Jewel Eggs

Post here if you want help with Chao raising/breeding, or if you are a kind person that likes to help other people!
Warning! This topic is 5 years and 11 months old! Please consider opening a new topic rather that bumping up this very old post.
Post Reply
User avatar
Chao Professor
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 234
Joined: Sun Jun 29, 2014 4:58 pm
Motto: It's thinking...
Contact:

Jewel Eggs

Post by Chao Professor »

Sorry, I'm not too up-to-scratch when it comes to the TCG. Sonic Advance finally arrived today, but all I can seem to find in the shop are normal eggs, every time. Is it randomly selected every time you exit and return, or does it change after a certain length of time? Does it matter if your current TCG is empty or not? I mean, I know jewel eggs show up by chance, but I've been checking all day.
Image It's still thinking...
User avatar
YuYuChaosho
Evolved Chao
Evolved Chao
Posts: 93
Joined: Mon Jan 08, 2018 10:29 pm
Motto: The day only gets worse when the sun sets at 3pm
Location: In the nearby Quicksand
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by YuYuChaosho »

It changes after a certain length of time.
I do believe it’s like the Black Market at that you must catch it at the right time to get a specific item.
SEGA does what Nintendon’t
User avatar
Mamkute
Chaos Chao
Chaos Chao
Posts: 2498
Joined: Sun Jun 19, 2011 6:25 am
Location: California

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by Mamkute »

If you don't have a Chao in the TCG, then only a normal egg will show up.

The game re-rolls for eggs every time you leave, through mini-games or levels.
Image
User avatar
Chao Professor
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 234
Joined: Sun Jun 29, 2014 4:58 pm
Motto: It's thinking...
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by Chao Professor »

Ah, thank you Mamkute. My garden's been empty, so no wonder.
Image It's still thinking...
User avatar
UltimaNumber
Chao Expert
Chao Expert
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon Mar 27, 2017 3:18 am
Motto: I'm just a number
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by UltimaNumber »

I've never seen the Onyx Egg in Sonic Advance 1. But I have in Sonic Advance 2. I'm not really sure why...
Always happy to see Number and his 12 daughters and 6 sons.

My YouTube stuffs
User avatar
Chao Professor
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 234
Joined: Sun Jun 29, 2014 4:58 pm
Motto: It's thinking...
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by Chao Professor »

It's there, but the chances of it turning up are pretty tiny since it's the rarest egg.
Image It's still thinking...
User avatar
UltimaNumber
Chao Expert
Chao Expert
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon Mar 27, 2017 3:18 am
Motto: I'm just a number
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by UltimaNumber »

Has that really been determined? I thought the rarest was Topaz because of this topic: https://chao.hippotank.com/forum/viewto ... 32&t=47614

We really should look into the coding or something and really determine the odds of every egg appearing in the store and what causes them to appear.
Always happy to see Number and his 12 daughters and 6 sons.

My YouTube stuffs
User avatar
Chao Professor
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 234
Joined: Sun Jun 29, 2014 4:58 pm
Motto: It's thinking...
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by Chao Professor »

Huh, I didn't know about this, that's pretty cool. I've seen Onyx in Advance 2, but not Topaz. I agree, it'd be really cool to dig through the code and find out the true odds.
Image It's still thinking...
User avatar
Mamkute
Chaos Chao
Chaos Chao
Posts: 2498
Joined: Sun Jun 19, 2011 6:25 am
Location: California

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by Mamkute »

I did some preliminary testing on those numbers.

I checked eggs spawning in the TCG 100 times, and the results were mostly in line with the guide. In those 100, I never got a Topaz egg, and got 3 Onyx eggs.


I can try for another 100 some time soon. Weirdest anomaly I got was 10 Aquamarine eggs, when the rate should have been half that. But even that is well within reasonable results.
Image
azureprism
Evolved Chao
Evolved Chao
Posts: 99
Joined: Fri Sep 29, 2017 12:48 pm
Motto: without memes i will die

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by azureprism »

I've seen every available egg in Sonic Advance 1, but I never counted the times a certain colour appeared. Topaz and Onyx did take forever to pop up when I finally had enough rings to buy them and was waiting for them to appear in the shop, though.
User avatar
UltimaNumber
Chao Expert
Chao Expert
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon Mar 27, 2017 3:18 am
Motto: I'm just a number
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by UltimaNumber »

I plan to test the probability soon as well, but also seeing if the 3:1 ratio in the guide is also true. I might actually be able to look into the coding with VBA to see if there's any variables that spawn certain eggs, and if I can edit that, I can see what values spawns certain eggs. We'll see.
Always happy to see Number and his 12 daughters and 6 sons.

My YouTube stuffs
User avatar
UltimaNumber
Chao Expert
Chao Expert
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon Mar 27, 2017 3:18 am
Motto: I'm just a number
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by UltimaNumber »

Well, I found where what value spawns what egg, but I can't find where it's pulling from to get the odds. I was trying to track whenever the egg changes without playing a minigame, since the Egg only generates when you open the store for the first time since playing a minigame or entering the garden, and it changes every time the hunger value changes, or when your Chao speaks or you close out of it. This responsibility is just far too much for me and I can't find where the odds would be. What I did find though is that Topaz and Onyx are not actually insanely rare, still maybe 1%, but the normal egg appears about 25% of the time.

In Sonic Advance 1, 030009C0 has the value of the egg sold in the store. When you enter the garden or finish a minigame, the value turns to FF. When you open the store, it checks if a Chao is in the garden, if not, it will still be FF, which is a normal Egg. If there is a Chao, it can be anything between 00 and 0B, 00 also being a Normal Egg. Again, I don't know where these values are pulling from to get the exact odds. (Remember, Sonic Advance 1! The other games with the tiny Chao Garden will have different values!)

