Your Chocobo Companion is special and you want it to stand out, right? In a sea of desert yellow chocobos, yours could be an eye-catching royal blue chocobo! Royal purple! A… muddy blue? The choice is yours, here’s how to change the beautiful coat of your chocobo.
What colors are available?
The colors available for chocobos are (mostly) the same colors you can dye on clothing in the game. Of course, some exceptions include dye labels with “generic” color names. This section includes Pure White, Ink Black, Metallic, Pastel, etc. Unfortunately, shiny metallic chocobos are not allowed. I think if you want that shiny look you can always give them some army of plate-style chocobos.
If you’re looking for a reference to what a chocobo looks like, I found this tumblr post with screenshots of the game in various colors. This must have taken a long time to gather and is certainly a very popular resource!
Use the archive view if you want to browse and compare them quickly, note that for some colors the preview is just text. If you’re interested in these color names, or if you’d like to see a side view of any chocobo, be sure to click on them.
Can you make your chocobo a new dye?
In patch 5.21, a new dye was added, available through Ishgard recovery content. Some of these are in the fancy dyes section (gunmetal black, pearl white and metallic brass), perhaps because they have a similar metallic appearance to other dyes in the same category. I don’t think anyone expected these colors to work on Chocobos, at least for now.
However, some of these dyes are added to the regular coloring. New red dyes include ruby red and cherry pink. Yellow labels currently include Canary Yellow and Vanilla Yellow. Finally, they added Dragoon Blue and Turquoise Blue to the blue palette. Maybe these are new options for chocobo?
My testing says no, these are not the available Chocobo colors. My attempts to get a ruby red chocobo have turned into pure old blood red (see color change mechanics for details). Hopefully our feathered friends can also have such bright feathers in the future.
How to change the color of Chocobo
After unlocking the Chocobo Companion, you can change its color immediately, as long as you have access to the Chocobo Stable (in the player’s house) and can buy the necessary fruit from the Market Board. For new low level players, it’s probably easiest to join an FC with a manor and stables.
If you don’t have FC or it doesn’t have Real Estate, you can also use the Chocobo Stables if you have an apartment. Each apartment building has its own stable outside the building where you can interact with your chocobo companions.
The way to molt is to feed it fruit, which is grown through horticulture and is regularly marketed. Seeds for growing these fruits can be obtained from the Grand Company Hunt Billmaster for 15 Confederate Seals each. They are very productive, especially with Soil cover, but they are only two days old to develop. Remember to take care of them so they don’t wither.
They are easiest to grow in an outdoor garden, but can also be grown in pots in an apartment. If you can’t wait two days, or if you don’t have or don’t like gardening, the easiest way is to buy all the fruit you need from the Marketboard. After selecting “Take care of my chocobo”, you need to select “Feed” and then give it fruit to start the molting process.
You then have a six-hour period after which your chocobo will change color based on the combination of fruits it has eaten. I usually feed my chocobo friends all the fruit at once, but you technically have six hours to do it. You can only feed one fruit at a time, so be aware that mining will be a bit tedious.
You can go back and look at the “Take care of my Chocobo” window to see how much time is left before the colors change.
The best tool out there is the FFXIV Chocobo Color Calculator created by Chop Chop. You enter the starting chocobo color and the chocobo color you want and the calculator will tell you the amount of food for each chocobo.
The default color for your Chocobo is “Desert Gold”, but if you’re not sure what your Chocobo’s current color is called, check your companion’s details in the “Appearance” tab. In the stables, this is the “View Details” section. If your Companion is unstable, you can check it from the menu. Characters > Companions > Appearance. This navigation can only be accessed if your Chocobo is unstable.
resovle problem
If you are not getting the color you want, there are a few things to check. When you try again, use the new color as the starting color or reset the Chocobo to the default “Desert Gold”. To do this, feed it a Ham lemon. You can buy Han Lemon very cheaply from Marketboard (at least on my server). You don’t have to wait another six hours to reset the color this way; just exit the Chocobo Stable interface and come back.
If your starting color is the default desert yellow, you’ve probably exceeded the limit on one of the RGB values (0-255) somewhere in the middle of the feed. Be sure to follow the recommended feeding sequence listed at the bottom of the color calculator results page. There’s even a helpful checklist you can cross off as you go so you don’t get lost.
If you’ve dyed a chocobo before, it’s possible that the chocobo’s original color did not accurately represent its “true” color (i.e. its RGB values). I recommend resetting with Han Lemon before trying again, as its RGB values will be correct.
Color changing mechanism
Each color has an associated set of RGB values, listed here. For example, your chocobo starts out in a desert yellow with RGB values of (219, 180, 87). Higher numbers produce light colors, while lower numbers produce dark, dark colors.
The way to change a chocobo’s coat is to feed it fruit once it’s settled. Each fruit will increase or decrease the RGB value, so a certain amount of each fruit will take you from the initial value to the target value.
| fruit | Increase (+5) | decrease (-5) |
| Apple xelphatol | Red | Blue blue |
| pear mamuk | green | red green |
| O’Ghomoro Fruit | blue | red, green |
| Valfurt | Blue blue | Red |
| Doman plum | red green | green |
| Pineapple Cieldalaes | red, green | blue |
Of course, there are only so many color options available, but there are many other value combinations, so if the chocobo’s RGB values don’t exactly match the values in the list, an approximation will be is taken to get the closest possible color.
Here’s how I tested to see if the new dye would work for our chocobo. By maximizing the red value and minimizing the green and blue values (255, 0, 0), it produces a very bright, vibrant ruby red. Unfortunately, the result is a rather distant blood red (145, 59, 48), so I think it’s safe to say that the new dye is not Chocobo approved.
Also of note is that (255, 0, 0) still seems to be the “true” color of my chocobo, not (145, 59, 48) of its blood red phenotype. Once I changed its color, I calculated the number of berries needed to go from the “true” color to the lavender color (131, 105, 105) and that got me there without issue. what subject.
I used 21 Doman plums, 2 Mamook pears and 2 O’Ghomoro (-125, +105, +105), while the calculator suggested 12 Doman plums, 6 Valfruits and 4 Cieldalaes pineapples ( – 10, +50, +70). That would leave me at (245, 50, 70), which I suspect might represent itself as Colibri Pink or Coral Pink or something. This could explain why some color changes fail and is a good reason to use Han Lemon to reset the RGB values if you can’t seem to get the color you want.
summary
Have fun with your chocobo and change its color if you haven’t tried it before. If something goes wrong, you can always use Han Lemon to reset it back to the default “Desert Gold”. Remember to use a color calculator and follow the feeding order for the most effective (and least tedious) results.
I’m curious, what color is your chocobo? What influenced your decision? Let me know in the comments section.