Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

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Lexaraj
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Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

Post by Lexaraj »

Hello everyone. This is my first post here. I've used Chao Island numerous time over the years but I've never made a forum account. I figured it was time! :)

So I'm finally getting around to making an all S-Rank Chao for the first time ever. I played the hell out of the Chao garden years ago but never went for an all S-Rank. I figure it's time to finally give it a shot. My first goal is to get a single S-Rank and then an S-Rank Chaos Chao of each type. I may go on from there and make S-Rank Chao of other types but those are my main two goals to start.

Being that I have quite a few questions, I'll just ask them in list format and whoever knows can answer them individually.

-How reliable is breeding S-Rank Stats to new generations? Are stats easy to pass on with consistency or is it major RNG that requires tons of resetting and breeding over and over?

-How important is learning and understanding genetics when breeding, specifically when breeding for all S-Rank? I don't plan on using any 3rd party programs or devices, so would there even be a way for me to reliable discern a Chaos alleles /phenotypes? If so, how do I do this?

-Is there any real trick to evolving up a Chao? Or is leaving my console on for long periods of time while away the best way?

-Semi-related to the previous question: Will happiness or bond decay over time if a Chao isn't interacted with? If I leave a Garden on and unattended for half a day or more, will I need to re-raise a Chao's bond/happiness or are those numbers unaffected by the passage of time?

-Are there any ramifications to feeding a Chao over and over in order to boost Stamina? I know they get full but they seem to still eat with relative speed if you continue to give them food over and over. Will repeatedly feeding them while full reduce bond or happiness?

-I read somewhere that Chao time passes slightly faster in the Dark Garden due to the way it was coded. Firstly, is this true? If so, is it a significant difference and are there any drawbacks to parking a Hero Chao in the Dark Garden to utilize this increased passing of time?

-Will winning Medals or learning skills at Kindergarten have any benefit to reincarnation or breeding?

I don't expect one person to answer all of these at once, just trying to gain more knowledge of the Garden so I can figure out the best way to do things. Thanks everyone!
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Re: Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

Post by Mandymom »

As for the genetics question

There is no way to know for sure about your chao’s genetic grades, but you can make an educated guess based on it’s parents visible grades. A basic understanding of chao genetics is all that is needed. Basically, a chao has two sets of grades, and the grade it has is known as an allele (variable of a gene) which are identical in chao that had no parents, aka homozygous. The phenotype is the one you can see when it’s taken to the chao doctor and what determines how much a stat increases. The genotype is both sets, which are different in chao with parents aka heterozygous. Each chao contributes one grade each to their offspring from either of the two sets, and one set is chosen to be the visible grades. By keeping note of the initial chao used for breeding with homozygous grade alleles, you can make a map of the possible combinations for the hidden alleles of the heterozygous chao. But there’s a catch-while it is possible for chao to inherit a grade upgraded by evolution, the previous grade is still hidden within the chao’s genotype, making it possible that is passed on instead.
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Jeffery Mewtamer
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Re: Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

Post by Jeffery Mewtamer »

In general, it's kind of hard to lower a Chao's Happiness short of deliberate abuse. As long as the chao in your active garden all know how to swim and you stand in the water to avoid unintentionally ignoring a request to be picked up, you should be fine leaving the gardens running for hours on end, and for all I know, that much preparation might be overkill. Also, as far as I know, there are no negatives to force feeding your Chao and the races/kindergarten have no impact on stat grades.

As for stat grade genetics:

Chao essentially hold three alleles for each stat. 2 are immutable and inherited, one from each parent. The third is mutable, originally picked at random from the other two and increasing by one rank everytime the Chao evolves into the corresponding first evolution.

When first hatched, store bought Chao have the same value for all three alleles for each type, and so there is no randomness in which allele they would pass down until they start earning stat grade increases.

