Chao Garden: Evolved 1.5.2

The Emerald Catalyst

A third catalyst element, beside fire and ice, in the market’s animal tab.

• It costs 100,000 rings, and the shelf only opens once you have finished the game: every karate difficulty, every race course won at Super in first place, a race won on every Chao Board course, every Arena cup, every Chao Clash boss. The locked row shows all five parts and how far along each one is.
• The accent is a chaos emerald — a faceted, semi-translucent stone with a small, steady sun burning inside it, sized to match the Light Chaos Chao’s orb.
• Four Chaos arts — Chaos Spear, Chaos Control, Chaos Blast and Chaos Boost — one per B-direction in Chao Clash, each with its own look.
• Emerald chao spar with both sides. Fire, wind, light and lightning square up against water, earth, shadow and ice; an emerald chao squares up against all eight. Two emerald chao are kin and run together.

The first catalyst of each element is free. Earning an element’s achievement now pays for your first one — fire, ice or emerald — and every repeat costs the usual price. There is no record in an older save of whether a catalyst was ever bought, so every existing save is treated as having claimed nothing: if you had already earned an element, you have a free one waiting.

Board gear

• Try it on first. Every gear card in the shop has a try on button that puts that piece on your own chao in the big preview — nothing bought, nothing equipped. It works on locked pieces too, so you can see what you are working toward.
• Wear a full-face helmet as a head. Six of them — Pail Guard, Downhill Racer, Vac Bubble, Flight Cap, Deep Bell and Orbit Dome — can be worn with the chao’s head hidden, the way a mask hat is worn in the garden. One toggle (☗), reachable from the stat page, the kit panel and the shop card.
• Helmets are sized by their width now, so a bobble, earflaps, a chin bar or a crown of spikes no longer shrinks the helmet they hang off. Hill Crown was never big and Powder Cap was never small; they are the right size on every head.
• Three models fixed from reports: the Scan Visor’s strap no longer runs across its lens, the Pail Guard’s handle no longer arcs up through its lid, and the Vac Bubble’s canopy is frosted and opaque.
• The shop’s head toggle now puts the piece it is on straight into the preview, instead of only working on a helmet you had already selected.

What a chao shows

• A Chaos Chao can say it is hungry. The ”!” and ”?” marks now sit over a chao’s own accent instead of replacing it — a Chaos Chao could never show either before, and an elemental chao lost its flame or its whirlpool for as long as it was hungry or curious.
• A light elemental’s motes leave from a small sun rather than from nothing.
• A half-fish turns a fire chao’s flame blue, and a fire Devil’s too, and grows it a little.
• Mono survives evolution. A mono chao’s baked textures came back two-tone the moment it evolved; they stay flat now.
• A Chaos Chao keeps its animal parts through its ascension.
• A fire neutral Chaos Chao’s held flame burns white. The ice gem is translucent and lit from inside. The held emerald sits inside the Light Chaos orb’s golden body rather than swallowing it.

The garden

• A lantern hung on a post lights up. It used to hang dark inside the post’s own glow. It burns in its own colour now, and the post’s light on the grass takes that colour — so a Soul Lamp on a post throws violet.
• Eclipse keepsakes glow violet once you have bought them. The Chaos Eclipse’s brazier, soul lamp, scrying pool, obelisk and the rest burned the ordinary warm paper light the moment they were placed; they keep the eclipse’s light now, on the lawn and on a light string, and the light they cast on the grass matches.
• A banked or traded chao takes its element with it. A fire chao that left kept throwing embers at the spot it was last standing, forever.

Chao Clash and the Arena

• The ten elemental weapon arts each have their own shape now, instead of ten prizes that looked identical.
• An unknown art skips the attack rather than the whole tick, and retreating hands the fight back.

Under the hood

• Sand Ocean’s fifth quicksand pool was floating off the edge of a crest; pools are now laid only on ground flat enough to lie on. With that pool catching the lazy line properly, dune six became a gate and took a sixth pool. Pars moved by well under a second.
• A large amount of groundwork for the Chao Quest revamp landed in this build — rooms as data, a world solver, a room editor and several model kits. The mode itself stays parked; nothing in the shipped garden changes.
• Two new headless tests: the emerald catalyst’s gate (computed from the modes’ own catalogues, so a renamed course can never make it unobtainable in silence), and the festival keepsakes’ light.