Demystifying Chocobo Raising Plans And Food!

I've started a project to begin working out the exact stats every chocobo food and care plan gives!

This should help greatly in min/max'ing chocobo raising for the like three of us that actually care about such things. Mostly it just seems like an area of the game that hasn't been solved yet, and I think it'd be nice to get it hammered out.

Also, demystifying this stuff will prolly be helpful for pserver devs who wanna try and get the backend behavior as close to the real server as possible.

So, to start, my references:

1. How chocobo stats work from Niniann via this guide here: https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/32770/ninians-guide-to-chocobo-raising-v2/#2001744

Specifically the Attribute Levels section

2. Parsing of chocobo stats from Ivaar's chococard windower addon: https://github.com/Ivaar/Windower-addons/blob/master/chococard/chococard.lua

I wrote a simpler ashita addon that simply finds the first chococard in my inventory and pulls the four attributes off it, then prints it to the chat

Then I used this to log my chocobo's stats after every action (Do Action -> Get Card -> Log Stats -> Drop card -> Repeat)

So here's what I have found so far:

Care Plans

Care Plan	STR	END	DSC	RCP
Basic Care
Rest
Take a Walk in Town
Listen to Music
Exercise Alone
Exercise in a Group
Interact With Children
Interact With Chocobos
Carrying Packages	+4	+10	-4	-4
Exhibiting to the Public
Delivering Messages
Digging for Treasure
Acting in a Play

Food

Feed	STR	END	DSC	RCP
Gysahl Greens
Sharug Greens
Azouph Greens
San d'Oria Carrot
Vomp Carrot	+1	---	---	-0.5
Zegham Carrot
Carrot Paste
Herb Paste
Vegetable Paste
Worm Paste
Gausebit Grass
Garidav Wildgrass
Tokopekko Wildgrass
Chocolixir
Chocotonic
Cupid Worm
Gregarious Worm
Parasite Worm
Celerity Salad
Tornado Salad
Lethe Potage
Lethe Consomme

If anyone knows if there's a way to make the above tables look "pretty" btw, lemme know

For now though, I will keep updating the tables as I go

There's a lot of things that are misunderstood or straight wrong from previous chocobo raising guides. After doing 5 birds through the last year, I've tried to track everything myself and have daily logs of every stat and action I did along the way so feel free to ask. The biggest thing to be aware of is that nothing is set in stone, EVERYTHING is random. It's part of what makes raising bird infuriating a lot.

Some correction regarding stats. Old guides say you can only get a maximum of 637. The actual cap is 640, barring one exception we haven't been able to pin down, where RCP gets an extra bonus point making the total limit 641. When you obtain an appearance modifier on day 29 based on your current stat totals, those flags add +1 point to STR, END, and/or DSC. Without these modifiers, the cap for a stat is 254, with it, it's 255. STR, END, and DSC will always be a multiple of 2 points, so even without the appearance flag, or odd with it. RCP functions more confusing, and can go up in increments of 1 point instead and does not have an appearance flag.

Something that needs more investigation is whether on the server these points function as fractional values that get rounded or floored to the ones we see, meaning things could give partial points that look like no change until enough of them happen. However, it's much more likely this is just the result of randomness and they're simply whole numbers like we can view on cards.

Care plans, food, and activities all appear to give random ranges of results rather than a specific number. In my experience, food essentially never changes stats at all. I've never witnessed a stat change from before and after the food trade. It could be said that the change won't happen until the following day, but activity changes happen immediately so I'd argue against this. Activities don't affect stats a majority of the time, but randomly can increase (or rarely, decrease) stats.

Watch Over seems to occasionally raise RCP. Take a Walk (all three) seem to randomly raise STR most of the time, but I have seen END increase as well. Compete against Others I've never personally seen a change on, but others have reported END. Tell a Story typically seems to raise DSC, but I've seen RCP raise as well. I haven't seen Scold affect stats, but I avoid using it most of the time. 99% of the time I have only seen stat increases from activities, but once or twice I have seen a stat drop by 2 instead of increasing, and my stats were not capped yet, so it seems to be possible.

For the care plans, Basic Care seems to be zero change, unlike what most think. I've left a bird on Basic Care for 2+ weeks and the stats didn't change a single time. The first tier double plans seem to be minor, about +2 to +4 on two and -2 to -4 on the other two. I've only done these on chicks, so I haven't checked their results on cards, and am estimating based on number of days it took to raise a grade on average.

