WikiRaising chao
Care and happiness
Happiness is a ceiling set by how a chao is kept, not a bar you fill. What raises it, what lowers it, what a sulking chao refuses to do — and the one thing it can never cost you.
Updated
Happiness is not a stat you train. It is a ceiling set by how the chao is being kept, and the chao’s actual mood then walks toward that ceiling.
Two things follow from that. Attention does not stack up — you cannot bank a week of petting and leave. And nothing you do to a chao’s mood is permanent: put the care back and the ceiling comes back with it.
What sets the ceiling
The ceiling starts at 100 and three things pull it down.
| Pull | Threshold | Worst it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Ignored | Nothing for 24 hours | 45 per further day, to 0 |
| Hungry | Belly below 35 | 35 |
| Tired | Energy below 20 | 20 |
Attention means a pet, a meal, or an animal or item given — those three, and nothing else. Any one of them resets the clock.
Inside the 24-hour grace period the ignored term is exactly zero, so a player who looks in daily never meets it at all. Past it, one day overdue caps happiness at 55, two days at 10, and a little over three days at 0.
⚠️ Neglect is owed whether the game was running or shut. Closing the app does not pause it, and it settles to the same answer either way.
How fast the mood follows
- Down: 0.35 per second while you are playing.
- Up: 0.30 per second, slightly slower.
A chao forgives, but not instantly. From completely miserable, the drift alone takes about five and a half minutes of being looked after — and every pet, meal and toy adds its own jump on top, so a real play session brings it home much faster than the drift would suggest.
⚠️ Neglect that happened while the game was shut is applied at once instead of eased into. It has already happened; watching a chao sink for a minute after you open the game would be showing you a week in slow motion.
What a sad chao does
Happiness drives behaviour.
| Below | What changes |
|---|---|
| 40 | The chao sulks, and will not play with the toys around it |
| 15 | It will not come when whistled |
A miserable chao also droops where it stands. That animation has been in the game since launch and could not be reached before 1.3.0 — overall mood is a blend, and a starving, exhausted chao still scored above the line.
What it cannot cost you
⚠️ A mood never costs a chao anything it cannot get back. Stats, levels, grades, alignment and everything steering its evolution are untouched by happiness. A chao you have made happy again is exactly the chao it was.
The one place happiness reaches beyond behaviour is the Stadium, where crit chance rides it — a well-kept chao crits more often. That has always been true and is unchanged.
Before 1.3.0
Happiness existed and did effectively nothing. It drifted toward the middle from both directions at roughly thirty times slower than a single ordinary activity paid it back, so every chao in the game sat pinned near 100. Being thrown was the only thing that ever lowered it.
Related
- Life cycle: the stages this runs alongside.
- Stats and grades: the numbers happiness does not touch.
- Garden: the toys a sulking chao will refuse.