption: In Pikmin 3, they're not just immune to electricity; it lets them become Flower Pikmin.
• In a Single Bound: Handwaved in the game by explaining that their ears act as sails. In Pikmin 3, Brittany says it's because they have less density than other Pikmin.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Yellow Pikmin weren't shown to be exceptionally better at digging than any other Pikmin in 2, but are shown to be the fastest diggers of all from 3 onwards.
• No-Sell: To electricity as of Pikmin 2.
• Shock and Awe: In the third game. Although they've always been immune to electricity (if the Dummied Out coding from Pikmin says anything), in Pikmin 3, they can be used to redirect electrical currents. It doesn't harm them in the process, either, instead flowering them if they aren't already. They still can't actually use electricity for attacking means, though (except in Super Smash Bros.).
• Tunnel King: 3 establishes that Yellows are the best Pikmin at digging, which 4's Piklopedia states is due to their ear-like lamellae helping them dig.
• Uniqueness Decay: They used to be the only Pikmin that could handle Bomb Rocks, which became a species-wide trait in Pikmin 3, and then removed entirely by Pikmin 4 as the player can carry them and throw them instead.
• Vocal Evolution: The first two games had Yellow Pikmin retain the same voice clips as their Red and Blue variants. From Pikmin 3 onwards, Yellows have a noticeably higher-pitched voice compared to other Pikmin types, only being outclassed by Winged and White Pikmin.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: The former in this case, they are able to produce yellow sparks of electricity and they themselves are yellow in color.

Blue Pikmin

Pikminidae caerula

Blue Pikmin are, unsurprisingly, blue in color. They also have gills which resemble a mouth. While they can't be thrown as far or attack as much as their yellow and red cousins, Blue Pikmin are useful underwater, where other Pikmin will drown.

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• Achilles' Heel: While Blue Pikmin have no troubles with traversing through water, the same cannot be said for the areas of thick mud found in the Primordial Thicket, where they're just as susceptible to drowning as any other Pikmin.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Pikmin 4 Piklopedia states that their blue color is due to having pigment proteins similar to cyanobacteria that allow them to photosynthesize.
• Boring, but Practical: While being able to traverse through water seems pretty underwhelming in comparison to the abilities other Pikmin have, Blue Pikmin are still a viable addition to the team given that no other Pikmin is capable of swimming. Thus, they are imperative for bringing back treasures and/or or eliminating any threats submerged in water, or otherwise making it safe for the rest of the Pikmin to move forward.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • The game's coding makes them slightly more likely to get eaten than other types of Pikmin, which means that even when they're not being treated as expendable by the player, they still suffer more casualties — at least in the later games, as in the first one the casualties are determined by which Pikmin are summoned from the Onions, order included.
  • In one of 2's promotional art displaying all the non-Bulbmin Pikmin types, the one Blue is hanging for dear life underneath the branch the others are sitting or standing on.
  • In 3, while the other primary Pikmin (a whole army of Yellow Pikmin are doing fine, and the first three Reds are at least trying to save their onion) are doing decent at worst, the Blue Pikmin's Onion is deactivated in the ground.
  • Blue Pikmin are some of the only casualties in the animated shorts, and one of those was from its own stupidity.
• Forgot About His Powers: In the first 2 games, whenever they grab an object that's on land, they often never think to carry it through the water and instead just continue to carry it on land, no matter what obstacle lies on the land like a wall or an unbuilt bridge. Averted in the later games, where their pathfinding abilities are enhanced to actually make them carry things through water no matter where they found the object first.
• Good Samaritan: They act as lifeguards to any drowning Pikmin in the first two games.
• Late Character Syndrome: While Blue Pikmin are almost always the last type the player gets in every game, the fact that they're the last to be found in the third game really hurts their viability. By the time you recruit them into your squad in 3, much of their usefulness is taken up by Winged Pikmin, leaving them only useful for the handful of puzzles and fruits in previous areas that require them. Averted for the first time come Pikmin 4, where you can find their Onion as early as your second day if you know where to look.
• Perpetual Frowner: That gill-mouth of theirs looks like it's always twisted in a dissatisfied frown.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: They're the only species of Pikmin that can survive underwater.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman:
  • An almost literal example. The Blue Pikmin have no powers on land, unlike all other colors of Pikmin (except their lifeguarding, which is near water anyway), and aside from not drowning, don't have any special ability in the water either. However, water is by far the most abundant hazard, and unlike the others, cannot be destroyed (usually), creating large "Blue Pikmin only" areas (and even one cavern can only be entered with an army of Blue Pikmin). This means as a result that most players tend to treat them as expendable in a bad situation or in any situation where casualties are likely high (such as fighting an unknown enemy), saving the high-damage Red Pikmin and useful Yellow Pikmin.
  • 3 makes this issue even worse with the introduction of Winged Pikmin, who make the ability for Blue Pikmin to take shortcuts by going through water obsolete and reducing them to being used only for submerged objects or strictly underwater sections. In fact, they were also directly nerfed on top of it, since they no longer have the ability to save non-Blue Pikmin from drowning.
  • 4 follows suit by introducing Ice Pikmin, who have largely the same ability to move above water as Winged Pikmin. The difference is that they can also be used to freeze the water and allow other Pikmin to cross, although it will take a lot of Ice Pikmin to freeze the water if the body is too big.
• Walk, Don't Swim: Although Blue Pikmin can survive underwater, they just walk instead of swim. Averted starting with Pikmin 3, where Blue Pikmin will twirl their stems to swim through the water when chasing something.
• Water Is Blue: They are blue in color, and are the only Pikmin that aren't afraid of getting wet.

Mushroom Pikmin

A rather unusual Pikmin type, these Pikmin are the only hostile Pikmin in the series so far (not counting Adult Bulbmin) and willingly attack Olimar and any other Pikmin types if they get too close. They are only encountered if normal Pikmin get caught up in a Puffstool's spore cloud, and are a sharp shade of purple and lack pupils. Unlike other Pikmin who have a leaf, bud, or flower on top of their heads, these guys sport brown mushrooms. They can also occasionally keep the immunities their previous form had before being transformed, and if left alone, will dance around the Puffstool.

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• Ax-Crazy: They will follow you until they are out of range, and can sometimes cause you to faint from relentless headbutts.
• Beat the Curse Out of Him: When a normal Pikmin attacks them, there's a chance they'll change back to normal. This runs the risk of actually killing them, though.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: As a result of the Puffstool's spores. They can be returned back to normal if Olimar shakes them off while they're attacking him or if a normal Pikmin smacks them hard enough, but the latter has a chance of killing them. Of course, they can also be turned back if the Puffstool that spored them is killed.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: They only appeared in the first game, and did not return alongside the Puffstool in the fourth, instead being replaced with a confused Status Effect.
• Evil Costume Switch: They turn purple, get white eyes, and gain a mushroom.
• Giggling Villain: When dancing around the Puffstool, they make a sound that sounds like they're giggling. Also, notably, when they're attacking Olimar they sound almost gleeful to be doing so.
• Monochromatic Eyes: Their eyes are a blank, solid white, lacking Pikmin's normal pupils.
• Mushroom Man: Little purple humanoids with a mushroom sporting from their heads, they're technically Plant Persons who were overtaken by a fungal parasite.
• No Name Given: They have never actually been named in any official capacity.
• Perpetual Frowner: They have droopy eyes and a frown after being converted.