For the next tier of "raise one stat, lower two", I've never actually used these as when they unlock, it unlocks the second higher tier of "raise two, lower two" at the same time and these adjust stats much quicker. Carrying Packages and Exhibiting to the Public are roughly +4 to 10 (+6 to +8 are more common) on success, and -2 to -6 (average -4) for the other two stats. The final three (still baffles me as to why there's no END+ and DSC- plan) raise their main stat by +6 to +10 on success, and -4 to -8 for the lowered stat. Failures on either will lower the gain, but not lower the loss.

Participating in Kamp Kweh will randomly give you a stat increase or nothing. If you get a stat increase, for me, it's always been +2 for STR, END, and DSC, and +1 for RCP. It's possible these could be higher though, as I only bothered to do this for a while before the random nature affecting my stats bothered me too much.

Using tokens or NPC training will produce different behaviors based on stats. The race tokens will increase a stat by +5, but because the first three stats only increase by 2 at a time, it will alternate between +4 and +6. On RCP, it will always give +5. When using retired tokens, it's a simple +2 to any of the stats.

When you hit the cap (640 or 641, ignoring appearance bonuses), you will lose stats from your highest stat in equal amount. If you're currently increasing the highest stat, it will pull from the second highest stat. I'm not sure what happens if you have multiple stats tied, it's likely either random which lowers, or goes in order from STR > END > DSC > RCP. In effect, this makes it impossible to lower any stat past a certain threshold outside of care plans, so once you're past day 65, you can't reduce them any further.

However, when care plans are still affecting stats, you can somewhat manipulate stat loss using them. If you use tokens to cap out your stat total, when you gain stats from a plan, it seems to prioritize taking the stats from the stat you're going to lower on top of the regular lower amount. Example: using the STR+ and RCP- plan, with say, 224 254 128 34 statline, you'll reduce the RCP by however much your STR gained from the plan first (even though it's not the highest stat), then reduce the RCP again for the loss from the plan. This can be helpful if you want to force a stat to 0 or something.

I'm still working out why some birds get a bonus allocation to RCP and others don't. When a bird gets this bonus, they can get up to 641 stat total and their RCP can be increased to 255 instead of 254. It essentially works as the equivalent of the appearance flag bonus +1 stat for the other three stats, but seems completely random. It may have to do with one of the unknown flags chococard spits out.

This has been my experience as well the past couple days tracking stuff like food and etc.

I did see my STR go up and RCP go down on a random vomp carrot, and I noticed when it happened I got a different feeding animation (red cloud instead of green one like you usually get)

Ive noticed that when your bird eats food, it can get 1 of 2 different colored effects.

IE here is my tracking so far:


Note the stat change on Vomp Carrot #1, Day 30

I think the "receptive to items" may have been part of this, and I think part of the seeming wild RNG on stat changes from care plans can also be influenced by things like your outcome from the plan (IE carry packages has I believe 2? 3? outcomes), as well as stuff like if they have any modifiers on them (like energetic, receptive, sick, restless, etc)

I haven't witnessed any stat changes from going for long walks, but I'll do a bunch of competitions to see if that ever modifies endurance.

Yeah after raising four chocobo for Mastery Rank, I'm just thinking for the next round of birds I'll be lazy with feed and just use care plans to raise stats and just go crazy with chocobucks. Feed really does seem like a waste of effort.

This is the way I always recommend to everyone, raise the first bird as a racer to farm chocobucks easily then just power level raise the next birds with tokens. Currently testing my latest racer 254 4 255 128 Gallop/Canter to great success. My previous racer was 254 34 225 128 Gallop/Auto-Regen. This stat spread was based on Sakura (200 40 250 100) from the final story race.

Yeah you can really punt endurance it seems.

I would suggest doing it as a google doc instead of editing the OP every day.

can probably narrow down the range of variables, like went on a short walk, saw brutus, got X & Y.
short walk w/o any events, only got X.

So since Im on my journey to just almost max out endurance, and then max out receptivity, what do folks recommend for this bird?

I was planning to just do Carrying Packages til I hit 200 endurance, and then swap to Acting in a Play and max out receptivity.

