That's where essences come in handy - you can generate pets to your specific wants. There's... often some color swing, though ^.^;;

Do dyes carry through when breeding?

Yep. Once you dye a pet, its future offspring's colors will reflect the dye color. It won't change colors for offspring born before the pet was dyed, though.

Short answer:

The way colors work is that--for each color slot--the children have a random color in between the colors of the parents. (so if the parents have the exact same colors as each other, then so will their children)


Long answer:

If you go to the generator with random colors, you can see the values if you click on a color slot.

There is R (red value), G (green value), B (blue value), H (hue value), S (saturation value), and B (brightness value).

Each of these has a number between 0 and 255, and mixing all these numbers makes the different colors. With every color slot, the children get a random value in between their parents' values for all six of these color identifiers.

If you play around with the color generator, you can click on a color and see what numbers come up. You'll notice that most bold colors have really high values for one or more of the identifiers!

So if one parent has a high value in something, and another parent has a low value, the offspring will have a value somewhere in the middle (not the exact middle value, but a random value in between the parents). If you play around with the generator again, you'll see that most of those middle colors look muddy or pastel...

Also, a bold green pet, for example, might have a really high green value but a low red one. A bright red pet might have a high red value but a low green one. Breeding the two together will generally result in a muddy looking pet with middle values in both...

That is why there are so many "dishwater" or pastel pets when people randomly breed two pets together.

Also, if two pets have widely different color values, then the number of different colors the offspring can have is almost endless!

That makes so much sense. I can understand how breeding would pick a random color between the parent's colors-- which does sound like there would be a trend toward the middle colors. Which in this case is the washed-out ones.

Thank you so much. -plans things in her head-