How sobering it is

I wish I had kept better notes on chocobo raising. I'm sure I wrote down when my chocobo's endurance finally fell to "better than average," but I can't find that scrap of paper at the moment.

I do know that endurance fell to "impressive" (below 192) after day 51, and that it fell to "average" (below 96) after day 62, so the endurance loss during that time should be around 96 points over 11 days, or about 8.73 points lost per day. Yet between day 43 and day 51 its endurance was in the "outstanding" range (192-223), which corresponds to a loss of about 32 points or 4 per day, which is actually the expected loss under "digging for treasure" according to ff11wiki.

I'm not sure how to explain the rapid loss of endurance between day 51 and day 62 unless DSC+8 from successful "digging for treasure" results in END-8 after the attribute cap is reached (thought to be 640 total points across STR/END/DSC/RCP). To put it another way, the care plan normally lowers endurance by 4 points, but when the attribute cap is in effect, endurance must be lowered by 4 more points to compensate for DSC+8 (otherwise the cap would be exceeded), for a total loss of END-8. The average of 8.73 points seems to be a result of my using strength training once during that time.

Note: When the attribute cap is in effect, raising an attribute with chocobuck training (strength in my case) leads to the reduction of the highest-level attribute that is not being raised (endurance). At least that's how it's thought to work.

If this is actually true, then this is convenient for raising an 8/7/4/4 chocobo at maximum strength without too much chocobuck expense. You could raise STR and END to the max with care plans, then use chocobuck training programs to raise receptivity to 94-95 points with 19 training sessions.

After nine successful days of "digging for treasure" (hope for no failures), you should then have 72 DSC ("a bit deficient"), about 219 END ("outstanding"), and exactly 640 total attribute points. Then after three more successful days of "digging for treasure," you should have 255/195/96/94 (640 pts).

You could then retire your chocobo and use one of the 100-chocobuck training tokens to raise RCP to 96 and lower STR to 253 accordingly. Then you could use another 100-chocobuck token to raise STR back to 255 and lower END to 193 accordingly.

If that plan actually works then you would have spent "only" 1,720 chocobucks to increase your chocobo's attributes directly, or as much as 490k gil and 41 hours of free runs.

In my case, not only did I spend 2,200 chocobucks to raise receptivity to "better than average," I also used 480 chocobucks worth of training programs (2 strength, 1 endurance, 2 discernment, 1 strength) between days 43 and 62 mostly out of impatience. And to top it off, I used 400 more chocobucks (1 endurance, 4 strength) to cap strength, leaving my chocobo at SS/B/B/B.

3,080 chocobucks. Somewhere between 657,000 and 880,000 gil. Over 73 hours of free runs. In the long run, hardly anything at all.

Well, I could have tried to rein in costs a little better, but with a minimum of 16 days required to raise discernment to 128+ with care plans (without any care plan failures), there most likely wouldn't have been enough time to finish and I would've had to resort to using chocobuck training anyway. (Of course, as it turned out, I finished care plan training after day 62 and discernment had just risen to "better than average," which was cutting it really close.)