Reynbowz's Breeding Guide
~a comprehensive guide to sylesti breeding~

IMPORTANT:
Please read the guide before asking questions to avoid cluttering the thread.
If you don't want to read the guide, please post your question in a separate thread. Thank you.

This guide is currently under construction! Don't mind the mess.
If you still have unanswered questions after reading, just send me a message and ask. I will be glad to help you.

Table of Contents
Intro page/TOC
Aging
Breeding
Advanced Breeding

Aging

Before we get into any talk of breeding, let us first note that pets can only mate and have offspring if they are old enough.
A Sylesti can only breed once it has reached the adult stage. How long this takes will depend on how young your pet was when it came into being.
Eggling to Hatchling = 3 Days
Hatchling to Adolescence = 6 Days
Adolescence to Adult = 18 Days

If you caught your pet in the wild with a trap, it may be an Adult already and you won't have to wait to start breeding. However, if the Sylesti was attained via a generator, it will start out as an Adolescent and will take 18 days to mature into adulthood. Adolescents can be caught with traps in the wild as well.
Finally, some pets may be obtained as eggs: either via breeding, finding eggs abandoned in the wild, or purchased from the scale shop. A pet obtained as an egg will take a 27 days to reach an age at which it can finally bear offspring. That's a lot of waiting!

There are three ways to speed up the maturation process of a pet. The first is out of the user's control: when another user Nurtures your egg in the Nurturing game found by clicking "Help Nurture Sylesties" from a Hatchery. The second way is to have another user view your egg's profile. Lastly, a Magical Pie from the Diamond Shop will age an Adolescent by 72 hours ( 3 days ) when used. This is the most potent, though costly, method of aging a pet.

Recruiting

Before you start breeding, you'll need to gather some pets to use as parents. If you're taking advantage of the breeding feature, you'll be looking for pets with genes/mutations ( traits ) to pass down. There are a few ways to acquire pets like these.

Catch: The quickest, most simple way is to catch one in the wild. Look for Uncommon pets, as Common pets will never carry or display any traits. Uncommon pets have the chance of having one visible or carried traits. Watch out for dynamic events, where you can find Rare pets that have a chance of displaying two traits! Caught pets are often Adults, so you won't have to wait before you can breed them.

Hatch: This method is slower and less reliable, but it's an option. Sometimes you may find an egg wild roaming, either in a chest or out in the open. These pets may or may not display or carry a trait. You can also buy an egg from the Scale shop, which will have a better chance of hatching into a pet with carried or displayed traits the more expensive it's sold for. You'll have to wait 27 days for the baby to hatch and grow to adulthood though, and you won't know what pet species is inside or what colours it will have.

Mutate: You can use a Genetic Mutator, purchasable from the Scale Shop, to randomly add GP to the pet it's used on. Not quick, not reliable, but you might as well spend those accumulated scales from Nurturing somewhere.

Generate: The most reliable method, though not fast and certainly not cheap. Regular Essences will generate pets with 2GP and an inaccurate approximation of your selected HEX colours. An Enhanced Essence will produce 4GP pets and be more accurate, whereas Mythical Essences will produce 4GP pets with the exact HEX colours you want. Unfortunately Essences aren't easy to come by. You can win them randomly as battle spoils, from the Nurturing game, Jynxie's Jamboree, forum games, or in satchels and treasure boxes. Reliable, though possibly expensive. Remember that you'll have to wait 18 days for your generated pet to become an adult before it can breed.

Breeding

As you may have noticed, pets can either carry or display genes/mutations, depending on how many Genotype Points (GP) are allotted into a particular trait. 2GP are needed for a trait to be displayed. 1GP is enough for a trait to be carried, but it won't be visible on the pet. When a trait is "carried", that means that the trait can be passed down to a future generation through breeding. Here's when we get to the interesting part.

Let's say we have two pets of the same species, each with 2GP in their own trait. One has wings, whom we shall refer to as Lucy. You can see her wings because she has 2GP in the wing trait. The other Sylesti has 2GP in the horn trait, so that he has a visible horn. We'll refer to the horned Sylesti as Bob. Also, we'll refer to the wings gene as gene A, and the horn gene as gene B. ( in this diagram, genetic points will be represented as coloured dots in boxes, as shown. Orange = gene A, blue = gene B )

There are four possible outcomes from mating Bob and Lucy together. For the sake of example, we will pretend that Bob and Lucy had four babies, each displaying the four genetic possibilities of Bob and Lucy's potential offspring. Note that all the potential offspring from these two parents will have no visible horns or wings. They will look like a Common individual of the family's species when found in the wild. The difference is purely in what invisible genes the offspring may carry. I have depicted carried traits as ghosty wings/horns. This is to demonstrate offspring as being carriers of genetic traits, even though you can't actually see those traits in the pet art.

The first baby, named Bucy, turns out to have 1GP in gene A. It is a carrier of the wings gene, but not the horn gene. The next baby has 1GP in gene B; this one will be named Lob, carrying the horn gene but not the wings gene. Third comes Blob, who inherited no Genetic Points at all from either parent, and will carry neither wings nor horns. Unfortunately, Blob is a genetic "deadweight": it cannot contribute any special genes to its theoretical offspring, and thus breeding Blob will be counterproductive to attaining an offspring with multiple visible traits. Sorry, Blob. No offense. Finally, we come to the offspring we are looking for. The last child of Bob and Lucy is Boblucy, who ended up with 1GP in gene A and 1GP in gene B. Like its other siblings, Boblucy will have no visible traits. However, out of all its siblings, Boblucy is the only one to be a carrier of both genes A and B! Wow, Boblucy is so special. Getting an offspring like Boblucy is very important towards obtaining a multi-trait offspring.