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Introduced in Pikmin 2

Purple Pikmin

Pikminidae yokozunum

These burly Pikmin are a special breed that are initially found when you throw Pikmin into a Violet Candypop Bud. Compared to other Pikmin, they are massive. They weigh as much as ten normal Pikmin and are ten times as strong. The only problem with them is that they are slow as molasses. But their strength more than makes up for this drawback. In Pikmin 2, they will probably replace the Red Pikmin as your main muscle.

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• Acrofatic: They're the fattest of the Pikmin 2 types (3's Rock Pikmin are equally wide, but appearance-wise they look less fat and more like blocky rocks), but also the strongest of all Pikmin and very effective in combat. On the other hand, they're still ridiculously slow.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Their ability to carry 10 times the weight of a regular Pikmin is genuinely useful and required for certain treasures in 2 and 4, but it comes with the drawback of Purples being incredibly slow, so it's best to have a mix of Purples and non-Purples carrying a treasure rather than relying on the former alone.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Yokozuna" is the highest rank a sumo wrestler can earn, and they act much like sumo wrestlers, which is referenced with their scientific name.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: They're the only Pikmin that don't appear in Nintendo Land who were introduced at the time of release.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Purples excel in places where strength is needed, such as battling and lifting. But they don’t have any resistances to elemental hazards, which limits their use for anything else.
• Demoted to Extra: Only useable in the Mission Modes and 2-player in Pikmin 3. And out of the Mission Modes, they only appear in the Treasure Collecting group.^note The reason why is because Onions play a bigger role in Battle Enemies (there are some in Collect Treasure, but they're limited to DLC levels), which Purples and Whites didn't have at the time. And Defeat Bosses is a time trail for the story mode boss fights, with the game only giving you at most the colors you would have up to this point to make it resemble the actual battle. And since they never appear in the story mode, you would never have them for the bosses. They would be playable again by 4.
• Glass Cannon: Despite looking more robust than other Pikmin and hitting way harder, they die just as easily, if not more thanks to their lack of immunities.
• Gravity Is Purple: These Pikmin have the ability to cause extreme gravity waves when they land on the ground and are purple in color.
• Gravity Master: Their ground-pound attacks are stated as causing gravitational waves, powerful enough to deal heavy damage to foes and make apparitions like the Waterwraith temporarily vulnerable.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: One of the few Pikmin to do damage on impact with an enemy.
• Ground Pound: Upon hitting the ground or a creature, they make a noticeable THUD! sound and deal damage upon impact.
• Mighty Glacier: The slowest but most deadly of the Pikmin.
• Nerf:
  • In Pikmin 2 they were twice as strong as Red Pikmin and could stun enemies when they land on them. Their combat strength was toned down in 3's Mission Mode, and their main purpose instead is their ability to carry ten times more than the other colors, and they completely lost their slam attack.
  • In Pikmin 4 they're changed to be just as strong as Red Pikmin, deal contact damage like Rock Pikmin when thrown, and are given back the slam attack, but it no longer stuns and instead does Area of Effect damage, with the stun effect being given to Oatchi as an upgrade.
  • Purple Pikmin were immune to panicking in 2, but 4 makes them just as vulnerable as the other types.
• Nerves of Steel: Purple Pikmin are the only kind that don't panic from the Mitites' scent or the Emperor Bulblax's roar, until Pikmin 4 removed this immunity.
• No-Sell: They won't be blown away by the Blowhogs' wind attacks; however, the Withering Blowhog's attacks will still reduce their flowers to leaves.
• Puni Plush: Their chubby figures compared to the other Pikmin just adds to their adorability.
• Purple Is Powerful: The Purples are, well, purple, and they're the strongest species of Pikmin.
• Purple Is the New Black: In Pikmin 2, they're referred to internally as "Black Pikmin," and their color in that game especially is very dark. They also debuted alongside White Pikmin, implying they were originally a black/white duo (which also would have gone nicely with the original game's primary-color trio). Later games just call them Purples internally and make their color much more robustly purple instead of blackish purple.
• Purposefully Overpowered: Purple Pikmin are very, very strong, but a lack of consistent availability and their dependence on Candypop Buds rather than having their own Onion is their biggest limitation, making it very difficult to get more of them. Pikmin 4 does have a Purple Onion, meaning you can finally make more Purples at any time, but getting it requires clearing the hellishly difficult Trial of the Sage Leaf.
• Stout Strength: They're the largest species of non-hostile Pikmin so far (with Rock Pikmin coming in at a very close second), and the strongest.
• The Strength of Ten Men: They literally have the power of ten Pikmin when it comes to carrying objects, and as such are useful for heavy lifting tasks that would normally take loads of other kinds of Pikmin. On the other hand, they move very slowly when carrying these objects on their own. ^note If you're curious about the actual game mechanics behind this, carriable objects have two values governing them. The first is weight, which is visible and used to determine if the object can be moved at all. You need a combined Pikmin strength at least equal to the Weight to move the item, and for this, Purple Pikmin are worth 10, and all others are worth 1. The other, hidden value, is the maximum number of Pikmin that can carry it at once. This is usually roughly twice the weight, and carrying speed is drastically increased if you have this many Pikmin carrying it at once. All Pikmin are only worth 1 point for this value, and since Purple Pikmin are significantly more rare than the main three types, it's nearly impossible to fill this value with nothing but Purple Pikmin on any but the lightest items. Their formidable strength is required to lift both the very heavy Dumbell treasure found in the Wistful Wild in 2 and the Gold Bar treasure found in the Primordial Thicket in 4.
• Super-Strength: They can carry more weight than regular Pikmin can, which Pikmin 4 states is due to their more developed muscle fibers.
• Vocal Evolution: In Pikmin 4, their voices become lower pitched.

White Pikmin

Pikminidae venalbius

White Pikmin with keen red eyes. These Pikmin are initially found when your other Pikmin are thrown into an Ivory Candypop Bud. They are smaller and weaker than other Pikmin, but are resistant to toxins, are themselves extremely poisonous to creatures that eat them, move very quickly, and are useful in detecting buried treasure.

