FFXIV Chocobo Companion Guide: Unlocking, Leveling, and Barding

So you've got your Chocobo as a mount, you're cruising around Eorzea, and now you keep hearing people talk about this "companion" thing. That's the same bird, just in fight mode. Once it's unlocked, your Chocobo will trot along beside you in the open world, smack mobs, patch up your health, and generally make solo play a lot less painful. Casters who hate getting their spells interrupted tend to love it. So does anyone grinding FATEs on their own.

It takes a little while to set up, though. Two quests stand between you and a combat-ready bird, and then there's a whole rank system, a skill tree, four battle stances, and a pile of cosmetic armor to sort through. Here's the plain version of all of it.

Unlocking Your Chocobo Companion

First thing to get straight: the mount and the companion are the same bird. You unlock them in two stages, and the combat half doesn't open up until the second one. A lot of new players assume buying the mount means they're done. They're not.

Step one, get the mount

Before any of the companion stuff, you need the Company Chocobo as a ride. That comes from a level 20 quest called "My Little Chocobo," and the catch is you have to join a Grand Company first. The Main Scenario walks you into that choice right around the same time, so it more or less handles itself.

Which Grand Company you pick barely matters here. People agonize over it, and you really don't need to. You can switch later for a small Gil fee, and most long-time players end up ranking up all three anyway to grab their exclusive rewards. If you want a tiebreaker, pick the one based in your favorite starting city, purely so the daily turn-ins are a short walk.

The quest giver depends on your company:

• Maelstrom (Limsa Lominsa): R'ashaht Rhiki, Upper Decks, around X:13 Y:12
• Twin Adder (Gridania): Vorsaile Heouloix, New Gridania, around X:9.5 Y:11
• Immortal Flames (Ul'dah): Swift, Steps of Nald, around X:8.5 Y:9

Finish that quest and you get a Chocobo Whistle, the mount unlocks, and the follow-up quest "My Feisty Little Chocobo" opens up in your log.

Step two, the combat unlock

Once you hit level 30, head to Camp Tranquil in South Shroud. Talk to Docette at X:17 Y:28 to start "My Feisty Little Chocobo." She sends you over to Luquelot at Bentbranch Meadows, and after a short stretch of running around and thumping some nearby Ziz to learn the ropes, your bird is cleared for combat.

That's the whole gate. Reach level 30, finish that quest, and you're done with unlocks. The companion system just flips on.

Summoning It to Fight Beside You

Your bird doesn't come out for free. You pull it into the world with Gysahl Greens, which you can buy from most material vendors for 36 Gil apiece. That's basically pocket change, so grab a stack of 99 and stop thinking about it. Running out mid-farm is annoying for no good reason.

A single Gysahl Green keeps your Chocobo out for 30 minutes. You can keep feeding it more greens to extend the timer, but the cap sits at 60 minutes total. Nice touch here: the timer pauses while you're in a city, inside an instance, or sitting on the mount itself. So you're not burning minutes while you poke around a market board or stand in a queue.

When it's summoned, your Chocobo shows up as a party member. That matters, because being "in a party" slaps about a 20% cut on the battle EXP you personally earn. Usually worth the trade for the extra muscle and healing, but it's the reason your own XP bar creeps a little slower while the bird is tagging along. You can summon straight from a Gysahl Green in your inventory, or open the Companion tab in the Character menu and call it from there.

A few limits are worth knowing. The companion can't enter instanced duties at all, so no dungeons, no trials, no raids, no alliance raids. It will happily sit and wait for you if you queue with the Duty Finder, which is handy. And if the bird dies in a fight or you manually dismiss it, you'll need another Gysahl Green to bring it back out.

Leveling and the Skill Tree

Here's where folks get tangled up, so let's separate the two "levels" your bird has, because they don't talk to each other.

The first is its combat level, which always matches whatever job you're currently on. Step out as a level 90 Reaper and your bird hits like a level 90 bird. This scales on its own and you don't manage it.

The second is its Rank, and that's the one you actually grind. Every Chocobo starts at Rank 1 and tops out at Rank 20. Ranking up earns Skill Points (SP), and SP is what you spend in the skill tree to teach it new tricks.

