Chocobo Breeding Without Racing

[Lex]

I hesitated to post this in case I lost some of my VII knowledge-cred or whatever, but I had no idea you could do this (and will absolutely be trying it on my next playthrough) XD.

You basically save as close to the ranch as possible before going in to manipulate RNG into getting the chocobos you want, someone posted this on Steam.

I knew that racing only increased the chance of you getting a special chocobo from breeding, I just had no idea you could manipulate RNG this way.

Here is the guide, which I found while peering at Steam's community hub for FFVII.

And here is the beef of the actual thing (after catching a great and wonderful and getting the nuts and required greens):

Breeding, RNG, and You
With the Nuts, Greens, and Chocobos handy, fly back to the Chocobo Farm and follow these instructions exactly!

1) Get as close as you can to it and save your game.

2) Next, HARD RESET your game. For PS1/PS2, simply press the reset button. For PS Vita, press and hold the screen and choose reset. For PC, press ALT+F4.

3) Now load the game and run into the Chocobo Farm as fast as you can.

4) Talk to Choco Billy and select Moving Chocobos. Select the GREAT one FIRST.
If you have followed this guide exactly, the chocobo will be Female.

5) Next, put the Wonderful Chocobo in a stable. It should be a male.
(NOTE: If you did not get a Great Female and a Wonderful Male, reset your game and run into the farm faster.)

6) Next, save your game and hard reset again.

7) Run into the Stable again as fast as you can. Talk to Choco Billy and feed ONE Krakka Green to ANY chocobo.

8) Now mate the Great Female with the Wonderful Male. Choose the female first and use a Carob Nut. As a result, you should end up with a Blue Female!

9) Exit the farm and fight 6 random battles.

10) Save as close to the farm as you can and hard reset once again.

11) Get inside as fast as possible and talk to Choco Billy.

12) Feed 50 Krakka Greens to ANY chocobo.

13) Mate Great Female and Wonderful Male again, choosing the female first. Choose your remaining Carob Nut. Following this guide, you should end up with a Green Male.

14) Exit the farm and fight 8 random battles.

15) Save as close to the farm as you can and hard reset yet again.

16) Once again, get into the farm as fast as you can.

17) Feed 5 Krakka Greens to ANY chocobo.

18) Mate the Blue Female with the Green Male. Choose the Blue one first. Use a Saraha Nut.
Following this guide, you should end up with a Black Female.

19) Exit the farm and fight 3 random battles.
(NOTE: If the Black Female isnt ready to mate after 3 random battles, go out and fight 4 additional random battles.)

20) Save as close to the farm as you can and hard reset one more time.

21) Run inside as fast as you can yet again.

22) Feed 6 Krakka Greens to ANY chocobo.

23) Mate the Black Female with the Wonderful Male. Choose the Black one first. Use the Zeio Nut.
Following this guide, you shoudl end up with a Female Gold chocobo!

What I find attractive about this is that you can do it as soon as you have control of Tifa on Disc 2, before the Gold Saucer reopens.

 

[ultima espio]

This was discovered a few years ago, I thought it was a common thing :p

You can also breeze through it if you fought a stupid amount of battles, something like 300000.

 

[Flintlock]

I didn't know about this. Though to be honest, I've never completely trusted the information I've seen on Chocobo breeding, because no two sources seem to agree on how much racing was required. For instance, looking only at the very first part of the breeding process, the first result on Google says to raise the good/great Chocobos to B-class, while the second result says that they need just four wins between them. I'm more inclined to believe the second, but you get the idea.

 

[Lex]

I've always raced every chocobo to S. Blame the American guide. Fucking Bradygames.

 

[Ite]

My first playthrough, I didn't have a guide or any FF fans irl. So, I wrote down everything the Chocobo Sage said and raised my chocobos without racing them at all. I guess I was crazy lucky.

Now I race them because I actually really like the process of breeding and raising birds. More than KotR! (not more than Quadra Magic or Mime)

 

[ForceStealer]

I usually raise them to S unless I'm particularly lazy about one. I mean, it doesn't actually take very long. Especially if you've roided the thing up on Sylkis Greens first.

That's not to say I didn't find this interesting however, thanks

 

[ultima espio]

The exact number of battles to breed quickly is 32767. You'd had to have done some serious level grinding to achieve that many battles.

 

[Lex]

When the PS4 version releases I'm definitely doing the "quick" method as soon as I get Tifa, I'm looking forward to it since it's something I've never done in the game before.

 

[Shinra'sMostWanted]

I thought I recall seeing this method like back in 1999. However, this was also before youtube and shit so I would spend hours reading and searching every possible final fantasy site on the internet lol. Grips of geocities and homestead urls found by msn searches. Oh those where the days. This icon right here is old as the internet

 

[ForceStealer]

I have that icon, lol. And I have indeed had it forever.

 

[Lex]

I used this method on my PS4 playthrough btw, it took about 20 mins (and I got really lucky with the great and wonderful chocos, which is crazy).

 

[DynamixDJ]

I've been spending a helluva lot of time looking into the mechanics of Chocobo breeding, namely RNG manipulation, and I've been mapping out all 256 possibilities for all variations of Chocobos, to try to get the 'best' possible Chocobo in the shortest way possible.

I too have a method similar to the one above, however there are a few... advancements... shall we say:

- 1.) Catch 2 Great Chocobos, and a third Chocobo of any type (I called it 'FeedMe').

- 2.) Move FeedMe into the stables.

- 3.) Save the game outside the ranch and perform a hard reset (CLOSE THE APPLICATION COMPLETELY, or PS1 - reset the console). Now run into the stables without hanging around in the pen screen.