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• Achilles' Heel: Pikmin 4 reveals that the Smoky Progg is the only poisonous enemy in the game that White Pikmin aren't immune to, with them being subject to instant death just like any other Pikmin.
• Acid Attack: In the animated shorts, they are shown to be able to spit small jets of acid capable of swiftly dissolving metal, though they can't do this in any of the games.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: Any Pikmin being thrown into an Ivory Candypop Bud will become a White Pikmin, with the poison immunity that entails.
• Albinos Are Freaks: Their white skin and red eyes definitely invoke albinoism and they are one of the more unnatural-looking Pikmin. However, it is a bit of a subversion as they are just as friendly as any other Pikmin.
• Awesome, but Impractical: They can poison enemies when eaten; aside from bosses, anything that doesn't die outright will be left in pretty bad shape. While this sounds useful, White Pikmin can only be made in Candypop Buds in 2, not an Onion, and thus are too scarce to sacrifice en masse. This is somewhat mitigated in Pikmin 4, where the White Pikmin get their own Onion that the player can obtain by completing the Trials of the Sage Leaf. With that said, their poisoning of enemies is significantly weakened, meaning unless the player has a large amount of Whites to sacrifice, it's still not wholly practical to take advantage of their special ability.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Venalbius" is a combination of the Latin words for "venom" and "white".
• Color-Coded Elements: Averted in Pikmin 2, where poison was purple. Pikmin 4 plays it straighter by making poison greenish white.
• Demoted to Extra: Like Purples, they're only useable in the Mission Modes and 2-player for Pikmin 3, and their Mission Mode appearances are also limited to Collect Treasure.
• Fragile Speedster: White Pikmin are the fastest, but they're just as fragile as other Pikmin. Pikmin 3 also made them weaker than the other types.
• Hollywood Acid: The purple acid they spit in the shorts is potent enough to liquify metal almost instantly.
• Metal Detector Puzzle: Their other ability in 2 is detecting and digging up buried treasure, which would otherwise be inaccessible without them. In 4, this became an ability of all Pikmin.
• The Napoleon: In the shorts, Whites show themselves to be pretty short-tempered and aggressive to go with their relatively diminutive stature.
• Poisonous Person:
  • If an enemy eats them, they'll be harmed or even killed by the poison.
  • In the Pikmin short films, they can also spit a corrosive, acid-like substance.
  • Pikmin 4 identifies their poison as aconite, and posits that comparatively to other Pikmin they lean more on the plant as opposed to animal side. Their poison is also stated to cause vomiting, respiratory distress and complete organ failure, followed ultimately by death by cardiac arrest.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The red-eyed Whites may look cute and edible, but eat too many and a Bulborb's bound to faint, and in the shorts they're capable of spitting a metal-melting acid.
• Taking You with Me: Mechanically, this is one of their purposes — just about any enemy short of a boss that eats one will be killed outright, while bosses will be significantly damaged or weakened. You can potentially avoid much greater casualties by deliberately sacrificing them, but it only works on enemies that actually eat Pikmin, and White Pikmin are hard enough to come by that it might not be worth it.
• Uniqueness Decay: Their unique ability to dig up completely buried treasure in 2 became universal among all Pikmin types in 4.
• Utility Party Member: In games post-2, the White's poison, increased speed, and ability to see treasures completely buried underground is mitigated by their poor attack strength.
• Vocal Evolution: Their voices become much higher pitched in Pikmin 4.
• Worker Unit: While they can fight, they're deal rather average to low damage at best, making them more optimal for worker tasks like carrying things or building bridges other than fighting enemies minus the occasional poisonous ones.

Young Bulbmin

Only acquired in dungeons of the second game, this special type of "Pikmin" — in truth parasitic Pikmin infesting and controlling Dwarf Bulborbs — is immune to fire, electricity, water, and poison, which makes them especially effective on many different hazards. Unfortunately, they cannot be taken out of the caves where they are found, so they are also good candidates for conversion into Purple and White Pikmin. Or throwing them into Queen Candypop buds.

(For tropes pertaining to the adult Bulbmin, see the section on the Bulbmin enemies.)

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• Achilles' Heel: They might be able to No-Sell most hazards, but Bulbmin are not immune to everything on PNF-404. They're just as vulnerable to bomb rocks and crushing attacks as any other normal Pikmin, and they can be eaten by enemies as well.
• Awesome, but Impractical: They're immune to water, fire, electrical, and poisonous hazards. This makes them a really useful utility… but they can only be used in the caves they're found in. As a result, for better long-term use, they're usually the first ones to get converted to other Pikmin when a Candypop Bud is encountered. Similarly, the small Bulbmin, the ones you can control, will only spawn if there aren't already 100 Pikmin in the field. This means that either you have to have already lost Pikmin, something players generally try to avoid, to use them, or go into a cave with less than 100 Pikmin beforehand, which puts you at a minor handicap until you encounter them.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: While the other nine are fairly obvious, these ones get represented with green (when viewed on the map screen, and their glow color when idle) or orange (their cursor color and that of their stems when buried, although the latter can only happen in two levels of one cave) for the sake of simplicity.
• Carnivore Confusion: Played with. Since they're parasitic Pikmin controlling a Bulborb body, depending on how exactly you look at them they're either Bulborbs that side with their prey or just Pikmin falling in with their own kind.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: So far, Bulbmin have only made appearances in Pikmin 2, and in only three of the many underground caves the player explores. They are completely absent in 3, and their role as the Guest-Star Party Member with immunity towards all hazards is taken over by the Glow Pikmin in 4. The most they get in that installment is a brief mention in the Startle Spore's Piklopedia entry.
• Guest-Star Party Member: They'll join you if you find them in certain caverns^note  The Frontier Cavern, The Submerged Castle, and The Hole of Heroes to be exact , but they won't return to the surface with you. However, you can use Candypop Buds to transform them into permanent members of your army, becoming ordinary Pikmin of whatever color you choose.
• Infinity +1 Element: They have middle-of-the-road attack and speed... but resistance to every element. You can only use them in the dungeon they appear in, though.
• Jack of All Stats: Kinda. While they possess the immunities of Red, Yellow, Blue, and White Pikmin, they lack the secondary abilities such as Red's increased attacking power, Yellow's high throws, Blue's lifeguarding, and White's agility and digging.
• Master of All: They're immune to almost every elemental hazard in the game (with the exception of explosions and crushing), making their role as a Guest-Star Party Member very beneficial.
• No-Sell: Are immune to all four elemental hazards of 2.
• Secret Character: They only appear in 3 caves and are almost entirely absent in promotional material compared to Purple and White Pikmin.

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Introduced in Pikmin 3

Rock Pikmin

Pikminidae habisaxum

These are the third Pikmin type discovered in Pikmin 3 (after Yellow and Red Pikmin), and true to their name, they are a sort of parasitic Pikmin encased in rocks. They don't cling to enemies when thrown, but the impact still causes damage and they can smash crystalline objects with ease. They are also immune to stabbing and crushing attacks, although they can be killed by the latter if it happens while they're standing on a hard surface.

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• Anti-Armor: Of the Armor Cracker variety. One of their most important roles in battle is breaking down other enemies' crystalline armor, which other Pikmin simply bounce off of harmlessly, in order to make it possible to actually harm them.
• Battering Ram: An odd living example. They break down most barriers by ramming into them.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Habisaxum" can roughly translate to "stone dweller", which fits well with the reveal that they're parasitic Pikmin using rocks as hosts.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Shiny or metallic gray.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Although Purple Pikmin can also deal damage when landing on an enemy, this is the only way the Rock Pikmin can attack, as opposed to grabbing on and doing constant damage like other Pikmin.
• Logical Weakness: Pikmin 4 introduces a somewhat interesting example with these guys. Normally, being made of rock, they're impervious to being crushed, instead just being measly buried into the ground before unearthing themselves on their own moments later... unless they're standing on a hard surface, like hard tile flooring or large concrete, or the crushing attack is also laced with other elements like fire or ice, to which the Rock Pikmin will naturally just get crushed to pieces and die instantly like any other Pikmin type.
• Nerf: In Pikmin 4, Rock Pikmin can be killed by crushing attacks if the ground they're standing on is too hard, or if the crushing attack in question is also doused with an elemental hazard as well, like fire or ice. They also have average digging speed now instead of being as fast as Yellow Pikmin.
• No-Sell: If they're hit by an attack that would crush Pikmin, they are merely reburied temporarily. They're also immune to attacks that skewer Pikmin. 4 nerfs the former ability by making it only occur on soft ground. On hard surfaces, their bodies can't handle the pressure and crack apart.
• Puppeteer Parasite: It's actually a parasitic Pikmin called Hermikmin that has wormed its roots into a rock, storing its vital organs inside an interior cavity resembling a crystal geode.
• Required Secondary Powers: Not the Pikmin itself, but Olimar's entry in the Piklopedia has him hypothesizing that, since they use actual rocks as bodies, that their respective Onions and Candypop Buds store rocks within them for the Pikmin to use as hosts.
• Rock Monster: Their appearance gives off this impression, blurring the line between very tough regular creatures than happen to look like rocks and animated pebbles with limbs and eyes. Regardless, they very much have this trope's affinity for toughness, being capable of easily shattering armor and objects regular Pikmin can't touch. The Piklopedia entry by Olimar in 4 reveals they're in fact the latter, being Pikmin known as Hermikmin that have wormed their roots into rocks to use as shells.
• Stout Strength: Mind you, they hit hard when tossed, but they're super slow when trying to bum rush enemies on their own.
• Tunnel King:
  • Though unmentioned in-game, Rock Pikmin are just as good as Yellow Pikmin at digging up objects in 3. They're also the best type at digging tunnels, which is tied to attack strength.
  • In 4 this is averted as they only have average tunnelling speed.

