Breeding: how babies get their stats

What breeding gives you

A baby's stats are built from its parents' wild points and mutation points, stat by stat. Levels you put on a tame after taming (domestic levels) never pass to a baby. On 85,200 picks, the chosen parent's wild and mutation bytes copy exactly.

A stat panel shows values, not points. The game stores points: wild points (what the dino had when the tame finished, including the taming bonus levels), mutation points (2 per mutation), and domestic points (your level-ups). Only the first two inherit. The stat panel shows the three as a triple after each value, in this order: (wild | mutation | domestic). For example "(20 | 4 | 0)" is 20 wild points, 4 mutation points, no level-ups. A mother with +4 health and +2 melee read as (20 | 4 | 0) and (20 | 2 | 0). Read a parent's points with the Dino Stat Extractor before you pair it. Level is 1 plus points, validated on 98k dinos.

Baby level is 1 plus the sum of its wild and mutation points across stats, so a baby that takes the higher parent on every stat is the best you can get from that pair.

The ancestry panel ("Show Ancestors") lists both parents with sex, level and dino ID above the baby. The counters print as "Mutations: ♂ n ♀ n" on every panel, paternal first.

Rates

Mating

A male and a female of the same species, both tamed, both with Enable Mating on, standing near each other and not on a cooldown. Same-species check is the engine's class check. Wander is not needed.

Mating time is 120 s on every species we read. While it runs the female's HUD shows a "Mating" progress bar and "Currently Mating with <name>".

Cooldown is on the female only. Drawn uniformly between 18.0 h and 48.0 h, average 33.0 h, on 1,000 Direwolf draws and 200 on Rex and Dodo. The male has no cooldown.

For egg layers the cooldown starts the moment the egg drops. For live-birth species it starts the moment the baby is born, not at mating. A pregnant female shows no cooldown. The female's HUD shows it as "Ready To Mate In: h:mm:ss". We read a Rex right after her egg dropped, and a Direwolf twice: at 61% gestation (no cooldown) and right after the birth (cooldown running).

Eggs and gestation

Incubation times come from the egg item's own constants, checked against the live gestation timer on a Direwolf.

A fertilized egg only incubates on the ground, in an incubator, or on a saddled Gigantoraptor. In an inventory nothing ticks.

On the ground the egg incubates only inside its temperature window and loses health outside it ("Too Cold!" on the tooltip). In an incubator it incubates at any temperature, including too cold, but the egg still decays in the incubator regardless of optimum temperature. Optimum temperature speeds up incubation by a percentage: a Rex egg at 33 °C got a 20% Incubation Boost, timer 1:39:39 to 1:22:38.

A saddled Gigantoraptor carries up to two fertilized eggs ("Attach egg to left/right saddle slot") and incubates them. When one is done the button reads "Hatch egg in left saddle slot", so the hatch is a manual action.

The incubator shows the egg's sex, colors, per-stat points, parents and a level. That level counts only the seven stats on the panel. A Rex egg with 25 points in every stat reads 176. The hatched baby shows the real level, 301, all twelve stats.

Outside its window the egg loses health at 0.001 per second. Back inside the window it resumes where it was.

A fertilized egg spoils in 8 days ("Spoils In: 07:23:59" on a freshly laid Rex egg).

The baby's whole genome is decided when the parents mate, not at hatch or birth. The mother carries it in the embryo fields until birth: 32,000 embryo reads on gestating Direwolves, and 3,273 births matched them. For egg layers the same code writes it into the egg item. The incubator readout matched the hatched baby, stat for stat and color for color. An egg's sex is fixed when it is laid (the incubator shows "MALE REX EGG"). For live births it is rolled per baby at birth.

Hatching, claiming, growing up

Claim the baby as it hatches or is born: the "Name Your <species>!" dialog pops on hatch and on birth. Unclaimed babies starve. The claimer shows as "Imprinted By" on the baby's HUD and "Raised By" on the grown dino's panel, before any cuddle.