How skill points add up

You earn more SP the higher the rank, then the gains flatten out near the top. Here's the running total at a few key ranks:

| Rank | SP earned this rank | Total SP so far | |------|---------------------|-----------------| | 1 | 1 | 1 | | 5 | 5 | 15 | | 10 | 10 | 55 | | 15 | 10 | 105 | | 20 | 14 | 165 |

The number to remember is 55. A full skill tree costs exactly 55 SP, so at Rank 10 you've got enough to max out one tree completely. At Rank 20 you hit 165 SP, which is exactly enough to max all three trees (55 times 3 is 165). So you don't have to lock yourself into one path forever. Given enough time, the bird gets everything.

Inside each tree, skills unlock in order, and each one costs its own level in SP. The first skill is 1 SP, the second is 2, and so on up to 10. You can't skip ahead. Botched your build? Feed the bird a Reagan Pepper to wipe the points and start over. One Reagan Pepper comes from your Grand Company Quartermaster for 48,000 Company Seals, or from your Hunt Billmaster for 20 Allied Seals.

Pushing past Rank 10

Ranks 1 through 10 fill up naturally as you fight. Rank 11 and beyond each need a Thavnairian Onion, and here's the fussy part: you can only feed the onion when your current rank's EXP bar is completely full. Feed it, the cap ticks up by one, and you grind the next bar.

Onions are a genuine pain. Growing one yourself takes around 10 days of gardening in a house plot (apartments don't have the right beds), with watering roughly every 48 hours or the crop dies. Because of that, most players skip the farming and just buy onions off the Market Board. If you're on the Free Trial and can't trade or use the board, the workaround is to find a friend with a house who'll add you as a Tenant with gardening rights. There are also two free onions tucked into side quests in Heavensward zones ("Landing a Stable Job" in The Pillars, and one late in a chain in The Dravanian Forelands) if you want to scrape a couple together.

Where the EXP actually comes from

The bird only earns companion EXP from a narrow set of sources, and a lot of the obvious stuff gives it nothing:

• Killing monsters around your level out in the open world
• Enemies during a FATE, since your level syncs down to match the zone
• Two Challenge Log entries: Bosom Buddies I (20 kills, worth 5% of the current rank bar) and Bosom Buddies II (100 kills, worth 10%)
• Training once per hour at a Chocobo Stable in player housing

Notice what's missing. FATE completion XP, Levequests, and regular story quest rewards all give the bird zero. So pushing the main story with the Chocobo out won't level it at all. You have to be actively killing things.

The weekly Challenge Log is the real workhorse, because the Bosom Buddies rewards scale with your Chocobo's rank, so they stay meaty all the way up rather than going stale. FATE farming is the natural pairing, since the level sync keeps everything inside the sweet spot for companion EXP, and mob-spawn FATEs beat single-boss FATEs for raw bird XP.

One more lever: Curiel Root. Feed it to a summoned Chocobo and it boosts the battle EXP the bird earns. The catch is it only affects kills, not stable training or the Challenge Log, and no NPC sells it, so it's back to gardening or the Market Board. Worth running while you're pushing ranks, pointless once you hit Rank 20. Free Company buffs can add a companion EXP bonus on top of that too, so if your FC has one running, pop the bird out during it.

A rough sense of the curve: the climb from Rank 1 to Rank 2 is just 4,000 EXP and flies by, but reaching Rank 20 in total takes about 29.5 million companion EXP, with over 25 million of that crammed into ranks 11 through 20 alone. The early ranks are quick. The back half is a marathon, which is exactly why the weekly Challenge Log matters so much.

Stances That Fit How You Play

Once your bird has at least one skill in a tree, it learns that tree's stance. Stances tell the Chocobo what to actually do in a fight, and you've got four of them. You swap between them in real time from the Companion tab.

Free Stance

The Chocobo auto-attacks and uses whatever skills it has unlocked, picking for itself. This is the lazy default and, honestly, often the best option once your bird is fully leveled. The reason is a bit hidden: the weaponskill cooldowns in the Attacker tree and the Defender tree don't share a timer. So a maxed bird in Free Stance can fire attacks from both trees back to back and still toss out its heals in between. You get more total output than parking it in Attacker Stance.

Defender Stance

The bird plays tank. Sounds handy on paper, and in practice it's the weak one. A Chocobo struggles to hold enmity against a real player's damage output, and in Defender Stance it can't cast any Healer spells even if you've unlocked them. So it just melts without you babysitting its health bar. For that reason, most players skip the Defender tree early and only fill it in later, once the other two are done, just to round out the SP.

