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Next, breed them a few times and get eight or nine other females with exactly the same stats, and the same level. Again, make sure they are not mutated yet.
Now you have this stock, you can start breeding for mutations. Put the male in the center and the females all around him, and set them all to mating. Because you have so many females, you will get lots of eggs at a faster rate. And because all of them have the same stats, the babies will inherit those stats, and come out as the same level as the parents.
This is useful because if you see a baby which is two levels higher than the parents, you instantly know that this baby has a mutation. So for example if the parents are 200 and the baby is 202, check it's stats and figure out what it is mutated in.
If the baby has a mutation you want, it is crucial that you get a MALE with a mutation, not a female. If you get females with mutations, the mutation counters on the maternal and paternal side will quickly fill up past 20 and you will be unable to get any more mutations on their offspring. But keeping the muts all on one side will enable you to keep breeding for them indefinitely.
When you find a male with a mutation you want, let it grow up, then remove the original male from among the females and place the mutated one in there instead. Then you look for a new male with two levels extra above the old male's level. So if the females are 200 and the male is 202, you instantly know that a 204 has both inherited the male's mutation, and got a new one in addition to that. Repeat the process, checking if it's male and if it's desirable, and if so, replace the current male with the new one.
It may be advisable to keep separate breeding lines for individual stats. This takes more work to set up at first, but will allow you to get mutations slightly quicker in the long run. So when you get a male with a melee mutation, swap that in and look for a baby which only has a second melee mutation, disgard any which have mutations in other stats. Then when you have a new melee mutation baby growing up, swap in a health mutation male and let that breed instead, looking only for health mutations in that line. Then when you eventually get as many muts as you wish, you can breed all the lines together to collect all the mutated stats onto one creature.
If you have access to Genesis or some mod maps, you can get the egg incubator, which allows you to see the stats of creatures without even having to hatch them, so this can speed up the process even more. But that is quite a high level engram, so you may not be able to unlock it yet.
You can use a female with the desired mutation. Her son's children will show that on the paternal side eventually, by breeding her with a non-mutated male. But with the breeding timer for females, that's a bit tedious.
However, you can do both simultaneously, as long as the two different breeding paths are kept far enough way, the mutated female with the desired mutation with an unmutated male, while continuing to breed the mutated male to unmutated females. I learned this from this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL4fDTRg4Ig
And have confirmed its accuracy in practice.
However this requires a lot of additional breeding time and energy, and will almost certainly end up slower than just skipping the female with the mutation and waiting for a male from the main line instead. Any breeding you are doing to shuffle stats is not breeding in the main line for a new mutation, the female's breeding cooldown could be an issue as you said, and a female can only breed with one male at a time, whereas males can breed with many females, so the number of babies - ie. the number of chances you get at a correct stat distribution from the RNG - would be greatly reduced.
Additionally, breeding the female to get male offspring will artificially inflate the mutation counter on the baby without getting an additional mutation to show for it, meaning that you will more quickly reach the 20/20 stat on one side, and your mutation rate will be halved. Again, it would almost always work out quicker in the long run to just ignore mutated females because of this.
So this game gets a lot of questions about how the breeding system works. Many people recommend various videos on how to breed creatures, but a lot of the guides are older, and use methods that made sense when you were hatching eggs with AC units like a caveman, but are now un needed with incubators being a thing. So I would like to offer my basics to breeding guide.
First off, all creatures in Ark have 1 initial level, then levels into their stats; these add up to the total level. For wild creatures, these levels are randomly assigned; a level 150 rex will have 149 levels randomly assigned to its 7 stats. When you tame a creature, the levels from taming effectiveness are also randomly assigned. More levels in a stat make it better, except for movement speed; base levels in movement speed do nothing, and are oft called wasted levels.
The levels into stats a creature has post tame (or hatch/birth) are what can get passed onto the babies. Levels from XP do not. Because of that random factor, different creatures of the same level can have very different stat allocations. Sometimes somewhat lower level creatures will tame out with more levels in a useful stat than higher levels; i.e. a level 130 rex could tame out with more levels in health than any level 150 you tame. So for the most part, only focus on specific stats when breeding, and ignore the total level. (The exception would be when you run into the level cap issues on official, but that is another post.)
When you breed creatures, the game picks the stat level count from one parent or the other separately for each stat. So an easy way to make stronger tames is combine the best stats you have gotten from tames; i.e. mate your best health rex with your best melee rex until you have a male & female with both good stats. This may take a few tries. If both rexes were female, you would mate one of them with a random male to move that stat to a male.
