Chao Garden: Evolved 1.5.3

The emerald

• It is glass now. On Windows, the emerald over an emerald chao’s head is a real refracting stone: the garden behind it bends through its facets, and it is lit from inside by a soft, steady core.
• No more light around it. The glowing shells that spilled past the gem and washed across its facets are gone. The facets turned toward you catch the light, the ones seen edge-on fall away, and the cut is the thing you read.
• The Light Chaos Chao’s emerald keeps its orb as a halo behind it. The gem inside reads the same as everyone else’s, at the size it already was, and the orb’s light sits behind it instead of over it.
• On Android the emerald is a translucent stone with the same inner light; the refraction is left out to keep phones fast.

Animal parts

• Tinting an animal part no longer makes it disappear. Turning on a slot’s ◐ colour toggle on the Stats page could remove the part from the chao entirely, leaving it looking like a limb had gone missing. The part stays, in your chao’s colour.

Smaller downloads

• Chao Quest’s models and textures are no longer in the build. The mode is still being rebuilt and has no button in the game, but everything it will eventually use was shipping anyway — about 90 MB of it. The installer is now 177 MB (was 268), the portable 185 MB (was 276) and the Android app 152 MB (was 243).

Under the hood

• More groundwork for the Chao Quest revamp — shops and an inventory, roaming crowds with real dialogue, jumping, and a room editor that terraforms and pours waterfalls. The mode itself stays parked; nothing in the shipped garden changes.
• The emerald’s headless tests were rewritten for the new stone, including a check that nothing it draws reaches past its own silhouette.