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. These dictate the sex, colour, and markings a colonist has—but not the mutations!

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.

Below your colonist's design, you will see an expanded area of genes and mutations, including links to all those that are visible.

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 should ignore while designing your colonist! These can be passed on as visible genes to babies if bred with another colonist who carries or shows these genes.

Mutations cause larger-scale changes to your colonist, such as line art edits or mass colour modifiers such as Albino. In this screenshot, this colonist has armless. As she is a tsabhua, that means that her owner edited out the arms in her line art or drew her without arms and used that as her official reference image.

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.

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.