A Yellow Chocobo? Are you kidding?

Well, a few weeks ago I decided it might be fun to breed a chocobo for digging purposes in FFXI. I've got my dig delay time down to 6 seconds and I've read that digging with a raised chocobo helps to level digging skill noticeably quicker than with rented chocobos.

With this in mind, I tried to find players who had parents that had digging traits and chocobos that were of colors other than yellow. Unfortunately, not as many players have bothered with the whole chocobo raising thing this far after introduction. There are probably a few different reasons for this. I imagine that the time involved is a major contributing factor. Also, the thing that both aggravated players and burnt them out with the whole process initially has been near negated with the addition of dyes that can be used to temporarily alter the color of your raised bird.

Breeding a red male to a black female and selecting the tour de Jeuno for the female's traits gave me a chick that was born with substandard stats in all categories, but with the Burrow trait already learned. I had high hopes for this bird, as I paid nearly 40,000 gil for the vouchers for the parents that resulted in the egg. I took great care in checking in on my bird, even paying expensive internet charges to quickly log in to feed and walk the bird while on a Caribbean vacation with my family. Imagine my disgruntlement when the day came when you can first detect the color of your young bird. Yellow. So it turns out that one of the players I bought a voucher from sold me bad heritage. Perhaps Square-Enix should have implemented some kind of pedigree system. What it comes down to is that at least one of the parents had a yellow bird somewhere in its background.

Disappointing, yes, but not the end of the world. Had I been dead set on a colored bird, I could quit now and start again, but at this point I suppose I'll just go for digging stats and use this bird for digging only. I've already got a pure-bred blue chocobo, so it's not too big of a deal... I guess.