Winged Pikmin

Pikminidae volarosa

Winged Pikmin are very fly-like in appearance, sporting small wings and blue compound eyes. Though they don't have any known immunities, their constant flight allows them to fly over water and deal with airborne and high up enemies much easier than other Pikmin, and can airlift objects back to the base out of range of most enemies and hazards, making them ideal harvesters. However, they deal less damage than other Pikmin.

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• Airborne Mook: A rare player-controlled example. The only time they are ever grounded is when they're knocked down by an enemy or when digging up fruits.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Reds are normally more powerful than Winged Pikmin in a fight, but Winged Pikmin are absolutely vicious when used against an airborne enemy, as they can be charged directly at them without having to ground them first.
• Bee-Bee Gun: Probably the closest thing to a playable example of this trope this series can provide, being flying, somewhat bee-looking creatures who you can command to attack enemies and destroy obstacles with.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Pink. This also applies for objects in-game: most of what can be pulled by them has pink on it somewhere.
• Death from Above: When fighting ground-based enemies they attack from above.
• Flight: They can fly over all hazards except for spider-webs, which are their only weakness. It's theorized in Pikmin 4 that the ancestral Winged Pikmin gained their wings from their Onion absorbing insects and incorporating their gene for growing wings.
• Forgot About His Powers: A drowning Winged Pikmin won't think to just fly out of the water unless you whistle at them.
• Nerf: Their ability to circumvent all hazards by flying is heavily diminished in Pikmin 4, as their pathfinding skills are limited to what regular ground-traversing Pikmin can traverse and nothing further.
• No-Sell: Zig-zagged. They can fly over water, but if they get knocked down into it, they'll drown just like any other Pikmin. They're much easier to save from water, though, as one whistle will cause them to jump from it and go back to hovering. They're also immune to most crushing attacks since they can just move out of the way, except the ones from the Quaggled Mireclops and the Final Boss of Pikmin 3.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Even in comparison to the other Pikmin seen in the past, featuring even more exaggerated proportions than other types with their stubby bodies, bulbous, oversized heads, and buttonlike eyes. Their pastel color palettes (compared to the vivid hues used for the Pikmin types in 1 and 2) additionally add onto this.
• Sequence Breaking: Due to their ability to fly, the Winged Pikmin are really good at this. Besides being able to take paths that other Pikmin can't, they can completely bypass a lot of the puzzles in game. A notable example is the second part to the scale area in the Garden of Hope. If you have Winged Pikmin with you, you won't even have to touch it to get the fruit at the end. The only thing stopping them from becoming full-blown Game Breakers like with the Purple Pikmin and Bulbmin before them is that they both have the worst attack stat of the Pikmin family (A measly .75 ATK stat) and they aren't immune to any known elemental hazard.
• Token Flyer: Winged Pikmin can fly as opposed to their land-based brethren. Although they are not as strong in combat as other species of Pikmin, excluding fighting airborne enemies, they are extremely useful for solving and most often bypassing puzzles throughout the game as they can carry objects in the air without having to worry about most obstacles and enemies.
• Utility Party Member: If you need something transported and it's not underwater, Winged Pikmin can get it back to base quickly and efficiently.
• Worker Unit: Similarly to White Pikmin, they can indeed fight but are rather weak and deal low damage, making them more optimal for worker tasks like carrying or building things other than fighting enemies minus the occasional flying ones.

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Introduced in Pikmin 4

Ice Pikmin

Pikminidae habiglacius

A type of parasitic Pikmin encased in ice. They are weaker than other Pikmin and are extremely vulnerable to fire, but are resistant to ice attacks and cannot be frozen, can float in and freeze bodies of water like ice cubes, and freeze enemies solid either by attacking or getting eaten by them.

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• Bilingual Bonus: Like with the Rock Pikmin, their scientific name "habiglacius" translates roughly to "ice dweller", and they're a parasitic Pikmin species that uses ice as a host.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: They're plant creatures made out of living ice. Their body composition is mostly water resembling a saline solution, with trace amounts of sodium, potassium, and calcium ions that function as neural transmitters, and it's all piloted by the Pikmin's root system.
• Blue Means Cold: Their icy bodies are cyan or light blue in color.
• Breaking Old Trends: While of the same general shape and size as the Purple and Rock Pikmin, they ignore some of their predecessors traits; Ice Pikmin can stick onto enemies and do pitiable damage at that, with a freezing effect to make up for their low damage rate, making them a support that can hold an enemy still for others to attack safely as opposed to Purples and Rocks being constantly thrown at enemies for heavy damage.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Cyan, reflecting their frozen qualities. Collin calls their Onion "light blue."
• Forgot About His Powers: If an Ice Pikmin gets knocked into a body of water, it will start drowning until you whistle at them and they realize they can just float.
• Harmless Freezing: Their freezing power behaves like petrification in 2. Unless the enemy is standing in a body of water being frozen over by Ice Pikmin, in which case the freezing is permanent, they can break out after a while without suffering any damage that doesn't involve Pikmin whacking at them while vulnerable... but defeat them in this state, and they're destroyed completely, leaving nothing behind except nectar.
• An Ice Person: They are Pikmin made out of ice and are capable of freezing both enemies and pools of water. The Pikmin 4 Piklopedia mentions that the reason they don't melt in warmer climates is because their cores are constantly generating ice and that similarly to the Rock Pikmin and Bulbmin, they're parasitic Pikmin that have combined with a host, in this case ice.
• Logical Weakness: Played straight with fire hazards where they will burn much more faster than other types, being made of ice and all. Downplayed with the other hazards, like electricity or (when they aren't actively swimming in it) water, which they will also die much faster to than the other types. At a glance, it doesn't entirely make sense, but considering how ice in real life can be a rather fragile substance that can easily break in many ways, an icy creature (a tiny and frail one at that) being very sensitive to many different non-ice hazards doesn't seem too off at the very least.
• Mundane Utility: Louie's notes has him state they're useful as an ice substitute for storing ingredients and leftovers.
• No-Sell: They're immune to ice attacks and cannot be frozen. This also makes them the only species of Pikmin capable of surviving in cold environments without any help from the captain or Oatchi.
• Puppeteer Parasite: Like Rock Pikmin, they're actually a parasitic species called Hermikmin that use ice as their choice of host.
• Required Secondary Powers: While not outright said, it can be inferred that like Rock Pikmin their respective Onions and Candypop Buds store ice within them for the Pikmin to use as hosts.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Being made of ice allows them to leisurely float on the water, letting them swim and follow your captains through aquatic bodies without problem. If something knocks them into the water, however, they'll start to panic and drown like any other Pikmin, and they are not immune to water from other sources, such as Watery Blowhogs, likely due to lacking the Blue Pikmin's gills to actually breathe in it.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Ice Pikmin are an excellent choice for dealing with flying enemies, as enemies that are frozen in mid-air will fall down and break apart instantly, regardless of how much health they had before. They also make enemies dwelling in water bodies a joke, as they will be permanently frozen in place unless the Ice Pikmin freezing said water are removed.
• Taking You with Me: Similarly to White Pikmin, enemies eating Ice Pikmin will backfire on them, in this case by being frozen over in a manner akin to the Ultra-Bitter Spray in Pikmin 2.
• Utility Party Member: Their ability to freeze both enemies and bodies of water solid, while an extremely powerful and useful powers to have, is hampered by their pitiful attack strength.

