Lore-Writer's Blog: Skin Inheritance (Patreon)

Update 1.0 is going to bring with it some changes to how skins work and how skins are inherited.

Aside from Skin Crafting (which is completely different and something I'll talk about later), Skin Inheritance and Gene Inheritance/Upstatting have both changed as well, to include Recessive Genes. 

Recessive Genes are inherited from an egg's parents, whichever gene was passed by the parents which did not get chosen as the dominant is saved to the recessive. Each parent has a set of dominant and recessive genes, and a pair of dominant and recessive skins. If a father passes his iconic dominant skin and the mother passes her melanistic recessive skin, the egg will be an iconic skin dom with the melanistic saved as the recessive. Each parent has 2 possible skins genes to pass on, which may or may not be the same skin, but the parent will only pass one each. So if each parent had 2 different skins, that's a total of 4 skins in their gene pool, which then they could pass 1 each to their eggs. Which skin passes depends on skin rarity.

There are 6 rarities, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Hybrid, Exotic, & Legendary. The more rare a skin is, the more recessive it is when nesting. If the father is IconicD/IconicR, then no matter what, he is going to pass on Iconic which is a Common skin and very dominant. If the Mother was a MelanisticD/MelanisticR, she'd pass on Mela to the egg. The Egg would be Iconic with Mela recessive. If two Iconic/Mela dragons nested together, the possibilities would be:

Iconic/Iconic = IconicDR
Iconic/Melanistic = IconicD/MelanisticR
Melanistic/Melanistic = Melanistic

Anytime two skins are passed on to the egg of the same rarity, a dragons Dominance trait comes in to help select the skin. The parent with more dominance will get a weighted advantage in their skin passing. This means it will be easier to pass on Recessive skins without the Dominant mutation, and Dominant skins with the Dominant mutation.

The skin inheritance system is changing for the better, we're making the base skin genetic and the skin customization something for the players to craft themselves. It's going to be awesome.

Update 1.0.0 will bring the new Dominant/Recessive Breeding, Upstatting, and Skin Inheritance system. The 1.0.2 Brood Watcher update will bring more changes to the Breeding system. Finally, Skin crafting will arrive in update 1.0.3. 

Thank you for your support!