Creatures Caves | Downloads

The answer is...well, I hope it's not too difficult to understand, but takes a bit to explain in full.

First, it helps to know that a creature's genes are organized in a list, starting from Gene #0000 (which will almost always be the Genus gene; if that's not present, the game crashes) and counting up from there. For example, the CFE Grendel genome has 751 genes.

When two creatures breed and conceive an offspring, the game takes their respective gene lists and splits them up into chunks, each containing...what I believe is a random number of genes; I'm not sure what the minimum and maximum sizes of these chunks can be. The game then takes these chunks and assembles the offspring's genome from them, deciding at random which chunks to take from the father and which from the mother.

If two creatures share the same base genome (e.g. if the parents were both vanilla ChiChi Norns), then chances are their genes are mostly the same and in the same places barring random genes getting duplicated or cut over the generations, and there won't be any issues. However, when two creatures of different genomes, whose genes don't line up, problems can ensue.

To get a neon coloration, you need a creature with nine pigment bleed genes set to come in at the same lifestage and with the same values (specifically, you need Rotation, Swap, or both set to 0). In DS, the nine initial pigment bleed genes can all be set to come in at birth and the creature will keep that coloration for its entire life, but in C3 standalone such a creature will lose its color upon aging. So you'll need another nine pigment bleed genes for each lifestage you want the neon color to persist, up to 63 for the creature's entire life. Since by default there's only nine pigment bleed genes, that's 54 extra genes.

If you left these at the end of the genome, the neon creature's genome would still be longer than any non-neon creature, but assuming their genome is otherwise the same they'll still line up for the vital organs, pose genes, and so on, and the extra genes simply treated as an extra chunk. However, if you move those extra genes up to where the initial pigment and pigment bleed genes are, that puts them above a bunch of vital genes. Especially the pose genes and the brain. So effectively, these genes appear later in such a creature's genome than they would in an unedited creature.

So if such a neon creature conceives a child with a non-neon creature, chances are high it'll receive chunks from the neon parents that are full of pigment/pigment bleed genes instead of something important, receive effectively the same chunk twice (the normal parent's earlier appearing chunk, the neon parent's later appearing chunk), and so on. And this can happen to the pose and brain genes, hence creating sliders, rightwalkers, and other such maladies.

In Alma's case specifically, while I haven't looked at her genome in recent memory, knowing my tendencies at the time I feel fairly confident in saying she probably has other extra genes that were moved to other places in her genome, further throwing her genome out of sync with that of vanilla creatures (or at least the kind of creatures people other than me were playing with). If she doesn't crossbreed well because of her extra pigment/pigment bleed genes, it's probably because of those other extra genes.