Glow Pikmin

Pikminidae supravelum

The elusive nocturnal Pikmin that lives in basal Lumiknoll nests instead of Onions. They are spectral-esque Pikmin that can only be accessed at night or in caves.

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• Achilles' Heel: They're completely unaffected by any elemental hazards, but will still be gone if eaten, crushed, or if they touch the Smoky Progg's fog.
• Ambiguously Related: The Piklopedia expresses doubts as to whether they are actually Pikmin. They have all of the same characterstics as regular Pikmin (loyalty to leaders, working on tasks, growing from leaf to bud to flower, converting to other Pikmin when thrown into a Candypop Bud), but they don't grow from Onions, and they're by all accounts not living creatures. The Lumiknolls they come from appear where Onions used to land, and another set of notes says they smell like them, but there are no exact answers as to what they truly are.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Bioluminescent light lime green. Can glow in the dark.
• Combination Attack: Glow Pikmin can merge into a glowing ball called a Glowmob that can be rolled at enemies to attack them while attaching the component Pikmin.
• Energy Beings: They're theorized to be something akin to this, with their "death" involving them becoming a form of light- or photons as suggested by Olimar- and then reconstituting themselves at the Lumiknoll.
• Fog Feet: Instead of legs, they have tails and float a short distance above the ground. This adds on to their ghost-like image.
• Infinity +1 Element: Like their precursors, the Bulbmin, they have an immunity to all hazards, with the new ability to teleport to their captain when they finish their tasks, which no other Pikmin can do. This is tempered by the fact that they're only usable in caves and require consummable seeds to summon.
• MacGuffin Guardian: Their Lumiknolls are the main objective of night excursions; the Glow Sap they produce holds degradative enzymes that are the key to curing Leaflings.
• Mad Eye: Their design has two dark blue eyes, one small, and one large with a cyan pupil. Though as a subversion, they aren't any less benevolent and friendly than other regular Pikmin.
• Master of All: They are oblivious to all environmental factors, limited mostly because they're nocturnal.
• Nocturnal Mooks: Are only found at night and inside caves, where natural light doesn't reach. When day breaks, they revert into Glow Seeds for the player to summon them later.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Unlike all other Pikmin, their flowers have pointed petals rather than the normal rounded ones.
• No-Sell: Just like the Bulbmin from 2, Glow Pikmin are immune to all kinds of hazards. In-universe it's also stated that they do not conventionally die, at least if we consider them to be "alive". While you still lose them for the purpose of commanding them if they are "killed", rather than release a soul, they do not count towards your Pikmin death toll if lost.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: They're essentially ghost Pikmin in everything but name. They're shown phasing through the walls of their nest in their introduction, they can teleport, and only appear at night or underground. The Piklopedia more or less states that these are bonafide ghosts, as they're not alive in any sense of the word and can't be killed by most of the wildlife.
• Purposefully Overpowered: They're immune to all hazards and can teleport back to you once their tasks are done. It's all necessary for them, as they're the only Pikmin available in Night Expeditions to use against the frenzied nocturnal wildlife, and temporarily summonable in caves through Glow Seeds.
• Summoning Artifact: After dawn breaks, your Glow Pikmin will change into Glow Seeds that can be used to bring them into caves.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Of the Bulbmin from 2, being a unique Pikmin type immune to all hazards that can only be used in caves (or in this case, night expeditions). Both are also associated with green^note Green is the color that an idle Bulbmin's stem glows and the color used to represent Bulbmin on the map, but this is more blatant with Glow Pikmin.
• Sweet Tooth: They only propagate via glow pellets, which are very similar to konpeito candy. Even if they kill an enemy during a night expedition, they cannot use the corpse to propagate because it disintegrates, sometimes leaving glow pellets behind.
• Teleportation: The main skill in their repertoire that makes them so useful. When a Glow Pikmin is finished with a task, it'll teleport back to your currently active captain. Swapping between the Rookie and Oatchi will even have the available squad teleport over to them, an incredibly useful ability for completing multiple tasks, or protecting the Lumiknolls from different sides.
• Undead Counterpart: A rare benevolent example. They're ghost-like Pikmin that only appear at night and can turn themselves into a huge homing projectile to deal damage that scales with the amount of Glow Pikmin, but are just as helpful to the captain as most other Pikmin. In fact, they may indeed be actual ghosts, as they can't be killed under normal circumstances (though you still can't use them if they "die".)

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The Candypop Family

Onions

The Main Onion (Pikmin 4 design)

^{Click here to see the Pikmin 3 design}

^{Click here to see the Pikmin and Pikmin 2 design}

A strange member of the Pikmin family that serves as a hive of sorts. The Onions are what create Pikmin in the first place, by absorbing pellets or enemy bodies brought back to them. In Pikmin and Pikmin 2, each color of Pikmin has a separate Onion, while starting from 3, the Onions start out separate but merge together into one "master" Onion each time you discover a new variety.

According to Pikmin 4's Piklopedia, Flarlics are also a type of Onion, and they both belong to the Candypop family.