If a store bought Chao originally had a B-rank and now has an S-rank, there is a 1/3 chance it would pass down the S-rank and a 2/3 chance it will pass down the B-rank. If it did pass down the S-rank, there's a 1/2 chance it'll be picked as the actual grade for that stat for an overall chance of 1/6.

If a Chao hatches for the first time with an S-rank, that means at least one inherited allele is S and the mutable allele is S, giving it at least a 2/3 chance of passing down an S-rank. If this happens with a store bought Chao, it's guaranteed to pass down that S-rank.

If Breeding a pair of storebought Chao that started with A and B ranks in a given stat but are now both S-rank, each has a 1/3 chance of passing down the S-rank and there's a 1/9 chance both will pass down their S-rank. In this 1/9 case, the child will be guaranteed to display the S-rank and will have a 100% chance of passing down an S-rank in the future, but there is also a 4/9 chance it'll inherit at least 1 s-rank and a 2/9 chance of displaying that inherited S-rank, making the overall chances 5/9 of inheriting and 1/3 of displaying.

If both parents originally hatched with an S-rank, there's a 8/9 chance the child inherits at least 1 S-rank allele, a 4/9 chance in inherits 2, and a 2/3 chance it displays an S-rank.

Naturally, if both parents have s for all three-alleles, the child is guaranteed to be the same.

Of course, the above is looking at individual stats, your chances of getting the best result possible are much lower considering all stats together(e.g. if you're mating a pair of store bought Chao that had no natural S-ranks but have an S-rank per stat between them, your chances of getting an All-S child with any given breeding is 1-in-7776, your chances of rolling five six-sided dice and getting all-sixes. Of course, if those S-ranks are all true-breeding and there are no hidden Ss on the parent with the non-S in each stat, those chances go upto 1-in-32, the chances of flipping 5 coins and getting all heads).

Hopefully this gives you some idea of the probabilities involved once you have some S-rank in your Garden's gene pool.

That said, if you want to know the full distribution of possibilities, your best option is probably to make a modified Punnett Square for each stat. If you keep records of your Chao's stat grades both upon first hatching and at the time of breeding, you can always know all of a store bought Chao's stat grade alleles and at least two of a bred Chao's alleles per stat(and maintaining a pedigree, you might be able to fill in the third, or at least narrow it down, but you can just substitute an x for the unknown allele and treat it as a wild card).

But as an example, given a couple of storebought Chao:
Chao 1 started at D rank and is now B-rank. It's Alleles are DDB.
Chao 2 started at A-rank and is now S-rank. It's alleles are AAS.

The Punnett square for this pair would look something like(please ignore any alignment issues, text charts work best with monospaced fonts and the ability to use tabs):

D D B
A AD AD AB
A AD AD AB
S SD SD SB

With each pair having a 1/9 chance of being the outcome and each pair with mismatched letters having a fifty-fifty chance of which letter fills the third slot. Since AD fills 4 of the 9 squares, it has a 4/9 chance of being the result, while SB, appearing only once, has a 1/9 chance.

To give a more complex example, through a data reading utility, we know a pair of Chao to have the alleles ABS and CDE. The Punnett Square looks something like:

A B S
C AC BC SC
D AD BD SD
E AE BE SE

Of course, if we didn't use the data reading utility and didn't know about the B and D alleles, we could just replace those with X's in the above table:

A X S
C AC XC SC
X AX XX SX
E AE XE SE

And treat the X's as wildcards(admittedly, if we get offspring with B-ranks or D-ranks, we know what the Xs are, though not necessarily which parent they belong to, figuring that out would require trial breedings with a third parent.

Hope that brief lesson in probability and genetics was helpful.
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Re: Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

Post by krzys2 »

Its not difficult to get all S chao, it is more difficult to get stable all S chao from 2 parents, making aka "S generation". Dont get crazy over babies not having an S. Usually the process can take super long but i the end I recommend evolving it couple of times to get till S.

