Beginner teaching beginners: Super Dino breeding

[Apostolos]

Goal: Beginner teaching beginners style tutorial on making your own killer dinos.


Introduction (to the subject and a little of my background)

I have had a couple people say I should do a write up on breeding. There are quite a few videos on youtube on the subject, but I had a very difficult time even understanding them as a beginner when first trying to 'get it'. It took a combination of a couple different videos and finally an "A Ha!" moment on my part before I understood some of the concepts.

The problem I noticed (at least for myself) is that in some vidoes it seems like the author is making assumptions in far too many areas with regard to what the person watching actually knows of the subject. In other videos, some things are left out entirely that are in my opinion kind of important to the subject, or the definition of certain phrases are not fleshed out enough.

Warning: This could get rather long and I will try to make multiple examples to follow along as I go. Hopefully these examples help demonstrate the 'how to' and more importantly the 'why' when doing certain steps.



The Hunt:

Most understand this part of the process and even first time breeders may want to skip this part of the write up. This of course is the part where you just need to find your breeding stock to begin with. I am not going to spend a lot of time here, but depending on the type of dino you are looking for you will see a varying degree of stat ranges for each. The only thing I will say here is to just tame as many as you can between lvls 130-150 (provided 150 is the max level dino for the server or settings you play on). You will eventually get a general idea for what is a good stat and which is not so great.

For the rest of this guide I will explain my own process as I went out on my quest to build up a Rex army for boss fights. I knew I wanted dinos that I would not ride myself but still needed to have high enough HP and high enough melee damage. So, I focused on those two stats when searching for tames.

After dozens of tames I had found two males that ended up with the stats that I could live with. The first one was a male that had 10500 Health (yes I am rounding..I think it was slightly over that). The second I believe (I do not have the game open right now) had 375 melee damage.

Now my 'hunting' was done. I had the starting stats I was looking for. The next part was combining those two stats.



Creating Patient Zero

Now that I had two dinos with the two stats I wanted to begin with, the first problem was combining those two good stats onto both a male and a female dino in order to create my "Base Pair". The Base Pair as I like to call it is a male and female dino that have the EXACT SAME stats and ZERO mutations. These two points are vital to keep in mind at this point moving forward and I will elaborate a little as I go.

Now the problem here is that the stats I wanted were on two males. This both good and bad if I am being honest. It is good only if you are playing on official and I will explain that small tidbit toward the end of all of this and will try to remember to put the official 'max dino level' consideration in it's own section.

Since I did not really care about any other stat that Health and Melee, I was able to go find some low level female to use for breeding purposes. I think I found a lvl 90 female and tamed her. Now I could get started.

In this example, you would want to breed your high Health dino with the low lvl female and look for a baby that inherits the high HP of the father. At this point it does not matter if the baby is male or female. Simply set it aside and move on to the next breeding session.

Here you would then breed the high Melee stat male with the low level female. In this case, the baby would need both the high Melee stat as well as being the opposite sex of the previous breeding session baby. It may take a few tries to accomplish this. Simply 'retire' any baby dinos that do not meet this requirement. (Retire is much better than destroy..so harsh)

This would then allow you to breed the two babies with high Health and high Melee. It may take a few tries but you would end up eventually getting both a Male and Female who both had the high Health and high Melee.

Now that you have a male and female who both have guaranteed high Melee and high Health in all their children, it makes it a lot easier to systematically breed children that have matching stats in the remaining areas of Weight, Stamina, Oxygen, and Food.

It make take quite a few iterations of breeding, but it is extremely important to make sure that #1 there are no mutations present in the children at this point (simply retire any that show up at this point) and that you eventually get a breeding pair that have the exact same stats.


Defining Mutations

Now that you have a male and female dino with the exact same stats and zero mutations (I cannot stress the importance of this) we need to get a few things straight.

Here is where I see so many people just not quite 'get it'. When looking at the ancestors screen, when you see 0/20 mutations on the father side and 0/20 mutations on the mother side, those numbers are only COUNTERS. That is is..simply think of that as a reverse count down timer. You are counting down (or up in this case) to a limit on your chance at receiving a mutation. That is it. I will explain a bit more as we go, but keep this concept in mind as we go as it was my own personal stumbling block when watching all those youtube videos as it was not explained very well in most cases.


FIRST MUTATION

So.. what do we want to do here? What is our ultimate goal? We need to know this in order to make a plan for getting to that goal.

My goal was looking at the alpha dragon fight. Now Therizinos would probably be better overall (since they take reduced damage from fire)but I thought I would aim at an army that could potentially win and if so, then would be able to win any of the other fights. With that in mind, my goal was a rex that had at least 15k hp and maybe upwards of 18 to 20k (due to fire being % based but I wont get into boss strategy here). The rest would be be aimed at somewhere around 1200% melee damage. If those were minimums then I could hopefully even go higher for non dragon fights.