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• Art Evolution: The Onion's have gone through some drastic redesigns in the later installments of the series:
  • The first two games had them appear as bulblike flying saucers with flower propellors and stilt legs, their midsections decorated with a black triangle pattern, making them look vaguely like decorated flower pots.
  • Pikmin 3 gave them a drastic redesign. The Onions have had their main bodies shrunk to the point of resembling berries (though a fully upgraded Master Onion resembles its old design), and their stilt legs have been replaced with leaf-like tendrils that retreat into the onion itself for lift-off. The combined Master Onion swirls with the color of each Pikmin type currently available, and it has an overall more bio-mechanical look to it compared to its old design.
  • Pikmin 4 redesigns them again, this time into something of an in-between of the previous two versions. The main bodies of the Onions resemble organic versions of their designs from the first two games, retaining the basic shape but looking closer to real-world plant bulbs rather than bulb-shaped spaceships. The legs, meanwhile, retain the retracting leaf tentacle designs from 3. They appear to still be able to combine together, but the colors no longer swirl around, rather being evenly divided around the Onion's body like cloves of garlic.
• The Artifact: They're still called Onions in Pikmin 3 despite now resembling berries.
• The Assimilator: The Piklopedia entry for Onions in Pikmin 4 mentions that Onions contain the natural ability to take on the aspects of any lifeform they absorb, including other Onions, which is why the Master Onion can create Pikmin of any known type.
• Big Eater: You can feed Onions a lot of things in the course of a day to no ill effect, regardless of size or shape. The Sandbelching Meerslug utterly dwarfs an Onion in size, but it'll still be eaten like anything else, with still enough space for more.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Onions are not the same species as Pikmin^note instead of the Pikmin Genus, they are in the Candypop Genus, despite acting as a nest to them. They make more Pikmin by absorbing nutrients, whether they be from other plants or dead animals, but some of the nutrients are instead used as fuel to fly, with the flower on top serving as a stabilizer. They also have other odd traits such as:
  • They seem to have some degree of sentience, as they follow the various captains' ships around, and are durable enough to follow spaceships into low planetary orbit without harm.
  • When absorbing animals they can copy their traits allowing new Pikmin to gain those traits, but can also do this with other Onions, or Onions of the same types. When they absorb different types of Onions they merge into a single Onion, allowing multiple types of Pikmin to be propagated in the same place, but with Onions of a type they already contain, they're instead cannibalized and converted into nutrients and fuel. The Rock and Ice Onions also stockpile ice and rocks for their types of Pikmin, the Hermikmin to inhabit when created.
  • Despite their plant appearance, their legs contain muscle fibres, but they're unable to walk. Instead, the muscle fibres serve to give them a small range of motion so that they can push themselves to move into a place where they can easily begin flying or landing when stuck.
• Cannibalism Superpower: They absorb the traits of whatever it eats in order to eventually pass it down to the Pikmin. An Onion can also gain the ability to produce other color Pikmin by being fed a different color Onion. If it's fed another one after obtaining that color, however, it'll simply cannibalize it for more Pikmin.
• Clown-Car Base:
  • Onions look far too small to hold the potentially thousands of Pikmin that they do, moreso in 3 where they can combine and hold all of a player's Pikmin in one place at once.
  • Alph muses that the swirling colors of the Master Onion might actually be the Pikmin themselves, converted into a fluid form for easier storage... which, if true, would make Onions even weirder.
  • In Pikmin 4 they absorb Farlics, making the Onion Bigger...so more Pikmin can be let out at once
• Connected All Along: The series has always left questions as to their relation with the Candypop Bud family, with their ability to produce Pikmin being shared with each other. Pikmin 4 finally reveals that Onions belong to the same family as the Candypop Buds, the Candypop family. Olimar theorizes that Candypop Buds are under- or undeveloped Onions.
• Fusion Dance: In Pikmin 3 and 4, they can fuse together into a "master" Onion that houses multiple Pikmin types.
• Hive Queen: While they don't appear intelligent enough to lead Pikmin (which is what they have you for anyway), they are the singular source of new bodies to throw at your enemies.
• Living Ship: Olimar finds some Onions buried in the ground, they grow Pikmin inside them, they're fueled by a substance similar to bioethanol created from the materials they absorb, they can fly into the edge of PNF-404's atmosphere without issue, and they do so to follow the Captain's ship without any prompting. Whatever it is, it's by all accounts alive.
• Planimal: Like Pikmin they have both plant and animal characteristics, such as muscle fibers, though they lean a bit more on the "plant" end of things.
• Power Copying: When absorbing an animal the Onions can copy some of their traits, causing the Pikmin to evolve.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Understandably in Pikmin 4, they refuse to follow the Rookie on Night Expeditions and just fly into the atmosphere for safety as usual.

Candypop Buds

Candypop Buds in General

A species of flower with a mysterious connection to the Pikmin, eventually revealed to be relatives of the Onions. Throwing a Pikmin of any color in it will turn the Pikmin into another Pikmin corresponding to the Candypop Bud's color. The flower dies after converting a certain number of Pikmin.

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• Ambiguously Related: Their exact relationship with the Pikmin is a mystery. They have the same ability as the Onions to produce Pikmin of specific colors (though these need to be fed Pikmin first), and they have muscle fibers similar to them, leading Olimar to theorize they may be underdeveloped Onions. Nothing is concrete, however.
• Art Evolution: Like the Onions, they too got a design change in Pikmin 3. Their petals now open in a more funnel shape with white bulbs at the tips, and there's a disk shaped cup in the center of the flower where the Pikmin get thrown in.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Their color — or in the case of the Queen Candypop Buds, the current color of their spots — determines what kind of Pikmin you'll get out of them.
• Dub Name Change:
  • The French translations call them Spitting Flowers (Fleur cracheuse).
  • The Spanish translations call them Bouncer Sprouts (Brotes rebotadores).
  • The Italian translation calls them Cromanvilleas (a portmanteau of "chroma" and "Bougainvillea").
  • The German translation call them Queen Flowers (Königinblumen).
• Nerf: From the second game onwards, all Candypop Buds can only convert five Pikmin instead of the first game's fifty. This was likely done to avoid stocking up on well over 100 Purple and White Pikmin in little time, since they are intended to be rarer.
• Fantastic Flora: They're giant flowers that can convert Pikmin into other colors. According to their combined Piklopedia entry in Pikmin 4, they're carnivorous plants that lure in insects into their mouths before eating them, and then spit out Pikmin.
• Planimal: There are notes that they contain muscle fibers, implying that they're planimals that lean further towards the plant side. Pikmin 3 onward has the Candypop Buds open and close in the presence of a captain, which lends credence to the fact.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Taken literally with the "too spicy" part, which according to Louie is present in every color bud making them unfit for salads.

Lapis Lazuli Candypop Bud

Flora colbaltium

Appears In: Pikmin, Pikmin 2, Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4

Throwing in Pikmin of any color will convert those Pikmin into Blue Pikmin. If you're lacking the Blues needed to navigate water hazards, these can be a lifesaver.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Blue, like the Pikmin they produce.

Crimson Candypop Bud

Flora rufusia

Appears In: Pikmin, Pikmin 2, Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4

If you lack Red Pikmin, these are the flowers for you. Like all Candypop Buds, they'll convert one Pikmin type into another.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Red, like the Pikmin they produce.
• Fire-Breathing Diner: According to Louie's cooking notes, these flowers will burst into flames on contact with the tongue.
  Keep fire-retardant condiments within arm's reach!

Golden Candypop Bud

Flora aurumia

Appears In: Pikmin, Pikmin 2, Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4

Although the name makes it sound more important than other Candypop Buds, these are just the Yellow Pikmin's answer to the previous two Candypop Buds.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Yellow, like the Pikmin they produce.
• Masochist's Meal: Their juices can erode holes in frying pans.
  Louie's Notes: Eating it would be unwise.
• Unique Enemy: While not technically an enemy, there is only one Golden Candypop bud in the entirety of Pikmin 2, located on a single floor in the Glutton's Kitchen.

