Genetics and You

If you're here, you may find yourself asking: What's the deal with the genetics of Xiunus? All colonist genetics on Xiunus are driven by something called the genome, what we call the genotype or genetic code of a creature.

It's good to be able to keep an eye on your colonist's genome if you want to fine-tune the breeding process, especially for the colour genes, which are inspired by CMYK. On the other hand, if you want to play more casually, don't worry about it! The most important parts are visible for you on your character profile, like this screenshot to the right.

Visible Genes are those that you will design on your colonist. You can easily see here whether your marking is dominant or regular, which will determine how expansive a marking will be.

Carried/Nonvisible Genes are those that you can ignore while designing your colonist! These can be passed on as visible genes to babies.

Every marking has its own collection of rules that are meant to distinguish them from other markings, such as how edges of the marking should be treated (soft vs hard), whether there can be holes in a marking or not, and whether markings are one or two toned.

Some can be modified by Modifier genes, such as reversal, which can only occur when the marking shows up as "Reversed XYZ" in the visible markings.

These are also grouped up with extras and standard rules, like eye colours, skin colour, or even a group of free markings you can include that don't show up in your genome.

A potential for confusion for newcomers to ARPGs are the minimum, maximum, and dominant ranges in markings. We will use the marking Corella as an example.

Minimum is denoted by the brightest colour, cyan. This is the smallest amount of the marking that should show. As there is a tilde (~) in the circle next to the word Minimum in the image, we know that this is an approximate amount. For this gene and many others, the location of this spot can be a bit different from the example image, for instance between the eyes instead of on the cheek. This is usually stated in the text of the marking itself.

Maximum, denoted by dark blue, is the maximum amount you can normally have of the marking and you should stay within the range that this shows.

Dominant, denoted by purple, should only ever be used if the colonist has that marking in dominant form. You'll know this if their visible genes mention "Dominant" in the name of the marking in your colonist's profile.