With my goals in mind, how do you go about doing that? The answer of course is mutations. So, what is a mutation and how do they work? The first part is easy.. the second question can get a little detailed so hang with me.

Remember the mutation counters I mentioned earlier? Well here is where they come into play. Those counters are counters ON THE PARENTS... not the dino you are actually currently looking at. Those counters are not actual mutations (hence the term 'counter'), and they are aimed at the parents and not the dino you are looking at. Yes..I just repeated myself. It is an important distinction. So, lets look at it in a little detail.

Every time a baby is born, it has a 2.5% chance to gain a mutation from the father and 2.5% to gain a mutation from the mother under normal circumstances. However, if counter for either parent is already over 20 then you lose that 2.5% chance.

Since we are starting with a fresh pair of parents who do not have any mutations at all, any babies they have have the full 5% chance to gain a mutation. If a baby has a mutation, it will manifest itself in three ways: Level up, Stat bonus and Color shift.

Now, the first part is the level up. What do I mean by this? In my case both of my starter dinos were level 231. They were the exact same level because as we started this guide, they had the exact same stats. This makes it very easy to instantly tell if a baby has a mutation because the baby will be two levels higher than the highest level parent. Why do you ask? Since both parents have the exact same stat numbers, they both took the exact same number of levels to get those stat points in the first place. If a baby gets a mutation then the level of the baby must go up since one of the stats of baby goes up during the mutation. (you cannot go from say 780 weight to 800 weight without leveling up in order to gain that point to put into the stat in the first place) So why 2 levels and not 1? I am not sure if it is a math issue with regard to the stat bonus or if the game is stating that the color change costs a level. Maybe someone else can clarify this particular point. All I know is that every mutation gives a baby +2 levels.

In our case, when hatching a bunch of eggs from my base pair of dinos, I am only looking for babies that are level 233. When I see that, I know instantly that the baby has a mutation. So, I claim the baby and then check under the hood to see where the stat points went.

The second part is the stat bonus. Every mutation will put a point into one of 7 stats: Health, Melee, Stamina, Weight, Food, Oxygen or Movement Speed. (yes you can get a point assigned to speed).

Here is where the levels really matter. If speed is chosen as the stat that is raised, then it is completely worthless. Since speed has been normalized, it is like multiplying by zero. No matter how many points you get in speed, it still equals out to zero effect making it totally worthless and a bit difficult to tell by looking at the dino's stats unless you know that nothing else went up in the first place. This is a dino that needs to be destroyed..err I mean retired. I will explain this as we go.

The 3rd thing that happens is a color shift. A random region on the dino is chosen and a random color is chosen. The biggest issue some people have is that there are times you cannot tell a color change has happened. The reason is that some dinos have color regions that do not get displayed on that dino in the first place. The second is that the color might be either the exact same color as the dino has in the first place (yes rather rare), or a color that the dino can normally get assigned during spawn. (this is easier to see but still disappointing to most).

**NOTE: Yes..it is possible to get an extremely rare random roll where a baby has 2 mutations (one from the mother AND one from the father at the same time). I am not a math guru, so not sure what the actual odds are of 'rolling' a 2.5% and a subsequent 2.5% but it can potentially happen. I have seen it happen myself. What is even far more rare is for both mutations to be not only on the same stat, but to be on the one you are looking for. Buy a lottery ticket if this happens :)

Now, in my case, the ONLY thing I am looking for in my FIRST mutation is Melee Damage or HP for my first mutation since those are my two desired stats. (and yes, I stressed FIRST on purpose and will explain as we go).

After about 100 eggs or so, I got a mutation that increased the baby's melee stat. Great..just what I was looking for. I named the new baby +1 Melee Male so it would be easy to differentiate and keep tabs on.

From here on I did a few housekeeping and preparation steps that I would suggest you do as well (especially if you are on official). I made a handful of baby dinos from my base pair that had zero mutations. I made 3 male and one extra female all of who were the exact same as my base pair. I just wanted to have more of them so I could set up a breeding farm as I went along since having one egg to hatch at a time would make me want to punch a baby after going through 15 thousand eggs.

Since my new +1 Melee Male was of course a male, I sat him beside what I called station 1 that had 3 0/0 Female dinos. That was what I named my base female dinos: 0/0 Female which indicated that those females had zero mutations. The +1 Melee Male dino had one mutation. You could see this by looking at the parent counters in his ancestry. The numbers on the left and right would add up to +1. Naming your mutated stock dinos in this fashion make it very easy to determine how many counters they carry without having to keep going into the ancestry section.

[Apostolos]

THE SECOND STEP

Here is where most people mess up when trying to breed mutations for stats. Now that we have a dino with a +1 stat in a desired area, the goal is to keep going to push that stat even higher. Lets get a 2nd mutation right? OK.. now breed your +1 Melee with your base dino of the opposite sex (0/0 Female in my case).

