Just got an enhanced zolnixi essence from a mission and decided to use it to make one of my goal pets instead of selling it. Sounds great, right?

Aren't enhanced essences supposed to not mess up your colors?!?!

My beautiful glowing fox turned into some drab green-yellow mess. So I went out and bought a dye and guess what? It looks even worse now! What was supposed to be a starlight-themed beauty is now some sort of puky grey-green shade of olive. And I don't have enough for another dye ;-;

What she was supposed to look like:


How she turned out and what she looked like after the 100k pet dye:


This isn't the first time either. The dark-brown beginning of one of my breeding projects was also made with an enhanced essence and she turned out burgundy.

Why, generator, why ;-;

That problem occurs most often with light colors, Arien. As I understand it, it works a bit like this.

Here's a selected color, a sort of medium-light turquoise.


The Generator isn't likely to give me exactly 64cccc. It's going to "swing" a little bit. Let's say it's going to swing, that is, move, up to 25 points in any direction. The color could therefore end up matching any of the 4 little circles I drew below, or any color in-between them and the original 64cccc color.

This is still giving us just several different variations on medium-light turquoise.

Now, watch what happens when I pick a really light color.

Extremes 1 and 2 are not so bad, they are still recognizably grey-green, like the original color (b1c9b2). But 3 hits the limits of the color field and bounces in a random direction, giving a lot of possibilities.

However, Extreme 4 is the worst of all, because, if the Generator swings the color in that direction, the arrow (depicting all the possible color swing in that direction) hits white. From white, it can easily "bounce back" into some other color!

It could finish up over in magenta--


Or orange--


Or a bunch of other places.

I don't know anything to do about it other than be aware of it and be prepared for a lot of work and frustration if you design using very light colors. Sorry.

The same phenomenon occurs with very dark colors, too. I lost count of how many times I had to fix a black that had turned dark green, or dark red...

Greater pet dyes (bought in the diamond store) are the best to fix those awry colors.

I love what you did with the visuals. Are these based on your experiences or just an example?

Just my attempt to illustrate Krin's explanation of why color swing can get wacky at the extremes, Flute. I had to go by memory of what he wrote, because I can't seem to find the thread now.

And yeah, I exaggerated the swing in the illustrations to make it easier to figure out.

My own greatest problems with swing have been with dyes, since I seldom bother with Essences. The Star-Crossed Qitari project used up a lot of Greater Pet Dyes, since even those only got the colors within parameters about 2/3 of the time. After awhile, I stopped counting how many Greater Dyes I was using, because it was too depressing. (However, I now have a filly who is 71% pure Star-Crossed!)