So, translucent white on runes has been an issue for a while. It's been brought up before I'd even joined the site, in fact.

It hasn't really gotten much better since. The white on puffs was toned down, but not taken off completely, and other species were either untouched or had white added to them afterwards.

Here are a few examples of pets that are supposed to be pure black:


This isn't an exhaustive list of affected species, nor a full list within each species represented. As you can see, and has been pointed out in the old thread, Ny'venes are among the worst in this regard.

It's already been explained in the older post that translucent white is a nightmare to work around in themed designs. It doesn't matter if it's only a little visible, it still ruins saturated dark colors. There's a reason why a lot of themes are light-on-dark. This is that reason.



It's not great to have to give up on making a certain trait look even half decent on a themed design. I'm proud of my Peppercorns overall, but you can't deny that the rune traits look awful on them.

The reason it's possible to add things like sparkles to mutations just fine is because the white can be completely opaque, and leave the mutation color unchanged. They can, however, still suffer from the same issues if they have translucent white, like pixie dust on Bulboris:



It's perfectly possible to make runes work without extra white. Most drae runes don't have it, and they look just fine. Same with bulb & fae runes.

I know you proposed choosing the whiteness of rune traits on the old thread, but since that hasn't been implemented, my suggestion is to just get rid of the forced whiteness on traits. And please, I'm begging you to not whiten the fae runes for the revamp, or on bulbs when they get theirs.

As someone who adores geo and smokey runes on rikkis, very very very much agree. It kills me to see designers have to work so hard to make them look nice, or for them to be a trait that has to be sacrificed for the good of the design.

I have asked Krin before when he is going to fix the ny'vene runes and I believe he said, "Some time soon," but obviously that never happened.

100% this is so hard to design around and looks SO BAD. The ny'venes in particular got shafted with these horribly white runes. Please please please fix them. :( 1000% agree with cat here.

I agree with the difficulty of having to design around runes. Something can look really nice except when it comes to those traits.