Breeding
Set two chao's colours and finishes, hatch an egg, and see what a pairing can produce. The roll is the game's own, so these are the real odds.
Parent A
Red
Parent B
Blue
One real roll of the game's own egg genetics.
The likeliest child
Magenta
The blend with the hue wobble taken out — the middle of what this pair makes, and the shade to aim a line at. Hatch an egg for a real roll.
What this pair can make
The surface
One of three, and only one. Metal is the finish that gets dropped: a crystal zeroes the metalness it needs, and a metallic jewel already is it.
Crystal is the one finish with no from-nowhere chance: it mutes every other one, so it never appears uninvited. Give a parent a crystal and half the clutch inherits it; give both and all of it does.
The sheen
Independent of the row above. On a metal — and on gold, silver or onyx — shiny means mirror-polished rather than a pearl sheen. A gem stores it and shows nothing; a crystal refuses it.
A jewel instead of the blend
A jewel is the other COLOUR axis, not a surface — it replaces the blend on the right, and composes with whichever surface came up above. A crystal ruby is faceted red stone; crystal gold is smoked glass.
The colour
Measuring the blend…
Magenta, on the model
Breeding decides the colour; raising decides the shape. The alignment and type buttons below are what a chao would have been RAISED into, so this is the one place to see a shade you bred on every form it could grow up as — the immortal one included, under ✦ Chaos.
The pictures above are the stock colour. Load the model to see the magenta itself.
What breeding decides, and what it does not
Two adults in the garden produce an egg, and what they hand down isappearance: the colour of the body and the finish over it. They do not hand down a type or analignment. A chao's adult form comes from what you give it — animals, chaos drives, fruit — and its alignment from how it is raised, so the child of two dark power chao is a plain neutral child with no type at all until you start feeding it. Seesecond evolution for what actually steers the shape.
That is why the model above keeps its alignment and type buttons: a bred colour is a thing you own for the chao's whole life, and it will wear that colour on whichever of the fifteen forms you raise it into. Set the pair, hatch, then put the child on a hero fly or a dark power and see it.
The colour is not one of the fourteen
A bought chao is one of fourteen swatches. A bred one is the exact average of its parents' two shades, so green and sky blue make a real turquoise rather than snapping to whichever swatch is nearest. The simulator names it — the shades between the swatches have names of their own, Chartreuse and Periwinkle and Slate — but the body wears the real blend.
Averaging colours pulls them toward grey, and it compounds: a garden breeding within itself would be beige by the sixth generation. Two things stop it. The average's saturation is put back to the parents' own level, so a blend stays as vivid as what made it, and every birth adds a few degrees of hue wobble, so a line keeps drifting instead of settling. On top of both, about one egg in twelve is awildcard that ignores its parents entirely and comes out one of the fourteen base colours — a fresh injection of pure colour into a line that would otherwise close in on a single shade.
One special case: two plain Normal chao make a sky blue. Normal is not a hue, it is the starter two-tone ramp, and blending it with itself would produce a chao that looks like its parents while having lost the thing that made them look that way.
The four finishes
Shiny and metal both breed on the same ladder: four per cent out of two plain parents, half from one parent that has it, and a certainty from two. That last step is the point — it makes a line self-sustaining once you have established it, so the scarcity sits in getting your second shiny chao rather than in holding on to the trait afterwards. A metal is the strongest of the four for crossbreeding, because it wears the chao's own colour: cross one into any colour line and half that line comes out as a metal version of it.
Crystal breeds on the same ladder with one difference — there is no from-nowhere chance at all. It is the only finish that mutes every other one, so it never turns up uninvited; you buy the first one, and after that it is a line you can keep.
A jewel is one per cent out of nowhere and twenty-five from a jewelled parent, whose jewel is the one inherited. A jewelled parent also passes on the jewel's colour rather than the body hidden beneath it, which is what a player sees anyway. And a jewel that came out of breeding wears the chao's own bred shade instead of the canonical one, so a bred gold is a metallic chartreuse that no shop sells.
Only one finish is ever stored, and the ranking settles it: jewel over crystal over metal. The loser is dropped rather than re-rolled, which is why the odds panel's figures are a little below the raw ladders — two metallic parents breed metal every time except when the one per cent jewel lands on top. Mono is not in the ladder at all: it is a purchase choice and is never passed on.
Where the numbers come from
The Hatch button calls the game's own egg genetics, extracted into this site rather than reimplemented for it. The finish odds are worked out exactly from the same ladders that roll; the colour spread is measured by running the real blend six hundred times, because the hue wobble has no tidy formula and a second copy of one would only drift.
The shelf keeps what you hatch, across reloads, so you can breed a line rather than a single pair. Put a child back into a parent slot and the next generation blends off its exact shade.
Related: Evolve for the shapes and the influence tracks, face genes for the eyes and mouths, which are inherited too, andstats and grades for the growth rates a child gets from its parents.