Here's the values for what egg for anyone curious

00 Normal
01 Gold
02 Silver
03 Ruby
04 Sapphire
05 Emerald
06 Amethyst
07 Aquamarine
08 Garnet
09 Onyx
0A Paradot
0B Topaz
Always happy to see Number and his 12 daughters and 6 sons.

My YouTube stuffs
User avatar
Swate
Junior Chao
Junior Chao
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Jun 18, 2013 9:34 am
Motto: Striving to fully understand Chao
Location: Australia
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by Swate »

When I was trying to get my Onyx Chao from Sonic Advance 1, it took absolutely forever. I think it took me around half an hour of "check -> minigame -> exit -> repeat" to get one to show up. Aquamarines also seemed rather rare. I got multiple Topaz eggs to show up and Peridots also seemed rather common. So it seems like my experience is rather the opposite of what some others are saying here.

I decided to also do a distribution test on my Sonic Advance 1, as well as my Sonic Pinball Party. (These are in a combo pack single cartridge, for note).

Image <-- Click to enlarge.

In 120 Sonic Advance eggs, I got an alarmingly high number of Peridot eggs and an average number of Topaz eggs but not a single Onyx egg. Aquamarine eggs were the second rarest. Also of note: there were a ton of Normal and Silver eggs, but not so many Gold eggs.

In 120 Sonic Pinball Party eggs, this time I got an extreme number of Garnet eggs, an average number of Onyx eggs and not a single Aquamarine egg. So for me, it seems Aquamarine eggs are the rarest between the two versions.
However, it seems like the rarities of the 3 most expensive eggs are generally more stable in Pinball Party, and overall it is more even. So it's possible that they made the chances a lot more equal in Sonic Pinball Party vs. the older version(s).

(Btw I do definitely know it is possible to get Onyx eggs in Advance 1 and Aquamarine eggs in Pinball Party, I have seen them before. It just didn't happen during this test.)

So my results seem to match my previous line of thought. NOTE there may be much more we don't know about the way things are set. You know how there are three eggs in every SA2B Black Market that are not obtainable on that save? Well, it's possible they've tried to pull something similar in the Tiny Chao Gardens. Perhaps it so happens that, for example, my Advance 1 is a "high Peridot, low Aquamarine and Onyx" version, while others may have a "high Aquamarine, low Topaz" version, etc.

Basically what I'm saying is, we can't claim to know everything about the Tiny Chao Garden, so we must accept that they could be parameters we don't know about. All I can say is, for my version at the very least, the above results are indicative of certain eggs being common and certain eggs being rarer.

Or perhaps I just need to do a larger sample size. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
heck yeah chao :cool:
User avatar
Jeffery Mewtamer
Advanced Chaos Chao
Advanced Chaos Chao
Posts: 3234
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2011 3:59 pm
Motto: Sightless Scholar
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by Jeffery Mewtamer »

Some thoughts:

Does the above list of Jewel Coat IDs used for which egg is in the TCG market matched those used to encode Jewel Coat in a Chao's data?
What happens if you overwrite that value to something in the range 0C-FE? Assuming it doesn't crash the game or cause glitches, it might give more insight to what the game code is doing.
Does the address that holds this value really differ from one version of the TCG to another? If it does differ, does VBA have tools that can track a byte going from FF to 01, 02, 03, etc. that can make tracking down the address in other versions quicker?
That the distribution might differ from cart-to-cart is interesting. The different distributions between Advance 1 and Pinball Party make me wonder if the two games are using different RNG algorithms.

I also think it worth noting that, given how much computers rely on binary, the actual distribution might give chances out of some power of 2 rather than out of some power of 10. Assuming any validity to the above guide, a 2% chance might really be a 4/256 chance for example.

Of course, something that would be really cool is if the RNG used to determine which egg is in the TCG shop worked similar to the RNG Golden Sun: The Lost Age uses for monster drops. For those unfamiliar with GS, the RNG there reset to 0 every time you started the game from a hard reboot and was incremented by one every time the player performed one of a list of actions during battle. The rarest drops had a 1/256 drop rate and would only drop if the RNG was at 0, but if you made the killing blow with a monster's weakness, the chances went up to 4/256 and would drop with an RNG value of 0-3. This effectively turned getting rare drops from an exercise in patience and luck into a puzzle of how to quickly kill a given set of monsters so the battle ends with a super effective hit to the one with the desired drop. The TCG might use a completely differ RNG scheme, but wouldn't it be cool if you could do a cold boot, load the TCG, play a mini-game in a certain way and get exactly the egg you wanted?

But yeah, its times like this that I wish I knew ARM ASM, how to do disassemblies, and had the patience to sift through all the disassembled code that would come from the games that had a TCG.
User avatar
UltimaNumber
Chao Expert
Chao Expert
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon Mar 27, 2017 3:18 am
Motto: I'm just a number
Contact:

Re: Jewel Eggs

Post by UltimaNumber »

I did a test to maybe see an RNG table, apparently, if you don't open the store, the egg changes every time the Hunger value changes, or when the Chao talks, or when you close out of the text, or when you leave and come back, etc. It's not gonna be perfect because there are times where two events happen on the same frame, but here's what I got before that happened:

BB00000766683188
8000448B02250001
00529959583003AA (I don't know why this in underlined)
121884100

Just plug in those values to what they correspond to, I wanted to do 255 tests, as that seemed appropriate, maybe the egg order would start repeating, but I can't. I can't even find where this is pulling from.
Always happy to see Number and his 12 daughters and 6 sons.

My YouTube stuffs
Post Reply