Growth phases: baby to 10%, juvenile 10% to 50%, adolescent 50% to 100% (engine phase cuts 0.1 and 0.5).

Maturation times are 1 / (baby age speed times the species multiplier), read from the engine.

A newborn eats the fastest and the rate falls smoothly toward the adult rate as it ages. There is no step at 10%. On the cluster, babies eat at half speed on every tier (0.5).

Use the Baby Feeding Calculator for how much food a baby needs to reach the trough.

Imprinting

Cuddle every 8.0 h (28,800 s at x1, the same on every species we read).

The first cuddle comes one full interval (8.0 h) after birth, not at birth. A newborn's HUD reads "Wants Care In: 7:57:42" at x1.

Cuddle type is pet, food or walk, one in three each. The request shows as text above the baby. A food request names a list of foods. A walk is only asked of species small enough to walk. The window to answer is 2 h. Answering while the baby is carried in a mate-boosted Procoptodon's pouch gives extra imprint.

Gain per cuddle, from the engine to the digit:

The engine sizes the cuddle count so the last one lands just before the baby matures at x1. On Normal and Evo 100% is reached with cuddles to spare.

At 100% imprint, max health, food, water, weight and torpor go up 20% and melee about 20% (melee multiplies: (1 + melee) x 1.2), applied after wild and mutation points and before taming additions. Stamina and oxygen never change. On a Direwolf baby, one cuddle at 32.9% moved health, torpor, food and weight by 6.6% each and melee x1.066, stamina and oxygen unchanged. At 100%, health 2,310 to 2,772, torpor 4,501 to 5,401, food 4,140 to 4,968, weight 238 to 286, melee 295% to 353%, stamina 780 and oxygen 600 unchanged.

With the imprinter in the saddle the dino deals x(1 + 0.3 x imprint) and takes x(1 - 0.3 x imprint). The HUD shows it as the "Imprinting Affinity" buff ("Rider Imprinted 100%, Damage +30%, Resistance +30%"). Anyone else riding gets nothing. On the cluster, anyone can answer a cuddle. The rider bonus still belongs to the imprinter only.

Stats and colors

Per stat the baby takes the higher parent's value 55% of the time and the lower one 45% (55.2% on 85,200 picks, both orientations).

Each color region is a coin flip between the parents (49.8% mother on 42,438 regions).

Sex is 50/50. For live births it is rolled per baby, even for twins; for eggs it is set when the egg is laid.

Myths

Domestic levels pass to the baby. They don't. Only wild and mutation points copy. On 85,200 picks, the chosen parent's wild and mutation bytes copy exactly.

70/30 for the higher stat. It is 55/45. 55.2% on 85,200 picks, both orientations.

The mutation counter is how many mutations this dino has. It isn't. The counter is the parents' counters added up, plus one per new mutation. The actual mutations are in the stats (2 points each), and the Dino Stat Extractor shows them. 60,000 children.

Negative mutation counters on both parents give extra mutations. They don't. Negative counters behave exactly like 0 to 19. 6.9% vs 7.0%, 3,000 per cell.

The level on the egg in the incubator is the baby's level. It isn't. The incubator counts only the seven stats it shows. A Rex egg reads 176. The hatched baby shows the real level, 301.

Twins have their own stats. They don't. Every twin and triplet carries the same genome. Only sex is rolled again. 457 extras.

Adult Gachas nearby make a baby Gacha eat. They don't. With nobody online the baby ate nothing and its food stayed frozen, adults nearby or not. With a player next to it, a baby Gacha eats straight from its own inventory.

On our cluster

Rates by tier and the Evo calendar are in the rates table above.

Babies out of render are paused by our baby-stasis plugin, so they neither age nor starve while nobody is near.

Weekly gene-trait focus species are the five on the community rates block.

Clone Potion from the store copies a dino.

Resources

• Baby Feeding Calculator
• Breeding Line Builder
• Dino Stat Extractor

Advanced breeding