However, I dunno if that will end up overcapping my stats because I already have discernment up (to have learned Treasure Finder)

I think by the time I get Endurance up, Discernment will be zero'd though, and then Acting in a play should drop Strength enough to be fine.

I pretty much dont care about Str/Dsc for a digger bird, and I am operating under the assumption that Bore/Burrow in 2025 are just actively a downgrade for your bird.

The items Bore/Burrow add to the pool seem to detract from the other items, which in turn lowers your odds of getting the actual stuff worth $$$

So instead, just in case it does... something(?) I went with Auto-Regen. Even if it doesnt do anything, I dont mind.

I shouldn't need chocotrains at all to max out Endurance + Receptivity right?

Is this a digging chocobo? If it's your first chocobo I'd agree with the Zedoma that you should raise a racing chocobo first so you can earn chocobucks for stats but also for useful racing silks (you need green).

Ive already got a racer, yes.

But are chocobucks even necessary if you only need to max out endurance+Receptivity?

They are "non competing" stats with each other, "Acting in a Play" lowers Strength, not Endurance, afaik right?

I'd use chocobucks for everything because between Hi-Chocolixirs, Tornado Salads, and race tokens you can skip figuring out 99% of this BS which is why we still don't understand it 20 years in.

Is this factoring in the new extremely expensive limits on chocobucks?

You'll pretty quickly hit races costing 10s of thousands of gil per run, which means a single chocotrain is gonna cost you several hundred thousand gil, which means 8 of them for a stat increase is going to run you millions and millions of gil (and countless hours sitting and watching that cutscene)

I know it's easy for folks to afk/bot, but if I can just max out my bird with 0 chocotrains needed since Endurance+Receptivity seem very easy to max, I am gonna go that lower effort route.

It's just time gated, but I already have a (worse) bird I dig with, so no reason to hurry.

i'd suggest only doing a few races each day, like 11~23. the cost really does start to get onerous.
you can get a LOT of stat+ from race chocotrains before your bird is old enough and from direct learning once it is old enough to do that instead.

ragnarok typically doesn't have any training tokens on AH so i would do 2 stacks of speed apples a day, one to the daily lockout race that costs chocobucks.

I am on Lakshmi, so I would spam for chocobucks for a while and win the gold cup or w/e each day. I didn't have trouble running out of chocobucks, but I think I only raised two birds.

I thought that winning the chocobucks races was pretty quick each day. There is no animation, right?

The gil was kind of irrelevant for me. I don't remember how high I went, but between the gold cup winnings and w/e normal income I have, I don't remember going farming to subsidize my chocohabit or anything crazy.

Free run animations can be skipped so it's pretty fast. You can get more bang for your buck if you use speed apples on the races with the three super chocobos (usually in lane 3 if there's one of them and lanes 3/5/7 if all 3). When I felt like it, I'd just do free runs till the cost hit 10k or so. For no good reason, I have hard time stomaching spending more than that.

The other thing is you don't get your chocobucks until you turn in your completion certificate so you can "store" chocobucks in the form of certificates if you approach your chocobuck maximum and don't want to spend any.

stopping when you see next race will cost 10k would put you at 97,050 gil spent earning chocobucks for the day.

at least i'm pretty sure it is. think it stays +500gil increments until you hit 10k then it goes to +1k gil from there.

i remember years ago when there was a 1k or 2k cap on gil/free race, i'd have a script run overnight until i hit 1k chocobucks... (that character got banned for unrelated reasons) the day after SE changed that cap for some reason i had <100k gil remaining on my character when i woke up...

Back in the day when the gil capped on it, you net positive NPCing Vomp Carrots

You'd effectively work out to, IIRC, about doubling your gil back per race on average. So if you spent 100k in gil, you'd get 200k in vomp carrots back.

So you could just sit and run the races endlessly and make like 20k gil/hr or something, which isnt a lot but it was effectively "free" money and borderline impossible to detect as botting (cuz its mostly just watching a cutscene, and TBH we didnt even bot it or anything, you just had to click enter a couple times every few minutes, you could let it just sit and run while you watched TV)

It was some real peasant level stuff, but this was back when a scorp harness +1 was like 150k so it, so a single day of doing it could buy you an SH+1 haha

It's "fast", but annoying. You have to go through half a dozen menus and delays for every race. I wrote a windower addon to do it for me, it will race 8 times in a row and handle using speed apples or etc as necessary.

