A brief look into variants

 [Originally written November 23 2020]

I had previously been dismissing any mutation that just changed a variant number, on the assumption that the variant system wasn’t actually implemented fully in C3/DS, and that the value was completely meaningless. But it started gnawing at me, so I decided to test it by engineering a genome where colors are linked to variants, then hatching several eggs of that genome. The result was a rainbow of Norns, proving that while the default genome doesn’t use variants, the script is still in the game. Further, it turns out that the CFF genome does use variants (to determine whether a creature is an angry drunk, a happy drunk, etc). 

Well, I haven’t been paying attention to my creature’s variant changes, so I decided to go through and check each genome, but it turned out that all of my creatures have only had variant changes in their pigment bleed genes, so there’s nothing to be concerned about. This does make me think, however – I’ve seen a few notable color rotation/swap mutations crop up over the years but almost always had trouble getting offspring to inherit them. If variant mutations are this common in the pigment bleed genes, it may be that the mutations I’d seen were variant-linked, and therefore appeared not to pass on because the children weren’t the right variant.