What happens if you get a mutation for HP? That is a stat you want to keep right? The stat is yes, but this is a Melee dino strain now so the ONLY stat bonus we want is more Melee Damage. Why does this matter? It matters because we want to boost our dino stats as high as they will go. If you keep the HP and the Melee Damage one one dino here, then you are taking up 2 of the potential 20 mutations this new parent will be able to pass on to it's children. We want to concentrate all of those mutations in one area as much as we can before our counter runs out on that one parent.

You will eventually reach that cap of 20 mutations from the one parent. We just want to be as efficient as possible until the counter hits that 20. The reason is that if you max out one parent's mutation counter, you will then not be able to add that parent's 2.5% chance to get a new mutation when breeding that dino. The base parent will be the only one providing a 2.5% chance to provide a new mutation. Yes, you can indefinitely increase stat points by always breeding with your 0/0 parent. However, it will GREATLY slow down how quickly you are able to breed those mutations in (instead of the normal 5% chance it is cut down to 2.5% since only the 0/0 parent can give a mutation) once one parent's counter is maxed out at 20 mutations. See the average number of eggs you can expect to go through below and then double that number once one parent's counter is at 20 for reference.

Instead, lets concentrate one just one stat at a time. In this way we can eventually get +20 melee from one mutation strain of dinos. When you are finished, you can then start over completely. Simply put that +20 Melee dino in the barn for now and go back to your base pair who both are at 0/0 and breed for Health. Simply repeat the process until you have a +20 Health dino. Then, you can combine the new Melee and Health dinos for a 'super' dino which has super high Health and super high Melee as a brand new baby.



THE LONG HAUL

This sounds really cool right? Well, lets do some math to show what you are in for and actually HOW to do this.

Back to my initial example, my first mutation was a level 233 dino with +1 Melee mutation. What do I do next?

I breed that dino with a base pair dino who is still at 0/0. That gives the following potential results:

lvl 231 dino (this is an unmutated dino that got the 'bad' stats from the 0/0 parent)
lvl 233 dino (this is either a mutated dino from the 'bad' stat 0/0 parent or an unmutated dino that got the 'good' stat from the new +1 dino)

*!@!@ BE CAREFUL HERE *!@!@

This is an extremely critical stage as you do not want to accidentally introduce a new mutation from the wrong stat into your breeding population. This will only happen at this first stage since both a desired result (copying the good stats from the +1 Melee parent) and a new mutation from the base parent share the same level number (233 in my case).

From here I am looking for just female dinos that share the new +1 Melee stat from the parent. I end up parking 4 of them beside one of my 0/0 males at two new breeding stations.

My end result looks like this:

+1 Melee male (squeezed in between the 4 females)
0/0 Female
0/0 Female
0/0 Female
0/0 Female

0/0 Male (squeezed in between the 4 females)
+1 Melee Female
+1 Melee Female
+1 Melee Female
+1 Melee Female

0/0 Male (squeezed in between the 4 females)
+1 Melee Female
+1 Melee Female
+1 Melee Female
+1 Melee Female

This equates to 12 dinos cranking out eggs. At this point I am ONLY looking for babies that come out to be level 235 and ignoring all the others. In this way I know that the new baby had done two things:

#1 Inherited the 'good' +1 Melee stat
#2 Gained a new mutation on top of that.

Every time I see a 235 I check to see if it gained a new Melee mutation. If that happens, I go through and "retire" all of the other +1 Melee dinos at all the stations and then slowly begin building the stations with the new iteration.


EGGS FOR DAYS OMG

Lets do a little math. With a full 5% chance to get a mutation on every new baby and 7 potential stats that can level up, Multiply that by two since you never know if the baby will be from the good stat parent or the base line and you are looking at 280 eggs on average to get a desired stat increase. If you plan on going all the way to +20 in one specific stat like Melee, then on average you will go through 5600 eggs.



Keep in mind that is average, so depending on your server settings you could be there for HOURS and on official, it will take months....and months. Just know what you are getting yourself into before starting this.



WHY USE 0/0 Dinos???

It should be apparent, but just in case it is not: Why are we always using the base pair of 0/0 parents along side the +1, +2, +3 and so on dinos we get that are mutated? That ensures that the baby dino has the bare minimum number of mutations since it inheriting zero mutations from the low level parent and that when you finally get to the +20 Melee dino, all those babies only have 20 mutations. Otherwise it cuts your chance in half of gaining new mutations.


MAX LEVEL DINO CONSIDERATION

Remember back when I said official servers had a special consideration to keep in mind? Well here it is. You will eventually get +20 melee on one dino. Then you will go back and work on Health. (I personally will probably stop initially at around +10 or +11 Health so I don't have too high HP rexes for my dragon army). When you breed those two stats together, the baby will have a rather high level due to the fact that it now has 20 levels in melee and +10 to +20 levels in Health (and anything else you level).

