FFVII - Chocobo Breeding
This is a guide for how to breed a gold chocobo. Note that the methods outlined here are not the only way, but this is the method that I have found to be the most effective.There are five basic kinds of chocobos in the game:
· Yellow chocobos - these are the normal chocobos, the ones that you can catch in the field. These can go wherever you can walk, basically, just faster.
· Green chocobos - these can go over all sorts of terrain, including mountains.
· Blue chocobos - these can walk in shallow (light blue) water, and rivers.
· Black chocobos - these are kind of like a blue chocobo and a green chocobo combined - they can walk over mountains and in shallow water.
· Gold chocobos - can go absolutely anywhere, even walking across the deep water. You need a gold chocobo to get to Round Island, the island where the Knights of the Round materia is.
Yellow chocobos, and only yellow chocobos, can be caught in the wild. The other four kinds, you have to breed. You can only start chocobo breeding on disc 2, after you've gotten the airship.
Before you start out breeding chocobos, you need these things:
· At least 4 chocobo stables, bought from the old man inside the house on the chocobo farm for 10,000 gil apiece.
· Some greens - gyshal greens will do just fine - for catching the chocobos. How many depends on how strong your party is and how long it takes you to kill monsters.
· The Chocobo Lure materia, which you could have either bought on disc 1, or found on discs 2 and 3 near the fence in the chocobo farm.
· 3 Carob Nuts: These can be stolen from the Vladorakos monster that can be found on the grassy areas outside of Bone Village.
· 1 Zeio Nut: These can be stolen from the Goblins on Goblin Island (northeast corner of the map). Might want to get the Goblin Punch Enemy Skill while you're there.
· At least 40 Sylkis Greens. Yes, it's a lot of money. Sylkis Greens can be bought from the Chocobo Sage that lives in the mountains near Bone Village somewhere. Eventually, if you do a lot of waiting and running back and forth, the Chocobo Sage will remember exactly how to breed a gold chocobo and will tell you, but it's faster to read a guide instead of waiting for him.
· Patience.
Equip the Chocobo Lure materia if you haven't already done so, and make sure you have your Gyshal Greens in an acessable place in the menu. Now it's time to catch some chocobos.
The Blue and Green Chocobos
Blue/Green chocobos are gotten by breeding a 'good' chocobo with a 'great' chocobo. 'Great' chocobos can be found near Mideel and Rocket Town (might as well go to Mideel, more exp.) and 'good' chocobos can be found near the Gold Saucer.
Go to Mideel first. Run around on the chocobo tracks a bit, and eventually you'll encounter monsters with a chocobo (as opposed to just monsters). Do not attack the chocobo; it will run away. Instead, feed it some greens to keep it occupied while you kill the monsters. If it stops eating, feed it some more. If you don't feed it, it might run away. Once you defeat the monsters, leaving just the chocobo (provided it's still there), you have 'caught' the chocobo, and you have two options: set it free, or send it to the stables. Now, there's a trick to determining what kind of chocobo ('good', 'great', 'average', 'poor', etc) it is before sending it off to the stables, and then going back and checking. What kind of chocobo it is depends on what monsters it appears with. We want a 'great' chocobo: 'great' chocobos appear with either one or two Spirals in Mideel. So if you catch a chocobo that was with one or two spirals, send it back to the stables. If you don't, and you catch one that was with Headhunters instead, it won't be a 'great' chocobo so don't bother sending it back.
Next stop, Gold Saucer chocobo tracks. Here, you need a 'good' chocobo, which appears with 2 Spencers. For some reason, this seems to take quite a long time to do and I have literally spent hours on occasion trying to encounter one.
Now that you have a 'good' chocobo and a 'great' chocobo in the fenced area outside the chocobo farm, head back to the farm and talk to Billy to bring the chocobos into the stables. Since you have to mate them, they have to be of the opposite sex: one has to be a female, and one has to be a male. The sex of the chocobos is random, and is not determined until you bring them into the stables, so SAVE outside of the chocobo farm and in the event that they do not match up, you can just reset and try again.
Once you have the correct sexes and bring them inside, SAVE again and mate them with a Carob nut. If all goes well, you'll get either a blue or a green chocobo. Usually green if you have a great male and a good female, and usually blue if you have a great female and a good male. If you get a yellow chocobo instead of a blue or a green one, reset and try again until you get a colored one.
Once you have a colored one, release its parents, and go catch another 'good' and 'great' chocobo, except this time make sure that they are the opposite of what you had before: if your 'great' chocobo was a female the first time, make sure it's a male this time and vice versa, and same for the 'good' chocobo. Bring them back and breed them again. If you got a blue chocobo the first time, you want a green one this time; if you have a green one already, you want a blue one. Also, be aware that the blue and green chocobos have to be of opposite sexes, since you'll be breeding them together at a later point.
The Black Chocobo
Once you have a blue and a green chocobo of opposite sexes, you can try to get the black chocobo.
First, feed your blue chocobo and your green chocobo 10 Sylkis Greens each (the more you can afford to feed them, the better it is, but 10 is the bare minimum). Then, head off to the Gold Saucer, to the chocobo racing area and talk to Ester. You're going to need to race your blue and green chocobos to A class at least. The higher class they are, the easier it is to breed them into a black chocobo, so all the better if you can get them all the way to S class. Once you've gotten them both to A class, head back to the chocobo stables. You should have released the parent (yellow) chocobos already, leaving just the 2 blue and green ones. SAVE outside, then mate the blue and the green with a Carob Nut until you get a black chocobo. If it hasn't been that long since they've been born, Choco Billy might tell you that you can't mate newly born chocobos, in which case you'll have to wait around for them to mature.
The Gold Chocobo
Once you have your black chocobo, head off to the chocobo tracks in the Icicle area to catch a 'wonderful' chocobo. These are the chocobos that appear with either one or two Jumpings. Catch one, send it back to the stables, and make sure it's the opposite sex of your black chocobo.
Now feed both your black chocobo and your 'wonderful' chocobo 10 Sylkis Greens each, and then race both of them at least as high as class A again. Then come back and breed them with a Zeio Nut. If all has gone well, you should (eventually) end up with a gold chocobo. Its stats will depend on the stats of its parents and grandparents, so if you want to use it for racing, it's best to feed them as many Sylkis Greens as you can afford. If you just want it to get the Knights of the Round materia, the bare minimum will be fine.