Chocobo breeding is one of FF7's more important side quests. Some of the game's best materia can only be found by completing this. There are only a few things required; time, some luck and a massive amount of gil. Expect to spend upwards of 250k gil by the time you're done depending on how many greens you use. (As luck would have it, most mastered materia sells for 1 million or more. "All" works nicely around 1.4 million)

To start, you'll need to buy room in the stables at the chocobo farm you passed in disk 1. There are 6 stalls, each costing 10 000 gil, so 60k for all of them. You can also have up to 4 caught chocobos waiting in the pasture. Using the chocobo lure, you'll want to start catching chocobos in specific locations.

There are types of chocobo you're looking for, you'll need 2 "good" chocobos, one male and one female, as well as 2 "great" chocobos, again one of each gender. To figure out what each one is, you first need to catch them and send them back to the stables. You'll be able to see them in the pasture but still you won't know what it is until you ask Billy to bring them into a stable, at which point he'll tell you "this is a great chocobo" or "this chocobo is pretty good" when you bring them up for selection. What he says should match up with the speed you see it running at in the picture, better chocobos of course look like they're running faster.

Make sure you save before putting your new chocobos into the stables, this is very important. The reason for this being that you can tell the quality of chocobo before selecting, but the gender will NOT be revealed until its in your stable. When you have found a few already it can be very frustrating getting the same gender when you don't need it, but there is hope. If you don't get the one you want, quit the game and reload your save to just before you entered. Now before you try again, enter and exit the farm a few times as this resets the random seed generator. It's still random chance but it will certainly save you from going out and catching another one.

Good chocobos can usually be found at the tracks on the coast near the Golden Saucer. They only appear with 2 enemies called "spirals", you'll notice most if not all the others you catch there will not be what you need. Great chocobo's can be found outside of Mideel, once again, not all that you find there will be the one you need. I've also found some of the necessary chocobo's outside of Rocket Town as well but it seems to be uncommon, I wouldn't rely on that area.

When you do bring them into the stables, give them names like "GoodF" or "GreatM" (M for male F for female of course). This will help immensely when you start breeding since they dont look different from one another once they're in the stables.

Training your chocobos is as simple as buying greens and feeding them, but the nuts you need won't usually be found in shops. Lets start with greens.

Make a trip to see the Chocobo Sage. If you haven't yet, he's located close to the north crater, close to the town you snowboarded from. His cottage is surrounded by mountains, but has a small grassland spot to land the Highwind. He has the best greens (as well as the most expensive, 5000 each for Sylkis green). You'll need about 10-15 per chocobo you've caught, that should get them strong enough to race without too much trouble.

Before you head back to the farm and feed all those greens, stop on the southern tip of the North Continent, its close to the chocobo tracks in the snow, but you'll want to walk on the grass part. Make sure you have steal equipped and look for an encounter here. The island to the south also works, but what we're looking for is a red dragon-like creature with tons of HP. Stealing from this beastie will get you a carob nut, and you'll need 3 of them to do most of your breeding.

For the gold chocobo you'll need a different nut. The Zeio nut can be found on the small island in the top right side of the world map, its called Goblin Island (you can check in the menu screen) and what a surprise, you'll find goblins here. Not only can you steal the nuts from them but they will also drop on their own occasionally. You only need one though, after this you should have everything you need to start racing.

Racing is pretty much required for breeding, as it will increase your chances for getting the rare chocobos you need, and is especially necessary for getting the gold chocobo. Racing is done at the Golden Saucer's chocobo betting area. Talk to Ester, the girl who taught you how to race in disk 1 when they forced you to, she organizes the rest for you, just choose the chocobo you want to race with.

All chocobos start at rank C and it'll take 3 wins to move up each rank. You want all your chocobos at rank A. As far as odds go, you've got little to no chance of getting green or blue chocobos from breeding rank C parents, about 5%, maybe less, where as 2 rank A's can easily get it right on the first try. I've heard of people skipping this step, but you could do 20+ save/reloads and still have nothing. There is also loads of GP to be gained from these races which you can use for useful things later. Megalixir for example is worth 300GP, so its up to you if you want to keep the item or exchange it. After everyone is advanced to rank A its back to the farm for breeding, there will still be more racing to do later.

By now you should have 4 rank A chocobos, and what we are looking to get are a blue chocobo and green chocobo of opposite genders. Once again I urge everyone to save before breeding, as this will allow you to try again by entering and exiting the farm to reset the random seed, giving you another chance to get what you want.

Note that by doing this you may not even get the same color of chocobo, it might even be just a plain one, but if they are high rank your odds of getting a rare colour is good. I've had it first try more than once. I have seen both green and blue from EITHER of the combinations that follow, but it seems one is more likely than the other. Combinations are as follows:

"great" male + "good" female bred with carob nut

"great" female + "good" male bred with carob nut

When all is said and done, you should have a green chocobo and a blue, one male and the other female. At this point you will no longer need the 4 yellow chocobos you caught and they take up the other 4 stables so they can be released as you will need the space.

The black chocobo is simple enough. All you have to do is breed your blue chocobo with your green one using the last carob nut you have, but first you'll want to buy more greens for them and race both green and blue to rank A just like before. I'm unsure of the odds without doing so, but they need a few in game hours of time before you can breed them after creating them anyway, so race away. After you have your black chocobo you're almost there, just a few more familiar steps.

Your legendary friend is almost within grasp now. There is one more chocobo you need to catch, its on the northern continent on the west coastline in the snow, not far from the town you got the snowboard from. Find a chocobo with 2 bunnies and catch it (you'll have to kill the bunnies but don't worry, they're evil, you can tell :P)

When you take it back and talk to Billy about putting it in the stable he should say "This... is a wonderful chocobo!". You'll want this one to be the opposite gender of your black chocobo. Once again, please save before you put it in the stables just in case its the wrong gender, save and reset like before as needed, but all we need here is the right gender so its 50/50. Race both your black chocobo and your new "wonderful" chocobo to rank A as with all the others and head back to the farm.

Again, save before breeding these two. Breed your black chocobo with the wonderful chocobo using the Zeio nut. You should now have a new gold chocobo, congratulations :)

I hope this information was useful, feel free to ask any questions below, I'll strive to answer them as well as I can. Updates will be added as needed.