Is there a reason why so many of the pets for sale or for breeding are pastel colored? Granted, they can be very pretty in shades of pale blue and pink, but I wouldn't expect people to purposefully breed so many pets to be pastel.

And on the flipside, there are so very few pets that are rich shades of brown or red.

Does breeding fade out the pets' colors? Is there a way to breed pets, without the colors fading? Are people just using lots of dyes, when they finish a breeding project?

On Sylestia, we have a term called "dishwater pets" - pets that are just bred randomly without much regard for colors or even traits. Perhaps due to the number of light-colored pets that are already out there, the number just keeps growing...

If you look for specific projects (in the breeding discussion fora, probably) or for themed pets, you'll be much more likely to get vibrant colors. If you specifically breed pets with the same colors as each other, they won't "fade" (though there will be very slight variations, especially if you're starting from regular essences).

I can't speak for other species, but lup themes in particular have a lot of rich browns and reds:
https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=4072159
https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=4110557
https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=1278224
https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=1458482
https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=1192100
https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=3826919

Breeding doesn't fade colours, or else PB breeding projects would never work.
It's probably got a lot to do with non-PB 6-vis projects that don't care abut colours just using whatever pets have the traits they're after, so after a while, with... however it is exactly that the breeding generator decides the colours of offspring between the colours of parents.

Basically, if one parent has black/grey/white then the overall saturation of the offspring is going to be lessened. Even if it's just a little bit lighter in one generation, a lot of back-breeding tends to happen in 6-vis projects, and over time the overall saturation decrease adds up.
Additionally, breeding certain colours together (like green c1 x red c1) will throw less saturated stuff a lot because colour theory?

The trick is that people who actually had a goal non-PB colouration in mind when they started just dye the pets that end up with all the traits they want so they can breed those and sell them for a far higher price than the dishwater failures of previous gens would go for.


At least, this is how we'd explain it.

I'd seen that term, 'dishwater pets', but hadn't been entirely sure what it meant. I've been looking for Zolnixis.

Do you know why they do that, though? Or how the coloring works, when you breed? I've seen threads for how trait-breeding works, but not colors.

What is a PB breeding project?

Ah, yeah, nixies are... kind of the worst, haha. They're really common, so they also tend to have a lot of bad colorings.

Like Scath explained above, if you just breed a lot of pets that have all different color schemes, the colors of the offspring get all muddy, and for some reason, they seem to get lighter the more generations there are...? I don't think anyone really knows how it works. The system just kind of decides which way the colors should swing, and we're all stuck with it unless we use dyes.

PB is Purebred/Purebreed, aka, pets that only have a single theme type in their ancestry (you can see if a pet is by the blue star + blue tag in their genetics section, and the blue stars in their lineage.)

Basically a PB project is where you have a theme and you breed only that theme together to get to a certain goal eg. 6-vis/ certain set of traits/ max stats.



Example:



Purebreed Sunbather Gazania Nytekrie (4th generation)



Purebreed Sunbather Gazania Nytekrie (8th generation)
> Max stat
> 3-vis with chosen traits.

Ahh, you guys both make very much sense.

I don't think that was the answer I wanted to hear (I'll admit I was hoping there was some way to breed the fading out somehow), but at least I get it.

It's a shame, too, because dyes are expensive.

Thanks for your answers!

I mean, you don't have to breed in such a way that the colours fade.
PB themes don't have colour fade because all the ancestors have roughly the same colour palette and thus there's no decrease in saturation.

A bright colour x a bright colour from similar parts of the spectrum won't result in a fade.

Colours from far disparate parts of the colour spectrum can throw all sorts of weirs colours, some bright, some not, depending both on the hue/saturation of the colours in question and whatever die the RNG rolls.

This is also why people tend to wait until they have all the traits they want visible before dyeing- you need way fewer dyes when you're just dyeing two pets.

All that means you need to find the pets with both the colors and the traits you want. Which I'm discovering is more challenging than I would have thought.