Next up is mutations; each mutation raises a stat by 2 levels & changes a color region. The best way to get a lot of mutations in desired stats is by "stacking" them. The incubator makes this process really easy, though it can be done without.
Basically, you want to start with the best of the stats you want to mutate that you have post tame; if they are on males, great, if on a female mate with random male until you have that stat on a male. Then you want to figure out how many levels that male has in its stat; there are a couple ways to do this, but one that works for everyone with an incubator is to mate the male with a bunch females and check the eggs; about half will have the male's higher level.
Say you are starting with health; if half his eggs say 40 health, name him 40 health. Then keep mating him & checking eggs; when you see a 42 health egg you have a keeper; if male that becomes the new health breeder, if female, mate with non-mutated male until you have a male 42 health. (Also keep mating male 40 health with all the females, may get male 42 that way before you can move stat over from female). Then go for 44 health, and so on. Then you repeat this process for each stat you want to mutate. Naming males their key stat makes it trivial to see new mutations in the incubator.
You will end up with a line of mutated males for each stat; always use un mutated females for the breeders, since they can keep generating new mutations even when the male side passes 20/20 on the counter. When you are done mutating, then you combine the lines; i.e. mate your final health male with a female until you have female with health stat, and mate her with final melee male until you have male & female with both final stats.
Also note that since you are on a private server, you will probably not have level caps to deal with. So the exact levels that end up in useless stats do not matter. Note I say probably; if the server admin chose to they could add in a level cap.
Adding to what the others have said, you can clean undesired stats by breeding your base dino with all the stats you want with a lower level dino, until your offsprings get the better stats you want, with the lower ones you prefer. Keep in mind though that this is not needed if you play single player/non dedicated as the level cap is not 450/500 as in official, so check what is the level cap for your private server.
I also suggest to follow this video, it's a bit long and repetitive, but it explains very well the basics for breeding, stacking mutations and so on, and you can potentially make it even easier if you use mods (awesome spyglass comes to mind).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL4fDTRg4Ig
No it doesn't. Your breeding goal is to have a male with the identical stats that the mutated female has. It does not cause the mutation counter to go up unless another mutation occurs.
But it can take longer. First because you have to wait for the mutated female to grow up, which generally takes a lot longer than it takes for the unmutated females to be able to breed with the mutated male again.
I usually do mutation breeding with 40-50 unmutated females with a mutated male. I also use the S+ mod, which has a mutator that guarantees that there will be a mutation in the babies. So my odds of getting the desired mutation is much greater than vanilla.
Nevertheless, I have on a couple of occasions raised a female with the desired mutation to give birth to a son with the same mutation before her mutated father, mating with 40-50 females could, even with the S+ mutator.
And like I said, they are not mutually exclusive situations. You can do both at the same time, and it probably makes even more sense if playing on vanilla.
Oh you mean if you breed it with the original, perfect stat, non-mutated male? Okay yeah I see what you are saying now, that would not increase the counter. I thought you were meaning to breed the female with the mutation stack male, my bad.
Yep, I did say that in my first post, but it is good to emphasize that point. Because if someone did breed a mutated female with a mutated male, that for example, had 10 mutations each in the same stat, their ability to mutate that stat any further with their offspring is gone.
If I may ask, how do you place so many females around a male?
Hey thanks for the video! But isn't the male rex a bit too far from most of the rexes for them to breed?
Also I wonder if it is applicable to other species as well.
I placed a platform directly above the females for the male to stand on:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2925241367
The platform on the right side (edited- I said "left" before the edit), I used for short dinos, like velonosaurs and raptors
On the left, shows the breeding set up for Tek Stegos. It's just tall enough for Tek Rexes. It's not pretty, I know.
I finally decided to try the S+ Propagator, which works great, so have since taken the platforms down.
Ah that's the method you told me in my thread a few weeks ago! I didn't think there would fit so many females though!
Yep, there are about 46 female stegos under the platform. I used to tediously place them by riding them into position around the male because I was afraid if I used a whistle command, it might take me forever to find him again.
But once I started using platforms, I could whistle the females into place, then place the male on the platform. At first, there were females out of mating range, so I then moved those into range. After that, I never had to move them again.
Of course, when I obtained the desired mutation in a baby male, I'd remove its father, then when the baby grew up, cryopod him then put him on the platform.
There are also some stegos in the background on the right side of the picture. I suspect that I happened to snap that screenshot at a time when I had not yet obtained a male with the desired mutation, but had obtained females. So I was probably breeding them to an unmutated male. I forgot to mention above that I usually only did that when I had more than one female with the desired mutation, which of course, greatly increases my chances of getting a male with the same mutation as his mother.