How to Choose Yoshi Colors in Paper Mario: TTYD

Partway through Chapter 3 - Of Glitz and Glory in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and the TTYD remake, you’ll receive an odd egg that doesn’t wish to be eaten. It will join your party and eventually hatch into a Yoshi that you can name. What color the little critter comes out as, however, can vary upon a variety of things, but can be manipulated to get the color you desire. Here’s how to get the Yoshi Kid to be the color you choose.

In short, what color your Yoshi Kid is will depend on how long it takes between when you recruit it and when it hatches in real time. The egg hatches following your first guaranteed losing battle against the Iron Adonis Twins when you get back to the locker room.

The color cycle goes as follows and resets back at 0 after 20 minutes:

0-6 minutes: Green
6:01-9 minutes: Red
9:01-11 minutes: Blue
11:01-15 minutes: Orange
15:01-18 minutes: Pink
18:01-19 minutes: Black
19:01-20 minutes: White

Keep reading below for complete details, including which activities count towards the time cycle and what does not.

How To Hatch The Yoshi Egg

Once you make it through several fights in the Glitz Pit and get to rank 14 (or win 6 fights), one of the minor league locker room NPCs will mention to you that the hot dog stand has a unique egg recipe it is offering. Go to the stand and you’ll find the hot dog stand owner struggling to catch an egg that’s hopping around.

When you step over to help, the little dickens keeps jumping around and eventually hops to the top of the hot dog stand. You can reach it by butt stomping on the large blue exclamation box to the far right of the Glitzville main screen. This will lower some stairs. Climb these, jump on the spring up here, and you’ll find a paper airplane tile. Take this to fly across the square to the egg. Speak to it and it will join your party.

The egg will stick around with you until you reach the Rank 11 fight in the Glitz Ring against the Iron Adonis Twins. Before you confirm the Ranked Match for this, exit the locker room and save the game on one of the hallway save cubes. This fight is unwinnable, so your best bet is to run away. When you get back to the locker room, your Yoshi will have hatched and you will see your colorful kid.

How To Manipulate the Egg Time Cycle

If you wish to reset the color you got, you have to have saved at any point between getting the egg and activating the Ranked Match against the twins. Once you save after the egg has hatched, you cannot change it. You can then try and manipulate the time clock to get your desired color. Some notes we’ve discovered about what counts and what doesn’t towards the time cycle:

What WILL move the cycle forward
- Time with the game paused
- Game running while not paused
- Time spent in-battle

What WILL NOT move the cycle forward
- Cutscene time (not even the ~2:30 minutes of unskippable dialogue/cutscenes between confirming your match against the Adonis Twins and getting back to the locker room)
- Paper Mario and the Thousand-Year Door on standby in the Switch’s background (this includes sleep mode)