Violet Candypop Bud

Flora puniceus

Appears In: Pikmin 2, Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4

These rare flowers are the only way to acquire Purple Pikmin, so you should always try to use them when you see them (at least until you hit 100 Purple Pikmin). They can first be found in Emergence Cave but show up in several other caverns.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Purple, like the Pikmin they produce.
• Purple Is the New Black: Their color in Pikmin 2 is a very dusty, dark purple, to go along with the Purple Pikmin originally being called Black Pikmin. It becomes much more purply purple in later games.

Ivory Candypop Bud

Flora niveus

Appears In: Pikmin 2, Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4

Like the Violet Candypop Bud, these flowers are quite important. As your only source of White Pikmin, you'll not want to pass these up. First found, fittingly, in the White Flower Garden.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Technically, a lack of color. Or an abundance of all colors, depending on how you look at it. They're white.

Queen Candypop Bud

Queen Candypop Flower displaying red dots

Flora regina

Appears In: Pikmin 2

This Candypop Bud is unique compared to the other five. It will cycle between red, blue, and yellow, and can only accept one Pikmin before wilting. However, it will produce up to nine Pikmin of the color it was when it took in the Pikmin, allowing you to multiply your troops up.

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• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The only Candypop Bud to not make a return in Pikmin 3. Given how Pikmin 3 removed caves, so that Onions are always accessible, their purpose in increasing the field Pikmin count was made a bit redundant.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Their spots flicker between the primary colors. The colors of these spots at the time a Pikmin is thrown in them determines the color of the Pikmin produced.
• Dub Name Change: A mild example. Since "Queen Flower" (Königinblumen) is the German name for the Candypop family in general, the Queen kind specifically is called the Empress Flower (Kaiserinblume)
• The Food Poisoning Incident: As the fruit of his culinary exploration of this plant, Louie states that eating it will lead to "spectacular, breathtaking indigestion".

Slate Candypop Bud

Scientific Name Unknown

Appears In: Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4

As Pikmin 3 introduced two new Pikmin types, it also introduced two new Candypop Buds for conversion into those new Pikmin. These dark gray flowers produce Rock Pikmin.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Gray, like the Rock Pikmin.
• No Name Given: They're simply labeled as "Candypop Bud" in-game like the other varieties, and their full name is only given in the Japanese guidebook.

Alizarin Candypop Bud

Scientific Name Unknown

Appears In: Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4

As Pikmin 3 introduced two new Pikmin types, it also introduced two new Candypop Buds for conversion into those new Pikmin. These pink flowers produce Winged Pikmin.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Pink, like the Winged Pikmin.
• No Name Given: They're simply labeled as "Candypop Bud" in-game like the other varieties, and their full name is only given in the Japanese guidebook.

Ice Candypop Bud

Scientific Name Unknown

Appears In: Pikmin 4

With the introduction of Ice Pikmin in Pikmin 4, a new Candypop Bud was introduced to accommodate.

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• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: A lighter shade of blue to differentiate it from the navy Lapis Lazuli Candypop Bud.

Flarlic

Bulbus lillium

Appears in: Pikmin 4

What appears to be a head of garlic with an Onion's flower propellor on top. While technically an Onion, it doesn't store or produce Pikmin. Instead, its highly invigorating effects are used to expand the limit of Pikmin you're allowed to field.

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• Planimal: Like the rest of the Candypop Family, the Flarlic possesses muscle fibres, but very much leans heavily towards the plant side of things compared to the Onions. According to Olimar's Notes, putting a Flarlic near an Onion will cause the Flarlic to start twitching, like it's trying to get inside the Onion.
• Power-Up Food: It contains strong energizing and analeptic effects that allow the Onion to deploy more Pikmin onto the field. The Onion visibly grows larger when it absorbs one.

Other

Undiscovered Pikmin

In the best ending of the first game, several Onions of multiple colors are shown flying up towards space. These seem to correspond to new types of Pikmin, but they have yet to be introduced and this hasn't been brought up in either of the sequels. There is one green, one orange, one blue-purple, one brown, two shades of cyan, three shades of black, and five shades ranging from purple to pink.

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• Dark Is Not Evil: The three black types seem to be just as friendly/interested in Olimar as the others.
• Last Episode, New Character: They, or at least their Onions, only appear at the ending of the first game.
• Sequel Hook: In short, this scene tells you that there are more than the red, yellow, and blue types you find in the game. Indeed, some of the colors shown in the scene would end up corresponding with actual Pikmin types introduced in subsequent installments, with almost all of them receiving Onions of their own by the time 4 came around.
• Walking Spoiler: Gives away a mild twist at the end of the first game.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: While the various Pikmin types introduced in subsequent installments correspond to at least some of the Onions seen in the best ending of the first game, the relationship between them is never fully elaborated upon even after the introduction of white, purple, black, pink, and cyan Onions (which themselves corresponded with redesigns for Onions as a whole). Additionally, many of the colors seen with the undiscovered Pikmin in the first game are still not accounted for, and once Green Pikmin were finally introduced with the Glow Pikmin in 4, they were established as the products of Lumiknolls rather than Onions.

Lumiknolls

Collux aeternium

Ant-hill like dirt mounds that produce and house the Glow Pikmin. They only appear at night, where the local predators find themselves attracted to its glow. Successfully protecting them will reward you with a glob of Glow Sap.

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• Challenge Seeker: When question arises why the Lumiknolls glow anyway since all it seems to do is attract predators, Olimar theorizes that the Lumiknoll must be doing it on purpose, as if it's seeking a challenge to evolve itself further and not stagnate.
• Decoy Convoy: An immobile example, Tricknolls are extensions of the Lumiknolls that exist to draw creatures away from the main Lumiknoll. They can still be fed Glow Pellets to produce Glow Pikmin, something which Yonny theorizes is because they are connected to the main Lumiknoll via underground tunnels.
• Protection Mission: Night Expeditions behave this way, requiring you to protect the Lumiknoll from the wildlife as they come over to destroy it. Tricknolls can be used to draw attention away from the Lumiknoll, and the mission is completed if it survives until morning, or if all enemies are defeated.

Leaflings

Castaways that have been fed to an Onion undergo an unusual transformation. Rather than being turned into more Pikmin, they are granted the species' trademark stems, and a face full of leaves, a form the Rescue Corps has come to dub as "Leaflings".

