Color swing makes sense for dyes and essences. It allows several versions of the same item to exist - take your chances with the cheaper variant or pay for the accuracy of the premium one.

For themed pets though, I find it incredibly frustrating that a rare find or growing pet can just... look terrible for no particular reason.

Here's an example of official themed colors:

Versus offspring of the exact same theme:


And these are offspring - this means the parents had worse color swing that wasn't visible. There's not really any reason for them to look so different from what was intended. The Forgotten Heretics are found in the temple. They're endgame-level content. Why is it that players can grind for hours to reach the final stage and the costly rare pets they find aren't even the colors they were designed to be?

Here's another temple theme with awful color swing.

That's green. They're not meant to be anywhere close to green .-. They were designed to be purple.


It's also not fun to be forced to keep color swing in mind when designing for themed contests. I've tried to avoid it to the best of my ability - no pure whites/greys/blacks, usually opting for desaturated bluish greys - but clearly that didn't work with the Forgotten Heretics. Light colors get messed up so often. It's weird explaining to newer designers, "you can't really use these colors because the game is coded in a way that will ruin your design, and there's nothing you can do about it :D"


And I've noted that color swing seems to be worse on growing pets with lesser materials used on them. I guess it seems logical that pets that had more spent on them get more accurate colors, but it feels more like a punishment for not adding more traits. Not to mention, I still get questionable colors on pets that did have greater fertilizer used.

A griffi that ended up 1c after I had forgotten to send fertilizer to the player growing it, side by side with the official theme colors.

The difference should not ever be that drastic. She has a trait I wanted for my project, but I'm hesitant to use her because the colors are so far off from what they're meant to be. It'll look awful on offspring - breeding preview with my 3v griffi. No themed pet should have more color swing than a greater dye. Any inherent value in breeding is wasted. I know I could use a dye to get the chance to reset her colors, but I shouldn't have to. One of the reasons why themed pets' preset colors are valuable for project breeders is that dyes don't have to be used.

The fact that a pet is themed alone should be enough to give them the right colors. Please reduce color swing on themed pets :')

Oh, geez...I didn't realize the swing could be that big! This entire time I thought it was just from players that used a dye once for some reason, making an off color.

100% support; I'll never be able to look at Themed and their originals ever again /hj

100% support. Thankfully ive never noticed severe color swing on any themes i have but that lune really is something... xP

Support.

Never really paid attention to it before since I don't tend to do much with themes, but yeah. That difference on the female griffi is huge. It looks more like a cross with a dishwater than a gen 1 theme.

The colors of the pet Skor linked with 6 traits put on it vs the official Sylvan Sunbeam colors:

The actual theme colors look coherent and vibrant. It looks good, which is the whole point of a theme. The extreme color swing ruins it. I don't see a reason why themes need this done to them.

While I'll always favor less color swing, don't forget that using a dye on a themed will let you reset the colors back to default for a theme, removing the dyed symbol while at it. Of course it can take a few attempts at times.

I'll use this bulbori as an example.

She starts out like this with some pretty bad color 1 swing.



One lesser dye and we get this.




If only I could do this on pre-tag themes. The color swing back then was a lot worse and there's some really mind boggling ones in my stables.

This thread reminded me of my two vibrant lagoon puffs that accidentally turned out as 1c :"))



For comparison, this is the official themed colors according to the codex.


While I'm not opposed to some color swing in themed pets, I agree with Skor in that it's a little too much at the moment.

As an experiment, if I sent you a lesser dye, could you use it on one of them to reset it's colors? I'm thinking even the lesser dye must act as a higher trait pet version of color swing.

My perspective is that it makes my particular themed pet unique. I'm major into variations and it's exciting to see that happen. I can see how it is frustrating for people who want exact copies of the colors. I would be happy if there would be a compromise that would allow for the variation for the ones who like it and also allow people to set the colors to be accurate for those who don't.

Support.

I personally don't mind because I kinda like the variation with some of the generated projects I do, but with themes they really shouldn't end up an entirely different color from what the design was.

This is an intended mechanic since the beginning. We have obviously dialed it way down from the early days, but it still is there for a reason. We want pets to have variance and we want some to be more precise than others, thus increasing the value of those with truer hexes.

Now, with the Themed Pet Codex, it's at least possible and much easier to compare live pets with the official colors.