Healer Stance

No auto-attacks here at all. The bird purely casts heals on you, itself, and anyone nearby. It drops Regen out whenever the party takes a hit, fires Choco Cure (a 300-potency heal) when something falls below about 75% health, and pops Choco Surge on cooldown for a healing potency spike. It also sticks close behind you, so mind where you drag it, since ground AoEs will still clip a bird that's trailing on your heels.

For solo players this is the comfort pick. A bird in Healer Stance will keep you upright through a lot of sloppy pulls, which is gold for casters who keep eating interrupts or anyone doing long open-world grinds. Tanks and DPS players generally get the most mileage out of leveling this tree first.

Attacker Stance

Pure damage. Auto-attacks plus only the Attacker tree's weaponskills, things like Choco Slash and the cone finisher Choco Blast (170 potency to everything in front of it). Healer players who don't need the extra patching-up tend to lean here for faster kills, and it pairs well with a DPS-heavy playstyle where the bird is just there to add numbers.

Picking a favorite food

There's a favorite-food system that ties into how your bird performs. Feed a summoned Chocobo a special food and it gets a buff for as long as it stays out. Curiel Root gives an EXP bonus, Sylkis Bud bumps attack, Tantalplant adds HP, Mimett Gourd boosts healing potency, and Pahsana Fruit raises enmity. Train the bird with the same food 10 times at a stable and that food becomes its favorite, which upgrades the field buff to a stronger tier-two version.

Only one of these buffs can be active at a time, so pick what matches your goal. If the bird keeps face-planting in fights, the HP food from Tantalplant helps it survive. If you just want things dead faster, Sylkis Bud is a solid all-rounder for every stance except Healer (which doesn't auto-attack anyway). The enmity food is mostly a trap, since the bird usually can't hold hate no matter how much you pump it.

Bardings and Naming Your Bird

This is the fun part. Barding is just armor for your Chocobo, and it's purely cosmetic. No stats, no speed bonus, nothing mechanical. It exists because your bird is your constant companion out in the open world and you're going to be staring at it for hours, so you might as well make it look good.

Each barding set comes in three pieces, head, body, and legs, and you can mix and match freely. Want a Dragoon helmet on a body from a Gold Saucer set and bare legs underneath? Go wild. Some sets are incomplete, like the Plumed Barding which is head only, and you don't even have to fill every slot if you want a plainer look. Whatever you equip on the companion also shows up when you ride the Company Chocobo mount, since it's literally the same bird wearing the same outfit.

Where bardings come from

There are around 90 bardings in the game, with about 66 of them available at any given moment and the rest tied to limited-time events or rare drops. The sources are scattered all over:

• Grand Companies sell the basic sets for Company Seals, like the Gridanian, Lominsan, and Flame barding. These are the cheap early options once you've got some seals banked.
• The Gold Saucer stocks the Gambler Barding for 20,000 MGP.
• Achievement rewards live with Jonathas by Apkallu Falls in Old Gridania, including the classic Barding of Light.
• Max out the Attacker skill tree and the game hands you the Dragoon Barding, a nice trophy for finishing a build.
• Crafters churn out a large chunk of them, usually from drops pulled out of Extreme trials.
• FATEs, daily hunts, deep dungeons, and the Island Sanctuary each have their own sets tucked away.
• And the cash shop sells plenty, if you'd rather just pay and skip the grind.

Pieces from different sets combine however you like, so a lot of the fun is in stitching together a look from five different sources.

Feathers and names

Two more customization bits round this out. You can change your Chocobo's feather color by feeding it specific foods at a stable in player housing. It's a fiddly system that nudges the bird's color values with different feeds, and there are calculators online that'll tell you exactly what to give for, say, a clean snow white or a deep red. Worth poking at once you have housing access.

As for the name, you pick one when you first get the bird. Want to change it later? You don't need a rare item or any Gil. Talk to a Chocokeep (like Luquelot at Bentbranch Meadows) in any of the main cities, or if you've got a house, click your stable, choose "Stable My Chocobo," then "Tend to My Chocobo," and select "Change Name." Quick and free, so don't stress too much about your first pick.

So that's the whole bird in one place. Get the mount at level 20, unlock the combat companion at level 30, keep a stack of Gysahl Greens on you, aim your first skill points at the Healer or Attacker tree (and leave Defender for later), and let the weekly Challenge Log carry most of the leveling work. The Dragoon Barding waiting at the end of a maxed Attacker tree is a pretty good excuse to push all the way to Rank 20.