On that note, in case people aren't aware, free runs repeat a cycle of 8 races with the same chocobos in a cycle, the number you start on in the cycle seems to be random? At any point, it's been so long now that I purposefully aligned my 8 to the following start/stop points for ease:

Runs 1-5 will contain one single "super bird" as people refer to them, with capped stats and Gallop + Canter. With good racing stats, these runs will be guaranteed 2nd place (3 chocobucks) with a decent chance of first, nearly guaranteed if you use a speed apple.

Runs 6-7 will contain no super birds at all. Even with subpar racing stats, I was consistently getting first place without even using speed apples. These are basically "free" wins for 5 chocobucks each.

Run 8 will be contain all three super birds at once. The best that can be guaranteed on this is fourth place, even with capped stats, which unfortunately is only 1 chocobuck. However, using a speed apple often will get you a higher position.

If you want to earn chocobucks as cheaply as possibly, you'd only use a speed apple on the 8th race, and only do 8 races a day. This will cost you 3550 gil in entry fees and the 750 gil for the apple, costing 4.3k for about ~34 chocobucks on average. A chocotrain will run you only about 11k gil or so each with this slow and steady cost.

If you're okay with spending a bit more, 16 runs ramps up the entry costs a little bit to 26k more for the second set of 8, making the chocotrain cost about 41k gil or so average. 24 runs is about the most you can run cost effectively, and those additional 8 runs will add 58k gil on top of it, upping the average train cost to around 80k or so.

Depending on your server, maybe it's still worth doing more (or spending even more on apples for the 1-5 runs) per day, but the cost amps up even faster past that point. The Bahamut AH has most trains for 100k or so, so it's not really worth spending more than 24 runs a day for me, and honestly I generally stop after 8-16.

Considering you're going to spend 30+ days raising a new bird anyways, that's a lot of days you can self-farm trains yourself if needed, which is why it's a suggested way of doing it. And care plans stop working at day 65 anyways, so after that point you're either using trains or gambling on random increases from activities.

Oh, also, side note, I heard that the race reward certificates become invalid after a server maint, but never held onto them to test this. Can you confirm or deny? I'd be careful about holding them too long haha.

Never heard of them expiring, now I'm curious.

I very much appreciate all of this. Some day I want the Pullus Torque but I don't know the first thing about raising. Every time I've tried I haven't been able to unlock the right stories and everything just goes to hell.

Recommended plan blueprint for obtaining a Pullus:

Day 1-5 Basic Care

Day 6-20 Listen to Music

Day 21-30 Exhibit to the Public

Day 31-64 Delivering Messages

Day 65+ Basic Care (Buying time to purchase/farm chocobucks to increase END to 4-34 and RCP back to 96-128 before day 120 using R: tokens)

Kayte and I have observed that DSC/RCP plays a big role in running into the NPCs and at 0 points it becomes an extremely low chance to ever see them. Also starting a bird with physical plans in the beginning makes it much more challenging to learn abilities and we know that END is the least valuable stat for racing whereas STR and DSC are the most.

Feed 0-2 Azouph/Sharug greens depending on how much energy is used per day. If you want to low maintenance raise, you just have to check in once a day to perform the Watch Over. Making sure the affection level remains at level 8 is vital for plan effectiveness. The only energy usage necessary is when performing walks to run into NPCs or learning abilities with Tell a Story which you will almost always learn in 1 or 2 tries with high mental stats.

can attest that after several days the race certificate becomes invalid. not sure if it was 5 days or something less but even without maintenance it definitely becomes invalid by a week later.

I should've refrigerated it after opening. This one's on me.

Ended up going to check on my old racing chocobo's stats from eons ago

Canter, Gallop
Str: 252
End: 233
Dsc: 154
Rcp: 2

So I am maxed out it looks like, as I thought. Im getting pretty good chocobucks per race with these stats, would you say this looks acceptable overall for chocobucks farming, or would you recommend I spend a bit more to tweak its stats to optimize it further?

IIRC, Canter and Gallop effectively give +1 rank to str/end, so if you already capped Str/End they arent very good, so do I want to do some Discernment trains to lower my strength a little bit perhaps?