Chocobo Madness

AggroChat Episode 20

Last night we recorded our 20th episode of aggrochat.  Quite honestly it doesn’t feel like it has been long enough for us to rack up 20 weekly episodes.  Rae was off traveling to visit some friends for the Labor Day weekend, so that left us with myself, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam.  We started the show by bidding a fond farewell to Blaugust since today is the final day of the month long blogging initiative.  Some pretty awesome content has come out of it, and as of last night we still had 29 people who had posted something each and every day of the month.  That is pretty impressive when you consider just how much content was churned out as a result.  Not everyone has posted daily on the Blaugust nook… myself included but still we have over 700 posts there during the month.  In total I believe we had 52 different participants that in some way joined in the fun, so I a wholeheartedly applaud everyone on the job well done.

After that we started a discussion about trash mobs, or more so why exactly we refer to non-boss encounters as trash.  It hasn’t always been the case there was a point at which we just referred to everything as encounters, and in part I think that is because over the years the care and thought that went into non-boss encounters was lacking.  We reminisce about some of our favorite non-boss encounters and talk at length about how we feel that encounters in general can be improved.  I really enjoyed the discussion last night, so hopefully you all will as well.

Chocobo Madness

With the 2.35 patch Final Fantasy XIV introduced ways to dye your Chocobo unlike quite any other dye system I have encountered.  Generally speaking in other games, you buy a dye or you pick a color from a selector and you end up with your color relatively simply.  It might be cost prohibitive to get the color you want, but there is very little guess work.  Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand introduced a system that is sheer madness.  First you have to purchase seeds for various fruits that can be found on vendors.  The seed is then grown in your garden and over the course of two days ripens.  You can shorten this time by doing various things and the yield can be increased based on the type of soil that you use and the fertilizer.  Where the madness goes into play is that these seeds increase or lighten various color sliders starting from the base yellow.

When the system was originally patched in, the forums were of course a buzz with trying to figure out the formulas for each of the colors people might want.  After lots of trial and error it has pretty much been agreed upon that the two types of fruit… the fruit that darkens a color and lightens a color are essentially on two different color mixing systems.  The darken fruits are on RGB and the lighten fruits have the side effect of increasing CMY.  This makes trying to mix a specific color absolute insanity.  The end result are several different guides for mixing colors and others that list supposed recipes for specific combinations.  The problem with all of this is that it doesn’t seem to be an exact science and there is a large random element to just how much a given fruit effects the end plumage.

The Results of Madness

So entering into this I knew I was fairly insane.  My ultimate hope was to arrive at turquoise so I fed my chocobo 15 Doman Plums and 10 Mamook Pears as a start.  Doman Plums being the fruit that lowers the red value and at the same time raises the Cyan value, and Mamook Pears being the fruit that raises the Green value.  The problem with this system is that you have to stable your bird and wait essentially six hours to see what the final result was.  The new color is revealed to you as part of a cut scene.  So before I went to bed Friday night and hoped I had made a good combination of fruits.  Saturday morning I got up fairly early and was excited to log in to see exactly what the end result was.  It turns out that I was pretty close and ended up with Celeste Green (R:144,G:184,B:180) which is really close to the shade of Turquoise I was actually after.

So now I have the hard decision of do I leave well enough alone for the time being, because I am actually rather fond of the color.  Or do I go for broke and try and push Celeste Green to the next step which would be Turquoise the shade I was actually after.  The problem is I have no clue if I just feed doman plums in the hopes of getting there, or do I need to feed O’Ghomoro Berries and Mamook Pears in the hopes of darkening both blue and green at the same time instead.  For the time being, and since fruit is so insanely expensive right now I think I am going to leave things alone and just be happy I got close to the color I wanted.  Now my attention turns to trying to get the Tidal Barding to go with the new color… but that is a whole different rabbit hole for another day.

#FFXIV #Chocobo #Dyes