The sanctuary

The garden holds 12 chao on a PC and 6 on a phone, and that is a rendering budget rather than a rule about how many chao you are allowed to own. The sanctuary is where the rest of them live.

A chao you put away is not stored as a summary or a snapshot. The sanctuary keeps the whole record — stats, grades, animal parts, element, finishes, name, lineage, the lot — and hands it back exactly as it went in.

Putting one away

Any chao can go in, with one exception below. There is no fee, no cooldown, and no limit on how long it stays.

Your last chao cannot be put away. A garden with nobody in it has no way back except hatching an egg, so the sanctuary refuses when you have only one chao left. The same guard stops you sending your last chao to another save.

Time does not pass in there

This is the part worth knowing, and it changed in 1.4.5.

A stored chao is frozen. It does not get hungry, it does not get tired, and its happiness does not decay while it waits. Before 1.4.5 a recalled chao was billed for the whole time it had been away — a month in the sanctuary brought it back with its happiness at zero, which made the feature actively dangerous to use. It no longer works that way, and the same fix covers a chao that was sent to another save and came back.

Nothing about the sanctuary ages a chao toward reincarnation either. Put a chao away on the day it evolves and it is that same chao whenever you fetch it.

Bringing one back

A withdrawal needs a free slot in the garden. If you are already at 12 (or 6 on a phone), something has to come out before something goes in — the cap is a rendering budget and a withdrawal is not allowed to route around it.

Otherwise there is nothing to it: pick the chao and it walks back onto the lawn.

Eggs

Bred eggs can be banked the same way, and this is the one that changes how you play. A banked egg does not count against the garden’s chao limit, so a breeding line no longer has to be spent as fast as it is produced — you can cross two chao, bank the eggs, and hatch them whenever there is room.

The egg bag holds 24. It is deliberately more generous than the chao cap, because a stored egg draws nothing and ticks nothing: the only thing that number bounds is how large a save grows after years of breeding.

Reading the roster

The sanctuary list shows its residents newest first. Tapping one opens its stat page underneath the chao you tapped, rather than below the whole list — with sixty possible residents, the older behaviour meant scrolling back up to find out what you had just opened.

Opening the panel with a large roster used to lock the game for several seconds while it built every portrait. Portraits are now built only as they scroll into view.