The real exciting part happens when you manage to get two offspring like Boblucy of the opposite sex. Upon breeding them, you have the chance of begetting a Sylesti who has 2GP in gene A as well as 2GP in gene B, for a total of 4GP and two visible traits! This kind of Sylesti is only otherwise attainable by catching a Rare ( blue stars ) pet in the wild ( very rarely ), or by using an Enhanced Essence. You have a 1/16 chance of getting an offspring like Bloblob, so get ready to do a lot of breeding!

Below is an example genetic tree to breed a 4GP Sylesti:


The process described here can also be repeated to breed more Sylesti with even more than 4GP, and eventually three or more visible traits! So we see why breeding can be a powerful tool towards attaining very rare, very nice looking pets.

An example genetic tree for a quadvis offspring:

Advanced Breeding

We're playing with the big kids now! You're ready to breed pets with 3+ visible traits. We know from before this will require some luck getting carriers to beget displayers. If you happen to be filthy rich, you may have generated some 4GP pets already. Since you're such a big hotshot breeder, we're going to start using actual genetic terms in order to more fully understand the site's system of genetics. Wow, look at you. Give yourself a pat on the back.

You will find that breeding two parents who have the same trait visible will result in the offspring displaying that trait visibly 100% of the time. If both parents have only 1GP in a trait, the child has a 25% chance of displaying that trait (inherited total 2GP), 50% chance of being a carrier (1GP), and 25% of losing the trait altogether (0GP).
A way to understand how this happens is to think of pets as having "positive" alleles and "negative" alleles. Let's take another look at the Brady Bunch:


Looking at the same scenario as before, we now realize that spaces that didn't have GP alloted weren't necessarily "empty". Instead, they actually had a sort of "anti-GP" there that prevented the trait from being visible. Here we have changed the coloured dots to coloured smilies for clarity. These smileys are what geneticists refer to as alleles. Some alleles are dominant to other alleles. In this case, an anti-smiley (the allele for nothing) is always dominant to a ☺.
For every trait slot (ie., Gene One vs Gene Two), a parent is capable of passing down ONE allele to the offspring. The other parent does the same, resulting in the normal two alleles for the offspring. But the only way that the trait can be expressed visibly is if there are no "anti"-alleles. Just one is enough for the Sylesti to be a carrier though.

Interestingly, some traits occupy the same trait slot. For example, Henna and Koi both occupy Gene Two on a Sylvorpa. So what happens if, say, a parent showing Henna breeds with a parent showing Koi?
Here we get into the dominance and recessiveness of same-slot traits.


If you want to know precisely how likely ( read: unlikely ) a particular result may be, try this genetic calculator. You can only calculate 5 traits max, but hopefully you get the idea. Just replace the letters with something that will be easy for you to recognize as a particular trait ( I use Ns for "anti-traits" ), and remember that a trait will only be visible with two recessive alleles.

Accumulating GP
There are two ways to go about this. I'll compare the two methods and you can choose whichever you want, but I prefer the slow and steady method and I'll explain why.


Let's say we want to end up with three visible traits. The simplest way to go about this is to have two pets carrying the three traits, 1GP in each, and breed them until you finally get a triple vis offspring. Although this method requires less thinking, I dislike it because you will have to do A LOT of breeding and waiting around till you finally get that "perfect" offspring. This is because each trait only has a 25% chance of becoming visible. Thus, you only have a ~1.56% chance of getting what you want, so you'll likely be trying and failing for a long, frustrating time unless you are so lucky you can get a perfect offspring on the first try in which case congratulations go buy a lottery ticket.

The second method is more intellectually complicated but I prefer it because it gives the breeder a greater sense of control over the outcome, helping decrease frustration. Also your chances of getting to your goal are higher and you will probably get there faster than with the unreliable first method.

In this method both parents will have 3GP each, just like the first method. The difference is they will have one visible trait and one carried trait each, rather than three carried traits. One parent's visible trait should be uncarried by the other parent, and vice-versa. The remaining trait should be carried by both parents. With this set-up, your ideal outcome will be offspring with a visible trait and two carried traits, which you can later breed again for triple vis. The disadvantage here is that you will need two sets of parents to accommodate the anti-incest feature and you'll have to wait a month for the offspring to be able to breed. That said, your chances of getting ideal offspring are much better at a 25% chance, so you are likely to be more successful than if you used the first method. Also, you will probably take at least that long anyways trying so many times with the first method.

Extra reserved post

and one more, just in case!

Open~~~~~~~~~~~

OMG hahaha, I love this! And it's so easy to understand <3 Great job Reyn!

Nice guide.
I have been wondering if there's a possibility to get a visible gene when one has the gene either visible or carried and the other doesn't ... ?

Short answer: No.
Long answer: For each gene or mutation, a single parent is capable of contributing 1GP max to the offspring. Since 2GP are needed for a gene or mutation to be visible, and since a child of the parents from the scenario you described could only possibly end up with 1GP in the desired trait, the offspring could only possibly be a carrier. Your chances are better with the 2GP parent than with the 1GP parent, of course ( 100% chance vs. 50% chance ).