Personally I started with 2 chao (market egg) which has different S ranks. Breed them to get 2 S chao.
Take other stat 2 S chao (market egg). Breed them, get 2 S chao.
Breed those 2 chao to get 3-4 S chao. Then breed that one with 2 S chao couple of times to get strong S gene at least in 2 stats. After having 2 strong S and one weak S. I went for 4 S and last either A or B.
Manually evolved to S rank. After that its just time of strengthening S gene, so might breed all S chao with previous chao which had 3-4 S. Getting all S chao, its good to breed with other all S, to try to get stronger gene.

In conclusion all S is easy, strong S gene is little more difficult. Tho genes are also colors, so sometimes getting color you want can also have effect on how long you will do it. To get shiny two tone orange chao it took quite a while and almost 2 full days
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Re: Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

Post by Mandymom »

I personally used Tiny Chao Garden deluxe (a remake of the tiny chao garden for the pc as I have the pc version of Sonic Adventure 2) and had gotten a chao with a few S grades off the bat, the only ones I had to breed for were Power and Swim, but that was a simple endeavor. Once you have an all S chao, it's not hard to breed for another one, usually takes only 4-5 tries to get what you're looking for.
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Re: Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

Post by Lexaraj »

Thank you for the replies, lots of good info! Sorry for the delayed response, been very busy!

I did have another question. Is known what determines which stats that a Chao will hatch with from the eggs that a Chao garden spawns when it is empty?

I'm asking because I'm having trouble getting a Chao with an 'A' rank in Power and, while having trouble with this, I've noticed that the stat grades the Chao hatch with are the same based on the character than I exited the Chao World with after removing all Chao from it and, in turn, spawning the new eggs.

Is this known behavior? I've always assumed the stats were completely random upon spawn, and I've never read anything that says they're determined based off character or anything else, but I have gotten some very specific and consistent stat grades when doing a few tests. I'm not soft resetting or hard resetting either. I'm properly exiting the Garden and saving upon emptying the gardens. I'm also using the Gamecube version of SA2B, if that matters.
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Re: Starting on the path of making an all S-Rank Chao and I have many questions.

Post by Jeffery Mewtamer »

I don't know the answer to your question, but a few things to consider:

1. Building a true random number generator is hard and generally relies on some non-computational source of randomness(such as how often a sample of radioactive material undergoes a decay event, minute fluctuations in the local weather, or the patterns formed in Lava Lamps). Since this external source of randomness is hard to build into individual units and hard to access remotely without always on Internet, most games, especially from the days when taking consoles online was in its infancy, use pseudo random number generators.

2. Depending on the exact nature of the PRNG used, it might be possible for the player to perform actions that will "seed" the PRNG in a way that gives predictable results, or even turns getting the desired outcome into a puzzle to be solved rather than a pseudo random event to be waited for.

3. To my knowledge, no research has been done on how to game any of the pRNG found in Sonic games, but to give an example of gaming the pRNG from another game: In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, item drops from defeated enemies are based on a counter that starts at zero when cold booting the game and increments whenever certain actions are performed in battle, looping back to 0 after reaching 255. The rarest items had a 1-in-256 chance of being dropped, only dropping if this number is 0, but killing the enemy that drops the desired item in a certain way would bump up the chances significantly, though still requiring a few specific values for the rarer drops. This lead to entire guides with step-by-step instructions on how to kill each possible set of random encounter monsters in the games end-game dungeons to ensure the counter is at the right value for the rare drop if that random encounter is your fist after cold booting the game.

4. More testing and rigor would be required to know for sure, but it isn't impossible you've accidentally been seeding(or avoiding actions that would reseed) the pRNG that determines the stats of starter Chao.

5. Only Marginally related, but I've heard the stat grades for starter and store bought chao are binomially distributed instead of flatly distributed. I.ee. average ranks are more common than extreme ones, or to give a simple example, it's like how when rolling two six-sided dice, 7 is the most common outcome while 2 and 12 are the rarest or flipping several coins and counting the number of heads(all heads or all tails is rare, a near even mix is common).
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