Chao Garden: Evolved 1.4.0 · Chao Garden: Evolved

Play with somebody else

Chao Race, the Chao Arena and Chao Karate now play against another person. Chao Board and Chao Clash already did, so that is all five modes.
Two ways in, everywhere: Online, where one player opens a room and reads out a room code like K7M-P2Q for the other to type in, and Nearby, which finds people on the same Wi-Fi with no server involved at all.
Nearby finds the other device by itself. If your network will not carry that, both screens print their own address and you can type the other one in.
Nothing you win in a live match is kept — no rings, no records, no trophies, toys, chest gems or XP, in any of the modes. The results sheet says it was a friendly, so a missing prize does not read as a broken reward.
A live race is two racers with no AI. Filling the grid would bury the one rider you came for.
Neither player owns the match. Both lock in, both send what they want, and both work out the same race or fight from the pair — so the second player’s stage or course is never quietly ignored.
A Chao Race or Karate match sends nothing at all after the gun. Both devices run the same match from the same starting point, so distance costs you nothing.

Chao Race, the Arena and Karate were frame-rate dependent. A phone at 30fps and a PC at 144 played the same race differently. All three run on a fixed clock now, which is a fix for playing alone as well.
The gun waits for both players. Each device starts its own countdown when it has finished loading, so a phone that loads in two seconds used to watch the finish while a PC was still compiling shaders.
The Arena’s forced switch asks both players. A fainted chao on one side was replaced automatically, because that side used to be the computer.
You read the result from your own seat. One of the two players was being told the opposite of what happened.
The jumbotron showed the opponent’s name over your own chao’s face.
The Arena over Wi-Fi was crawling while the same fight online was smooth. Two flat waits in front of every request, neither of them in the game.
READY TO RACE did nothing on Nearby. The button was wired to the online room, which a Wi-Fi match does not have.

Four new finishes, each unlocked by finishing a mode, and none of them for sale until it is:
Rainbow — win every Chao Race course at the top tier.
Slipstream — take an S rank in a race on every Chao Board course.
Riftglass — defeat every boss in Chao Clash.
Chaos Prism — earn the other three.
Rainbow is a colour and the other three are surfaces, so a completionist wears Rainbow and Chaos Prism at once.
Earned is earned. Nothing takes one back — including trading away the chao that won it.
Rainbow is a prismatic fractal over the body rather than a stripe of colours, and it shifts as the chao turns rather than on a timer.
Rainbow cannot be bred, and it is not in the pool a blend can land on.

The four earned finishes now show on the egg, on the shelf and on your lawn. They were wired end to end and appeared on no egg anywhere.
A Rainbow egg wears the fractal rather than a flat violet shell.
The market row names the finish it is selling and previews the egg it will actually hand you.
Shiny is no longer offered on a gem. Ruby, sapphire, emerald and the rest have their own glassy finish and there is nothing for a polish to act on — the row used to arm the toggle, charge the plain price and hatch a plain gem.
Gold, silver and onyx are unchanged: they are metals, so Shiny still buffs them to a mirror.

Crystal composes with all eleven jewels. A jewel is a colour and crystal is a surface, so a ruby chao can be translucent faceted red stone, and crystal gold is smoked glass.
A mirror-polished chao reads as a mirror again. Gold, silver, onyx and plain metal had all gone flat: a floor that keeps a metal from going black in an empty room was washing out the very contrast a mirror is made of.
Animal parts take the polish too. A shiny metallic chao had a mirror-polished body and satin arms.
A jewelled chao’s animal parts were never painted at all — all eleven jewels kept the animal’s own colour.

The dragon’s antennae are their own choice. They rode along with the dragon horns, so there was no way to have one without the other. They sit in the Ears slot now. A chao already wearing dragon horns keeps them, and gains the antennae when Dragon is picked in Ears.
A longer weapon reaches further. Held weapons grew about 2.7× when the tools were authored, and Chao Clash’s hitboxes never knew — a trident and a war fan hit from exactly the same distance.
The desktop Arena’s loading screen is short again. A spectator could roll any of fifteen model packs, so a full bowl loaded very nearly all of them before the fight started. Four forms a session, re-rolled each visit, with colour still rolled per spectator.
The karate dojo’s elemental effects burn instead of flashing. They are sized in world units, and the dojo camera stands far enough back to put an ember at about one pixel.

Still temporarily unavailable while it is reworked. Nothing has been removed from your save.