A broken genome

 [Originally written September 14 2020]

I briefly hopped into C3/DS to hatch the egg from last time and do a genetic analysis. Out came little Daffodil, who takes after her father, except for the tail. To add more diversity to the gene pool, I also hatched her a partner, Yew the Magma Norn. After teaching them language and dropping them off in the Woodland, it was time for genetic analysis!

Or so I thought. I encountered this rather bizarre behavior when I tried to run my mutation finder script. Figuring it was a problem with my python code, I kicked myself for not properly error checking the file reads. Only adding such code didn’t actually help, and my script certainly wasn’t the source of the “bugger” lines! That was coming from the official gendiff.exe, which was encountering some kind of problem when it got to pigment bleed comparisons. 

Opening the genome directly in the genetics kit resulted in it informing me that it corrected 2 genetic errors automatically.

Indeed, these must have been what caused the problem with gendiff, because I saved the autocorrected genome and tried plugging that in instead, and lo and behold, the errors were gone. Why the problem with gendiff.exe caused my python program to read infinite blank lines is a mystery I don’t care to solve.

It turns out Daffodil has only three mutations (anything that was obliterated by the autocorrect notwithstanding). One makes her libido lowerer emitter kick in earlier (but without the rest of her reproductive system adjusting to match, it shouldn’t have any effect). The other two are pigment bleeds. One of those is that one of the female adolescent pigment bleed genes now kicks in as an embryo, but since none of the coloration values have changed, it has no effect. If they had changed, I’m not sure if they’d mix with, overwrite, or be overwritten by the existing bleed genes. More research is needed. The final mutation changed one of the male adolescent pigment bleed genes to have a mutability of 73 – quite a massive change from the standard 255! Now why couldn’t that big change have happened to the actual pigment values and not the mutability?