- 4.) Feed FeedMe 14 Krakka Greens. Now move one of the Great Chocobos over. It will be a Female. Feed it 11 Sylkis Greens. Now release FeedMe.

- 5.) Save the game outside the ranch and perform a hard reset. Now run into the stables without hanging around in the pen screen.

- 6.) Feed the Great Female 17 Krakka Greens. Now move the last Great Chocobo over. It will be a Male. Feed it 11 Sylkis Greens.

Now head over to the Chocobo Square. The Male should 107KPH and 363 Stamina. The female should have 88KPH and 486 Stamina. The Stamina figure may be 1 or 2 out due to the way in which the Sylkis Greens work. You now have the Chocobo with the highest MDash, and another with the highest Stamina possible (over 50 of the 256 possible outcomes).

You now have the option to race you Chocobos or not. If you do wish to, you'll need a minimum of 4 wins between them both to be able to qualify for a special Chocobo.

- 7.) Save the game outside the ranch and perform a hard reset. Now run into the stables without hanging around in the pen screen.

- 8.) Feed either Chocobo [65 Krakka Greens if you have raced], or [62 Krakka Greens if you haven't raced]. Now breed the Greats together,

The breed, gender, or stat boost isn't affected by which Chocobo you select first (for 1st and 2nd generation breeding, it does with 3rd), however the amount of battles required before breeding can continue is sometimes affected.

- 9.) The Chocobo you receive in both instances (races or no races) will be a Green Female. Talk to Chloe, you'll see that the newborn has received a boost to MDash, MRun and Stamina. Fight 8 battles.

- 10.) Save the game outside the ranch and perform a hard reset. Now run into the stables without hanging around in the pen screen.

- 11.) Feed either Chocobo [115 Krakka Greens if you have raced], or [113 Krakka Greens if you haven't raced, selecting the male first]. Now breed the Greats together,

- 12.) You will now get a Blue Male, with a boost to MDash and MRun! Fight 6 battles, and the two newborns will be ready to mate!

I'm still not 100% certain on how the battle count before breeding can continue works. It may be to do with the stable no. that you are selecting as opposed to the Chocobo.

That's as far as I've got, soon I will have mapped out the Wonderful Chocobo breeding sequence, so I'll be able to swap out one of the Greats for a Wonderful, and obviously I'll finish the subsequent generation breeding.

 

[Cthulhu]

How long / many tries did that take you, and/or how well do you know the game's source code to have figured that out,

 

[Nanaki Skywalker]

The furthest I've ever gotten in Chocobo breeding without racing was getting Green or Blue. I only wanted to get that far anyway so I could get a shortcut to or from the Highwind during the Corel Huge Materia quest. I didn't exactly have the patience to travel the railroad tracks from North Corel to the Reactor.

 

[DynamixDJ]

Errrrr... Short answer - roughly 2 1/2 weeks, and at first, absolutely nothing; all testing and mapping was conducted using a legally obtained copy of the NTSC PSX version on an emulator, and by utilizing the save/load state feature (saving on the feeding screen) I was able to increment the RNG marker by 1 each time I loaded my state and fed an additional Karakka Green. To map out the 'Moving' stage, I would move a Chocobo, feed it 11 Sylkis Greens, then take it to the races to record it's stats.

How much has changed since then. My Chocobo endeavors lead me to the qhimm forums, which led to me taking an interest in the games coding. and about 4 weeks ago (23rd Dec to be precise) I started learning hex and binary, and started trying to figure out an 'unknown' address on the save map, namely 'the amount of battles required before breeding can continue'. I spent a good few hours looking at the hex editor on a save game editor (BC), and I did eventually find what I was after, amongst other things.

Then I started using a program called Cheat Engine, which allows me to view and edit the values for pretty much anything I like, I just have to find them first. I can see the field RNG value change live, I can even set it to increase by one every time I press F3 to load my state. More importantly, I can also see the raw stats of my Chocs as I 'move' and 'breed', so that I can map out all RNG sequences with minimal effort.

Then the spanner in the works came; Chocobo's Personality. Long story short, my workload has tripled, so I decided to put my 'pet' (no pun intended) project on hold for a few weeks, as I am mad keen to get my walkthrough to a state where I am happy to leave it for a long period of time, as so that I don't have it nagging me in the back of my mind. The thing is though, I am so deeply buried within Makou Reactor jizz, it's unbelievable! I'm in the process of mapping out every Bit of every Bitified Byte of every variable!. When I do pick up my Chocobo thing again, I'll have a much, much better insight into the inner mechanics of the breeding process as a whole (not to mention the game itself)!

So yeah, that just about answers your Q. One last thing, BrutalAl hasn't as yet been credited on this topic as the originator of this method, so let me be the one to say that the credit goes to .....BrutalAl!

 

[DynamixDJ]

The furthest I've ever gotten in Chocobo breeding without racing was getting Green or Blue. I only wanted to get that far anyway so I could get a shortcut to or from the Highwind during the Corel Huge Materia quest. I didn't exactly have the patience to travel the railroad tracks from North Corel to the Reactor.

Lol. I never thought to do that, it's a good idea!

After messing around with the RNG of the PSX version, I needed to be sure that the RNGLUT (RNG Look-Up-Table) was the same on the PS4 (which it is), so the very first thing I did post Highwind was breed a Gold Chocobo using BrutalAl's method (worked fine). I made sure to grab the KOTR Materia with Tifa, as so that the Trophy Screenshot would save with her in it . I called the Chocobo - RNGold.