Final Fantasy VII/Chocobos

On the latter half of the game (in Disc 2 and Disc 3), it's possible to rent chocobo stables, breed chocobos, and use your own chocobos in Golden Saucer Chocobo Square racing.

Successful chocobo breeding needs some preliminary steps:

• Gobs of cash. You can go to Mideel or go doing some quests. Advance plot or something. Extra loot and mastered materia is a good money source too.
• Stables. Go to the chocobo farm, rent all of the stables you can get. The people there will tell all you need to know about the technical side of chocobo breeding, too.
• Chocobo Lure materia. You can find them lying about (on Disc 1 when you first come to the farm) or you can buy them from the farm.
• Greens. You need greens to draw chocobo's attention during fight. Any greens will do.

Catching Chocobos

You can catch up to 4 chocobos while you're off the farm. Simply waltz around on chocobo tracks (with Chocobo Lure equipped) until you get a funny fight with unusual music. Use Greens on the chocobo so that it won't run away, and throw another one when it stops pecking it. Kill the monsters, and the chocobo will be yours.

There are various locations where chocobos can be caught. The most important, if you want the coveted Gold Chocobo, are

• Southeast of Gold Saucer (Good chocobos)
• Mideel (Great chocobos)
• North Continent (Wonderful chocobos)

(Todo: Add the rest of the locations too, and what monsters surround which ranks of chocobos)

Once you have caught the chocobos, hop off of it, and tell it to go to the farm.

Two important facts about catching chocobos: First, the rank of the chocobo is directly determinable from the enemies surrounding them. Secondly, the sex of the chocobos isn't determined until you move them to the stables. Therefore, for the best results, catch chocobos from the specified area, minding the monster types; head outside the farm, save the game, and then try to move the chocobo to the stables. If it's of wrong gender, reset the game, load and repeat.

Chocobo ranks and colors

(Todo: To be written...)

Racing tips

(Todo: To be written...)

Breeding a Golden Chocobo

Getting a Golden Chocobo is actually quite easy, it just involves tons of luck manipulation.

For this, you need:

• A lifetime pass to Gold Saucer. Otherwise, this is really going to get expensive. (Plus, you know you are going to be addicted to Super Dunk afterwards anyway.)
• A Great Female Chocobo.
• A Good Male Chocobo.
• A Wonderful Male Chocobo.
• Three Carob Nuts. You can steal these from Vlakondrios (the red dragon thing) south of Bone Village.
• A Zeio Nut. You can steal these from goblins of Goblin Island (or kill them, all the same...)
• Tons and tons of Sylkis Greens. Easily the most troublesome part of this mission: You can buy these from Chocobo Sage (north of Bone Village).
• Shoulderbuttons+Start+Select. Or Alt+F4, if you're in Windows. You'll need to reset often because oftentimes in breeding, you get a completely different beast than you was looking for. Don't worry, the right one will show up one day!

Sylkis Greens

Sylkis Greens are the most difficult part of the process to get right. Basically, these are used to boost your chocobo's stats. This isn't necessary, strictly, but it makes getting a gold chocobo far more likely.

Firstly, there are number of theories on what chocobos should be boosted to A-S rank. It's definitely easy to get a gold chocobo with all chocobos at A or S, but some say that only the black female and wonderful yellow male need to be A or S.

Then, the amount. Some say 40 Sylkis Greens is all you ever need (to boost up the black female and the wonderful male). A proven theory is to feed all chocobos greens in bunches of 20 greens every time they lose a long round of racing. Some say that the best way is to simply feed each of them 99 Sylkis, but that may be serious overkill, because the stats will max after about 40-60 Sylkis fed.

Sylkis Greens are sold by the Chocobo Sage on the northern continent. They cost an arm and leg to get. Many people seem to buy one, then resort to the W-Item cheat to get tons of Sylkis. I abused a lot of Mideel critters and ultimately sold a mastered All materia.

Breeding and racing

Basically, you need to take your Great Female and Good Male, feed them some Sylkis, then race them on Gold Saucer until they're class A or S.

Then, you need to decide what you are after. You need either a Green Male and a Blue Female, or a Green Female and a Blue Male. Either way, you need to breed your Great Female with the Good Male, give them a Carob Nut, and the end result is either a green or a blue chocobo. Depending on what gender this chocobo is, you should then get the other color one and of opposite gender next, again breeding your Great and Good with a Carob. They won't breed again right away, though, so meanwhile, you should again Sylkis this colored chocobo up and race it to class A or S. And when you finally get to breed the other one, again Sylkis and race.

Now, you should breed the Green and Blue chocobos with the last Carob nut and you should get a Black Female chocobo. Sylkis and race. You should also Sylkis and race your Wonderful Male chocobo.

Once you have Black Female of class A or S, and a Wonderful Male of class A or S, breed them with a Zeio nut. The end result should be a golden one (slightly darker than yellow chocobo).

You can Sylkis it too, even if it won't grow much as a result. It should be pretty easy to get to S class with it or even win in S class. But if you can't stand listening to the race music any more times, try going treasure hunting. A lot of cool materia caves wait you.