#breeding guide

Edits I made for personal friends explaining how to breed. Never intended to post them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but @dailyrowlet drew all the amazing rowlets and i forgot who did the other Pokémon. Sorry…DM me if you know who did the other 4 Pokémon! (I hope it’s ok that I used them DailyRowlet /)///(\)

Well first off here are some things you’ll need to prepare yourself:

Lots of empty boxes in your PC

A bike (in ORAS the Mach bike is a lot faster than the Acro bike)

A pokemon leading your party with the ability Flame Body

Destiny knot (optional)

Everstone (optional)

Since I have a powersave, making sure that the shiny I hatch will have at least 5 perfect IVs is very easy for me since there is a code that can alter a pokemon’s IVs to be perfect - so I use the altered pokemon as a parent! And with the destiny knot and two 6 IV parents, the shiny will have at least 5 IVs. 

Now the everstone is if you want it to have a certain nature. I still don’t know how to choose natures by myself because it confuses me but looking on Smogon, you’ll find what nature is best for battling and I tend to choose that one.

Now lately I’ve been hatching shinies very easily and I think it’s because I changed my method. Before I was just hatching eggs as I collected them - meaning I would bike around until my party was full and then wait until the 5 eggs that I had hatched and then I would deposit them in the PC and repeat the process. And that method is fine, I’ve gotten shinies from it. But recently I changed my method to collecting 4-5 boxes of eggs at a time before hatching them all and most of them have been within 200 eggs! Darumaka and Gothita were over that - Darumaka at 1026 and Gothita at 576 but that’s still REALLY good!

So it could just be my luck that’s making them come out so fast but I think it might be because the eggs aren’t locked until you pick them up so the faster and more often you pick the eggs up the higher the chance you’ll land on the lottery I feel? It’s just a theory and could be totally wrong but it seems to be working for me!

Now in case you’re really new to breeding - Flame body cuts the amount of steps in half and the bike just makes hatching go by faster since the bike is faster than walking.

I sometimes see a lot of people in the Legacy Challenge tag trying to breed really low-level breeds/genes to really high-level breeds/genes with no middle ground and then getting disappointed when the babies don't inherit any of the good traits. So I wanted to give a lesson in FR genetics (with the help of this invaluable resource right here) which should hopefully help people in their breeding projects. :3

When two dragons mate, there is not a 50/50 chance of the offspring getting the traits of their parents. Like in real genetics, some traits are more "dominant" or "recessive," meaning some genes/breeds are much more likely to pass on than others. In general, the more expensive a gene or breed, the more difficult it is to pass on those traits to the next generation. The only time there's a 50/50 inheritance is when the breed or gene of both parents is of equal rarity. For example, breeding one starter breed with a different starter breed.

So if you try to breed a starter with an imperial, only one out of every twenty babies, on average, will be an imp. So your chances of getting what you want in your legacy heir are pretty darn slim.

But, breeding a starter with a common breed, like pearlcatchers, ridgebacks, spirals, or snappers, you have roughly a one in three chance of improving the breed. Which is way more likely to get you a breed upgrade on your heir.

'But,' you might be saying, 'I don't want a common breed, I want an imperial!' Well, here's where the strategy comes in. You're more likely to reach that imp, and faster, by going through a staircase of less-rare breeds than by just trying to jump straight to the top.

Let's say, for the sake of math, that if there's a one-in-three chance of getting something, you're the unlucky one who doesn't get it until chance #3. Every single time. AND You always get 1-egg nests (or you're doing a legacy challenge and only one egg in the nest counts). This is, of course, not how probability works in actual practice, but it'll help to illustrate the point I'm about to make.

So, if you always get it on the last of the standard average tries, then that means you would have to breed a fae/imp pair 20 times before you get an imp baby. BUT if you breed that fae with a pearl catcher, you'll only need to breed them 3 times to get a pearlcatcher. Then you breed that pearlcatcher with a skydancer, 4 times until you get a skydancer baby. Then breed that skydancer with an imp, 7 times until you get your imp. This stair-step method will get you your imp in 14 attempts, rather than 20!

Now of course, if we switch up the probabilities, and you're the lucky duck who gets every improvement on the first try, you can breed a fae with an imp and get that imp on try 1, where going through the stair-step method, you'd need 3 breeding cycles to get it.

But in realistic probability, you're probably far more likely to improve your line's genetics up to what you want using some kind of stair-step, than by simply trying to breed from zero to sixty.

This method also applies to each of the 3 gene positions. And that link I linked at the beginning gives detailed probability statistics for all of them, that you can reference to build your own breeding program.

Now, as far as trying to breed through every single stage vs. skipping a step here and there, I haven't done the math or research to know for sure what the absolute optimal pattern is. You're welcome to try those experiments on your own. But in general, I'd highly recommend at least some level of stair-stepping over just buying the breeds/genes you want as your final goal, and breeding them with an ungened starter.