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• Ambiguous Gender: Being transformed in to a Leafling obscures a person's identity, including their gender. The Rescue Corps refer to Leaflings with neutral pronouns until they are cured as a result.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The first game's Bad Ending had Olimar be fed to an Onion by the Pikmin, transforming him into a Pikmin hybrid. This fate plays an important role in the main campaign of Pikmin 4, doubly so since Olimar wound up becoming the Red Leafling.
  • Their I.D.'s will note them to originate from PNF-404, the name the Koppai Crew gave to the Pikmin planet.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The Red Leafling is set to be the closest thing Pikmin 4 has to an antagonist. Once he is defeated for the fourth and final time, rescued, cured, and identified as Olimar, it turns out the game is only halfway done. The second half deals with curing Oatchi and stopping Louie.
• Emergency Transformation: Collin notes that Leaflings don't seem to need their helmets in order to survive PNF-404's oxygen rich atmosphere, and it's implied that the castaways were turned into Leaflings specifically so that they could survive on the planet's surface without the need of equipment.
• Forced Transformation: The demo shows one Castaway being sucked into an Onion to be transformed into a Leafling by the red Leafling. The transformation prevents them from being identified, and it's an objective to discover how to reverse this.
• Only Sane Man: The Red Leafling and the Sage Leaf are the only ones that do not have a one-track mind obsession with Dandori, instead having a goal of converting castaways to Leaflings so that they can survive on PNF-404 or wanting to train the player respectively. Both speak more coherently than them as well. The other Leaflings just spend all their time in their caves playing around with Pikmin and fake treasure while constantly babbling about Dandori.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Leafling transformation is a problem that the Rescue Corps were completely unprepared to deal with. Not only are they impossible to identify just by looking, but their personalities are muted and the transformation is so thorough that even DNA scans can't figure out who they are.
• Plant Person: They're half-explorer, half-Pikmin hybrids.
• Recurring Boss: The Red Leafling must be defeated four times in Dandori Battles.
• Serious Business: Dandori is a matter of life and death to all Leaflings, with the conscious ones testing the Rookie's dandori skills in their respective challenges.
• Terse Talker: Leaflings... tend to speak... in short bursts... with lots of ellipsises.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • The Red Leafling explains that his motive for turning the castaways into Leaflings is to help them survive on PNF-404, as well as learning the art of dandori. He'll compliment the player if they manage to best him in a Dandori Battle.
  • On a different note, Olimar theorizes that the Pikmin-ification process that transforms other creatures into Leaflings is done by the Pikmin for the purpose of securing a permanent leader for themselves. Given how often Pikmin struggle without one, you could forgive them for deciding to do this to Olimar, even if it was mainly done to save his life. Of course it's only a theory.

Sage Leaf

An ancient Leafling who hosts a series of trials unlocked after clearing Olimar's Shipwreck Tale.

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• The Ace: Being on PNF-404 longer than any other known character in the game, he has mastered Pikmin management. He offers ten of the hardest challenges in the entire game, and it is implied by his tips that he would have zero trouble if he was doing them himself.
• Cool Old Guy: He's been on PNF-404 for far longer than Olimar and quickly takes the Rookie on as an apprentice.
• I Choose to Stay: After the rookie completes all 10 of his trials, the rescue crew offers to cure him and take him with them when they leave PNF-404, but he staunchly refuses.
• Inexplicably Awesome: His origins and history on PNF-404 are a complete mystery. All that is known about him is that he is very skilled at dandori, made the Brutal Bonus Level his home and training ground, and that he discovered the Purple and White Onions when nobody else was sure if they even existed.
• Mysterious Past: Who he was and where he came from before becoming a Leafling is never revealed due to his refusal to be restored to normal by the Rescue Corps.
• Old Master: He's a master in the art of dandori and will test the player's skills with his 10-story Dandori Challenge.

Moss

Folicanis amicaris

Appears In: Pikmin 4

A green pup with a leaf tail native to PNF-404. Just as the player has Oatchi, Olimar has Moss. Or rather, had, before he went missing. She can be encountered as the enemy's Rescue Pup in Dandori Battles and wandering around Hero's Hideaway before rescuing a specific castaway.

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• Anti-Villain: She's just following her master's orders and helping them transform castaways into Leaflings to save their lives. Otherwise, she's a friendly pup who doesn't intend to cause harm. Even as a Mini-Boss in the Hero's Hideaway, she simply steals your Pikmin from you rather than actually attacking you.
• Armless Biped: Like Oatchi she's an alien dog with only two legs for limbs, implying that they're the same or of similar species, despite being born on two separate planets. The Ancient Sirehound's similarities to the two pups gives strong evidence towards this implication.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: In the Pikmin 4 prologue cutscene, Olimar came across a hungry and tired Moss, giving her a snack and earning her loyalty and cooperation in finding his ship parts.
• Big Friendly Dog: Despite her appearance and role in assisting the antagonists, Moss is ultimately just a very loving and loyal dog who wants to help the people who showed her kindness.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: She is a unique encounter and has the same or similar abilities to the player characters. Still, the game doesn't treat her as a boss, more like a recurring obstacle. Nonetheless, she poses a specific threat that no other enemy in the game offers.
• Canine Companion: She is Olimar's companion compared to the Rescue Corps' Oatchi.
• The Dragon: In the second half of the game, she switches from being Olimar's companion to Louie's, supporting his antagonistic motives. But once Louie runs off for the Ancient Sirehound, she returns to Olimar's side and is aligned with the Rescue Corps for good.
• Face of a Thug: Despite her constant squinty-eyed expression and larger size, Moss is a friendly loyal dog that does what she is told without question, even following and obeying a clearly antagonistic Louie for the second half of the game.
• Heel–Face Turn: Her heel nature is downplayed, but a cured Olimar is able to get through to her after beating Louie's second Dandori Battle and convince her to help the Rescue Corps.
• The Leader: Heavily implied to have become the Pikmin's new "captain" in the ending, as she's seen whistling and leading the Pikmin away after watching the Rescue Crew and Olimar leave.
• Meaningful Name: Moss is a type of plant that is fuzzy and green, just like Moss the dog.
• Mini-Boss: Moss is a constant entity in all Dandori Battles as the opposing dog, but she becomes a persistent solo element in Hero's Hideaway until you open the safe. She'll try to call Pikmin away from any tasks until you incapacitate her, which keeps her out of the Rookie's hair for about half a day.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Even as Olimar becomes a Leafling due to his failed life-support system, Moss continues to obediently follow his commands, as seen in Dandori battles against the Rookie and Oatchi. She also follows Louie and aids him in Dandori battles in the second half of the game despite his clearly malicious intentions coming in conflict with her former master. When Louie abandons her, Olimar directs her to the Command Post.
• Planimal: She has a leaf on her tail, signifying that she has been leafified, making her physically similar to the Pikmin. Unlike Oatchi, her condition isn't curable due to being a native of PNF-404.
• Reviving Enemy: She can't be killed or defeated permanently, only incapacitated. Her HP will recover over time if she's downed, not unlike a Bulbear from the second game, though it takes Moss significantly longer to recover (about half a day at the soonest). Collin will warn you of when she gets back up, so you can plan accordingly.
• The Rival: She serves as the second player's Rescue Pup during the story-mode Dandori Battles.
• Superpowered Mooks: As she has capabilities similar to Oatchi's, facing her in Hero's Hideaway is like facing a pseudo-Captain. She will use her whistle to steal both active and idle Pikmin, which can't be recovered until she takes significant damage.
• Swallowed Whole: She can swallow objects several times her size and carry them back to base. She gains this ability as her final buff upgrade in Olimar's Shipwrek Tale, and Olimar later passes it down to Oatchi for him to use.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Olimar first befriends her after feeding her a Scrummy Bone.
• Undying Loyalty: Moss will do anything for Olimar, so much that she snuck aboard the Dolphin as he was leaving and forced him to crash-land. She still follows his instructions after his Emergency Transformation into a Leafling, and after Louie abandons her, she immediately perks up when she hears Olimar's voice over the Rookie's comms and runs back to his side. She stays with him in the Rescue Base for the rest of the game, just happy to be with her best friend again.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In the good ending of Olimar's Shipwreck Tale, Moss sneaks aboard the fully repaired S.S. Dolphin as Olimar takes off and leaves behind PNF-404. But due to the physiology of her leaf tail, she cannot survive outside PNF-404's atmosphere, forcing Olimar to turn around and return to the planet to save her life at the cost of his failing life support, resulting in his Leafling transformation either way and necessitating intervention from the Rescue Corps.

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