preferred xenotypes make no sense.

[Normal.kid]

So after preferring three custom xenotypes for my ideology and making my starting colonists said xenotypes they all now hate themselves and each other. How does this make any sense?? They are all the preferred xenotypes I picked out. My initial intention was to single out the non wanted xenotypes from my colony and ideology so that when I had that 50% chance for random recruit its not some waster that's dependent on crack. Apparently that's not what the game meant when asking for the "preferred" xenotypes and now my dudes have a -10 permanent mood de-buff. :( And the random recruit thing never worked. Eh, there goes another 1 year colony. They all ended up having mental breaks and killing each other. Such a waste.

[brown29knight]

It is VERY picky about what is a preferred xenotype. If you set a preferred, then edit that race in ANY way, then they will not be the preferred race anymore. Also, having a preferred race means modifying genes is out, your preferred people will refuse to change.

Better to leave that blank, to avoid all headaches, unless you never play with genetics, in which case you can set it to whatever your race(s) are to get a permanent bonus, and if that is the case, be sure to make the race first, finalize it, THEN set it in the religion. (likely means going back a couple tabs in colony generation)

[boytype]

It is especially worth just ignoring unless you are doing a Body Purist run because it is practically impossible to ever get a custom xenotype to join your colony through any means.

Both the refugee and reward methods that exist to have someone of your custom xenotype join have such a minuscule percentage to basically never happen. In an over 120 hours playthrough I had 1 refugee join (a 12 year old with zero learning % and growth tier) and when testing the ritual ideology reward, had to successfully complete the ritual over 60 times before the person who joined was of the custom xeno.

If you are going to totally ignore the gene stuff in a run or are doing a body purist run, you would be ok to to use it, as long as you had a limited number of xenotypes among your colony.

[VoiD]

Yes, it's kinda broken and not worth using.

Doesn't even guarantee new recruits actually follow the prefered xenotypes

[RelaxItsJustAGame]

Yep, I just ran into this. :-/ I rescued a crash pod person, and they had a goofy religion where they preferred Neanderthal xenotype. And they weren't a Neanderthal, so they hated even themselves. It's kind of funny, it seems like a bug.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Originally posted by RelaxItsJustAGame:

Yep, I just ran into this. :-/ I rescued a crash pod person, and they had a goofy religion where they preferred Neanderthal xenotype. And they weren't a Neanderthal, so they hated even themselves. It's kind of funny, it seems like a bug.

That one isn't a bug, you can convert someone to any ideology even if they would be undesired. The issues with preferred xenotypes are usually because the xenotype was made after the ideology instead of using the xenotype editor in the ideology screen or because prepare carefully was used which broke the xenotpye entirely.