I did some reading and read that there was an incident on official servers where a dino was released accidentally which was super high level (apparently from one of the devs). This is hearsay but apparently there is a setting where any dinos over the level of I believe it is 450 are automatically destroyed by the server.

It is possible to continue to breed dinos with 0/0 base dinos in order to guarantee a 2.5% chance at a new mutation indefinitely. This could result (eventually) in dinos that reach into the 1000's if you could go through enough eggs without an overwhelming desire to gouge out your eyes. However, I think it is around level 379 that you need to be your max level a baby is born at in order to not have it level up too much through the course of play. (my math may be wrong there too but I think you get my point.. don't level a dino over 450 on official.

Hopefully someone finds this helpful. I got bored so thought I would post this. I just hope it is written well enough everyone can understand it. If I flubbed something, let me know. (not sure how long I have before I cannot edit but I will try)

[KitsuneShiro]

YouTube tutorial is a much better format. People aren't going to read all that.

[Captpickles]

Agreed. Youtube please. No one reads books in 2019.

[demojoke]

it was enjoyable and filled a lot of gaps. Thx for the hard work

[Vesuvius]

You should add/edit

"If you keep the HP and the Melee Damage one one dino here, then you are taking up 2 of the potential 20 mutations this new parent will be able to pass on to his children.
You will eventually reach that cap of 20 mutations from the one parent"

You can mutate infinately... as long as only mutate on the paternal OR the maternal side... (paternal being the most efficient)

[Bluenymph]

I was about to say the same thing Vesuvius did.

If you have a female that's maxed on mutations, just breed her to your 0/0 mutation male. This is how you can keep going with mutations well after the limit is reached.

You can do the same thing with the male, just breed it back to the mother.

Always breed back.

Get a mutation? Breed it back to your original 0/0 mutation parents. This might mean it takes longer to get another mutation, but it'll save you a lot of backtracking later on.

[Apostolos]

I see what you are saying. I edited probably a bit too much and I think started to sound like a broken record saying the same thing in a couple different ways, but hopefully it is a little better.

[Veeshan]

I disagree that youtube is a better format; it is a neutral format. However you've committed the same sin that most youtube tutorials do; 10x more words than necessary.

I love the guide idea, I'd just recommend you heavily condense it and use bullet points etc. Another trick is to remove all meta notations; "I'm not going to spend much time here," etc.

[Vesuvius]

Originally posted by Veeshan:

I disagree that youtube is a better format; it is a neutral format. However you've committed the same sin that most youtube tutorials do; 10x more words than necessary.

I love the guide idea, I'd just recommend you heavily condense it and use bullet points etc. Another trick is to remove all meta notations; "I'm not going to spend much time here," etc.

The advantage here is... text is easy to edit.... youtube vid.... more time consuming :)

[Jip]

@Apostolos, if people really want to learn then they will soak up any and all information given to them. People do have limited attention spans these days so they only have themselves to blame. You can't please them all, but I think this guide was pretty awesome and well explained. Thank you for the effort you put in to it !

[Vesuvius]

Add to the Guides forum OP?

[Jip]

Originally posted by Veeshan:

I disagree that youtube is a better format; it is a neutral format. However you've committed the same sin that most youtube tutorials do; 10x more words than necessary.

I love the guide idea, I'd just recommend you heavily condense it and use bullet points etc. Another trick is to remove all meta notations; "I'm not going to spend much time here," etc.

TBH Veeshan, Apostolos is in a no-win situation here. They could have made it clinical with just bullet points, and then people would be asking their reasoning and for further explanation - or they add some personality with their first person experience and then they're asked to STFU and just get on with it.

This is presented as a guide to help people, and personally, I like it. If this was on YT, the same words would be spoken as written. I like a narrative. It makes it more human.

[KitsuneShiro]

This will just get lost on the forums unless the OP adds it to the guide section.

[Apostolos]

OK..never done a guide before. I am sure I could have taken more time and made it pretty, but as suggested I added it in that section. Thanks all.

[Ertosi]

I used to worry about keeping my mutation lines separate, like yours, but that was back when I played on a modded server cluster with S+ and could guarantee mutations with their tek mutator, so you could afford to be picky. I changed my tactics after moving back to official where getting mutations is so rare, you don't want to throw any away. When keeping your mutation lines separate, you're trying to keep your mutation score low, only keeping your targeted stat for each line, but that's only a 1/7 chance that any given mutation is the stat you're looking for. Compare keeping all mutations where you'll bump up that mutation score fast, but what's the cost really? As long as the other parent is still below max mutations, you've only halved your chances. 1/2 a chance is much better than 1/7.