Evolve
Pick a stage, an alignment and a type, then set what has been pulling on the chao and how far it has got.
What you are looking at
An adult chao's shape is pulled by four influences: swim, fly, run and power. Animals push one up gently. A chaos drive pushes one up sharply and drains whichever rival is highest, so sculpting is a transfer rather than a deposit.
Two independent things decide the result.Direction is which stats are pulling and in what proportion, set by the four sliders. Development is how far the transformation has got, set by the age slider. Zero every influence and run the age slider up for the base adult second evolution, which can be acquired in game by locking each stat at 0% influence — the chao will passively grow into it over time.
Finishes and elements
The colour row carries the bought finishes and they do not all mix: a jewel replaces the gene colour outright, a crystal mixes with nothing at all, and metal is the one shiny composes with, where it means mirror-polished rather than a pearl sheen. A control that cannot legally be on is disabled rather than silently ignored.
Crystal is a surface and a jewel is a colour, so the two compose: a crystal ruby is translucent faceted red stone, and crystal gold is smoked glass. Shiny is offered on the metals only — gold, silver and onyx take a mirror polish, while a gem is already glassy and has nothing for a polish to act on.
The four earned finishes
Four more finishes cannot be bought at any price and cannot be bred. Each is won by finishing a mode, and once won it is kept — nothing takes one back, including trading away the chao that earned it.
- RainbowcolourWin every Chao Race course at the top tier
- SlipstreamsurfaceTake an S rank in a race on every Chao Board course
- RiftglasssurfaceDefeat every boss in Chao Clash
- Chaos PrismsurfaceEarn every other special finish
⚠️ They are two axes, not one ranking. Rainbow sits on the colour axis and the other three share the surface slot, so a completionist wears Rainbow and Chaos Prism at the same time, and all eleven jewels compose with the three surfaces. Rainbow is a prismatic fractal that shifts as the chao turns rather than a stripe of colours on a timer.
All four are on the model above, in the Earned row — and because they are two axes, Rainbow lights alongside any one of the other three. The earned finishes table lists what each one takes.
Riftglass was rebuilt in 1.4.6 and is now theclearest finish in the game — clearer than crystal. It is smoked stone with a sun burning inside it: the body transmits fully, drinks light over a short distance so it still reads as stone rather than as tinted glass, and carries a wide inner glow in the chao’sown hue, because light that has travelled furthest through a solid is the most coloured.
Its sun is 2.25× wider than it shipped and its coronae now take the chao’s floating-accent colour — the colour of the ball, halo or spike above its head. The core stays white-hot on purpose: tint that too and the sun stops reading as a light and becomes a coloured ball. Because the accent is one of the two things held off every recolour, it is a different hue from the stone by construction — an emerald riftglass chao is green smoked stone with a sun of its own colour in it.
A Chaos Chao is offered beside the five types rather than as a sixth one, because it replaces the type rather than being another: press ✦ Chaos and the alignment row then chooses which of the three you get — Light, Angel or Devil. It is an adult form only, its shape is fixed, and it takes no influence or age, so those controls say so rather than moving nothing. SeeChaos Chao.
An element is separate from all of them and composes with every one. It replaces the ball, halo or spike above the chao's head with a mark of its own and gives it an ambient effect; an adult's mark is larger than a child's. Six elements are earned by raising and two only by a catalyst — see elemental chao.
Animal parts
Pick an animal and the viewer offers the regions that animal actually grants — a Dragon has six, a Seal has two. Choose the ones you want, then pick another animal and do the same: one region holds one part, so a second animal replaces what is in that slot rather than stacking on it, and the parts you did not touch stay where they are. That is how a chimera is built.
Eighteen of the twenty-one animals graft something. The bat, the skeleton dog and the half-fish are modifiers rather than donors — they strip parts, restore feet, and swap the floating accent for a flame — so they are not in the picker.
Each grafted region carries a ◐ toggle: on, the part wears the chao's own colour and finish instead of the animal's. It is per region, so a bred purple can carry into the dragon horns while a peacock tail stays peacock. Wings have a third state — keep the wings' own natural colour and take only the chao's finish, which on a gold chao means metallic teal rather than gold. That natural colour is the form's, so it shifts with alignment and second evolution. Seeanimals for what each one grants.
Where a colour comes from
The fourteen in the colour row are the ones a chao can be BOUGHT as. A bred one wears the exact average of its parents' two shades instead, which is a colour no swatch here can express — seebreeding to cross two and put the result back on this model.
Children
Children have no second evolution to steer, so the influence sliders are off for them. They have a trait instead: the strict leader of what you have given the chao so far, which the silhouette starts telegraphing hours before the cocoon. Alignment and type both reshape a child, since the child model carries all fifteen combinations of the three alignment arms and the five stat shapes, and the age slider is that trait fading in.