The Chocobo World gives access to many things earlier, faster, or more convenient than other methods. Among the benefits are:

• All Ultimate Weapons
  
• All Magic x100, except for Ultima and Meteor (Assuming you have Refinement abilities learned)
  
• Doomtrain GF one disc early
  
• Access to many powerful GF abilities, like Abilityx4, Status/Elem Atk/Guard, and Spd-J/Eva-J/Luck-J teaching items.
  
• All of Quistis' Blue Magic items, including Dark Matter, Power Generator, and Barrier

Additionally, with some minor exploitation, you get the following:

• Fastest way to max out HP/Str/Vit/Mag/Spr/Spd/Luck on all characters.
  
• Easy infinite Dark Matters
  
• Early access to all of Rinoa's limits, and several of Zell's.
  
• Faster access to most rare items than Disc 4 CC Group, which requires extensive preparation to abolish rules.

Most of the information of this guide is also available at Github[github.com]. This includes the code I used to figure out these tables, and which contains easy-to-use scripts to do the same yourself.

The Chocobo World can be unlocked on disc 2, when Balamb Garden gets mobile. You need to find and complete a Chocobo Forest to unlock the Chocobo World. The easiest one is very close to Shumi Village, which is marked on your world map, and is the northern most island, right above the Trabia continent.

The Chocobo Forest is the dome-shaped forest close to the village. You can either complete the minigame, or you can pay Chocoboy to catch a chocobo for you, with a trivial amount of gil.

You'll be told to name your Chicobo (baby chocobo). After you do, whenever you can access the save menu, you can send Chicobo on his adventures, or get him back home. Whenever he gets home, any items he found on his journey will be given to you.

These items are the focus of this guide.

If you play the chocobo world game, you'll notice that there are four categories of items - A, B, C and D.
Whenever you send Chicobo Home through the FF8 save menu, those items are awarded to the then-active party. Each item class has two item tables, and each table has 64 entries. When you import items, a random starting point on the table is selected, and you get the next X items, where X is the amount of items imported.
This means that if you import 64 or more items of a certain category, you are guaranteed to receive every item on that table. Each table has a few duplicate items, and you'll receive those as often as they occur.
As mentioned before, each item category has two different item tables. To switch between these tables, save your game, and then reload your save. In this Steam version, Ctrl+R is a soft reset that doesn't require a full game restart. (But it doesn't work in menu's or during dialogue)

There are multiple ways to cheat, all depending on your patience and willingness to install things.

All of them come down to the same, however: There is little to no validation on which save file belongs to which Chocoworld file. Even between saves originating from different "New game" presses, the game has never refused an import.

The basic idea is to copy a Chocoworld file to elsewhere, import, and then copy it back, so you can import the same file repeatedly.

Setup:

1. Play the game to find items. Any item you find can be imported as often as you like.
   
2. Go to C:/Users/[your username]/Square Enix/FINAL FANTASY VIII Steam/user_[some number]/
   
3. Find the file named "chocorpg.ff8". Copy it to some other folder.

Repeat as often as you like:

1. Start FF8, load your save.
   
2. Find a spot where you can access the save menu. When you load in on a save point, you may need to walk off and back onto it.
   
3. Welcome Chicobo back home. Unpack loot.
   
4. Send Chicobo back away.
   
5. Exit Game.
   
6. Copy the "chocorpg.ff8" file back to the folder noted in Setup step 3.

It mostly works the same as Manual. However, a bit of fiddling massively increases your rewards.

1. Play Chocoworld until you have at least 2 different item categories.
   
2. Open Hex Editor. I use Notepad++.
   
3. The items are stored at 0x1c (A class), 0x1d (B class), 0x1e (C class), and 0x1f (D class). Set them all to 99. The digits are stored per digit, so the hex values look identical to the actual number of items. Values including a, b, c, d, e, or f are invalid.
   
4. Continue as per the Manual Method, but you get a lot more stuff.

I wrote a Python script to be a bit more convenient than the hex editor. I extensively used it to figure out the drop tables, to figure out the Mog Bug, and to figure out how to switch between the tables. I haven't seen anyone ever document either of the latter two online.

• Install Python 3.7[www.python.org] or higher, if you don't have it yet.
  
• Install from or locally clone the Github[github.com].
  
• If cloned, navigate to the GIT folder, and run the included CLI command with:
  python chococheat [command]
• If installed, run the CLI with:
  python -m chococheat [command]
• Run the following commands:

1. init --auto
   
2. run

The tool will keep running. You can now run FF8, and repeatedly send the Chicobo on his journey and home again, importing a full set of items every 4-ish seconds.

You can also explore the tool some more with it's included information by suffixing any command with --help.

Here is a little bit more information in case you decide to play around with the Hex editor.

Note that in basically all cases, numbers are notated oddly in this format. Instead of just storing it as a regular 8-bit integer, numbers are stored as 2 4-bit integers. As a consequence, their semantic meaning corresponds with how they look in hexadecimal format.

Most of this is a modified version of this Guide[gamefaqs.gamespot.com], though most of the byte addresses are slightly different.
The important parts are the red-bordered nodes. In order, they are:

1. MiniMog Event Control. Important to the Mog Bug.
   
2. Chicobo's level. Note that 00 has a meaning of level 100.
   
3. Chicobo's current and max HP. Raise to make Chocoworld play easier. Chocoworld recalculates this on every level-up.
   
4. Chicobo's weapon. Whenever Chicobo attacks, one of those four numbers are randomly chosen, and that is how much damage he deals. Raise to make Chocoworld play easier.
   
5. Rank. Affects item drop rates, though the old guides made for the Pocketstation are no longer accurate - even in normal play, this version of FF8 let me find A-class items in the Chocoworld despite having a rank of 6, where it used to be that 4 or better was required. Valid values are 00-06, which corresponds to 1-7 in most of the older guides.
   
6. Item counters. The game uses 2 different formats for this. When you start a new game, it is a different format, and I don't know how to decode that. However, when you have at least 2 different categories of items, it switches to this format, which has the items in order, by class, from starting with A, and then B, C and D.

Please note that this section requires either manual hex-editing the Chocoworld file, or a tool similar to the one on my Github[github.com]. The Mog Bug requires a file that cannot be created through normal play of the Chocobo World.

Sometimes, setting the Mog Status to invalid values will bug out Table 2 for B-class items. The Mog event status is contained at 0x07 in the file. If Chicobo's level (0x08, the next byte) is 10 or higher (encoded with 4 bits per digit, so it translates to how it looks in hexadeicmal), you can set the Mog byte to 03 (Hex). After that, importing a file with sufficient B-class items will bug the droptable.

Importing only B-class items only gives you some low-quality stuff, but if you have a large amount of drops that would normally sort below the Mog's Amulet in the reward screen, there are several goodies you cannot get from a non-bugged import. These are:

• All Pet Pals
  
• All Occult Fans
  
• All Weapon magazines
  
• Combat King 001, 003, and 005.

As far as I can tell, only Table #2 for B-class items bugs out this way.

While I haven't managed to destroy any of my own game saves, if you do manage to blow up yours, I'm not responsible.