Your Litters

Brief introduction to them.

Creating Litters

Breeding two adult dogs together – one male and one female – will create a litter. Litters contain two (2) to ten (10) puppies that will have statistics that are reflective of their parents'. You can breed your dogs at the public Breeder or by searching Jobs Open. You may choose to breed two of your own dogs together, or make a stud request and pay to use another player's male dog.

Stud Requests

Studs are male dogs who are offered for public breedings at a price. The owner a female dog may sent a request to breed to a certain dog that is up for stud. The owner of the stud will then have the ability to accept or reject this inquiry. You can find studs by going to the Dog Search and marking the checkbox labeled "For Stud."

There are many reasons why you might want to use an outside stud. You may want to search for better suited statistics, dominant personalities, different breeds, or fresh bloodlines. You will know that a dog is a stud, because you will see a yellow asterisk icon beside his name. Hovering over this icon will show you the cost of sending a stud request to this dog. You can create a request by navigating to a stud's profile and clicking on "Make Request."

You can manage your requests by navigating to your Requests. Here you will see all of your incoming and outgoing inquires. You will receive an alert when a stud owner accepts or rejects your outgoing request, and when one of your dogs receives a stud request. You can accept, reject, and delete requests from this page.

Breeding Dogs

Either make a stud request or take two of your own dogs, and go to the default Breeder or a user's breeding den. The default breeder's services cost $500, and user breeders can set their own fee.

The benefit of using a user's breeding den rather than the default is significant: by doing so, you have a higher chance of breeding out Low stats from your puppies, and there you can breed litters of 4-10 puppies, instead of 2-4.

The mother dog cannot be on a team, must be between 10 and 92 days of age (or 42 days if she is inbred), and both dogs must be healthy. The mother dog also cannot be put back onto a team until her litter grows up. The father dog's only age requirement is that he needs to be over 10 and not retired. Dogs naturally retire between 100-105 days (and if in a long race can sometimes retire a few days later, when the race ends). Inbred dogs naturally retire between 50-55 days of age.

Once bred, the mother dog will be expecting, and 24 hours later, the litter will be born. Once bred, she will have a baby bottle icon before her name to mark her as the current mother of a litter.

You can view all your current litters on the "Litters" tab on your kennel page, and you can view every adult dog you've bred from a special section on your "Dogs" tab.

Statistic Inheritence

Statistic Inheritence (Click to Toggle)

Take a look at one of your dogs' pages and check out the History tab. This shows you all of your dog's Original Stats that it was born with. These are what will get passed down to your dog's pups.

Personalities, Trainability, Immunity Points and normal stats (Intelligence, Speed, Stamina, Strength, Obedience) are all stats for which the original values are passed down.

Health stats (Eyes, Paws, Joints, Muscle, Ears) are the only stats that are passed down from your dogs' current values. So if the mother and father dog have 10 in Eyes, that can pass down to the pups, giving them a head start!

The individual outcomes you'll get from breeding are simply down to luck (and some careful planning), and every puppy in the litter will be different. You can improve the stats of your lines over generations if you are selective!

Let's break this down more specifically.

• Major, Minor and Low Inheritance

  Major, Minor and Low stats are a big factor to breed for - your puppies' natural strengths and weaknesses! They determine your pups' potential as adult dogs, so it's a good idea to pay attention to how these are passed down.

  When you breed two purebred dogs together, you pretty much know what you'll get! However, with two purebreds there is a chance you can breed out their Low stat, so, for example, you can breed a purebred Alaskan Husky that is ++Speed +Stamina -None. You can work on a whole line of such dogs if you want!

  Note: Any stat marked "None" is just average and like the dog's other stats simply tops off at 15 - so while you probably don't want a Major or Minor of Low, a Low of None is pretty useful!

  When you breed two dogs of different breeds, or two mixed breeds, things get more interesting. Let's use an example. I'm going to breed an Alaskan Husky and a Canadian Eskimo Dog.

  The Alaskan is ++Speed +Stamina -Strength, and the Canadian is ++Stamina +Intelligence -Speed. Stat boosts are passed down by tiers, and each puppy (they can all be different in a litter!) has the chance to inherit either boost from either parent. So for our puppies, the Major ++ stat could be Speed or Stamina, the Minor + stat could be Stamina or Intelligence, and the Low - stat could be Strength or Speed.

  But a dog can't have the same stat as both a Major and a Low, for example! Each stat can only fill one spot. So if the script assigns the Major in our puppy to be Speed, and then it tries to assign Speed also as the Low, the Low will become None. The same goes for the Major and Minor, so use care when breeding dogs that have the same stats as different boosts. You can be strategic. You can also breed a ++None +None -None dog if you want to.

  There is also a small chance that the Major and Minor boosts can flip spots! So for example, while ++Speed was one of our parents' Major stats, and +Intelligence was one of the parents' Minor stats, there is a chance their puppies could have ++Intelligence, +Speed, or both.

• Normal Stat Inheritance

  For each "normal stat" (Intelligence, Speed, Stamina, Strength, and Obedience), your puppies can inherit a value in the range of their parents' original stats, or they might be born with +1 over the parent with the higher stat in their major, minor or low! There is a much higher chance of this happening in major stats.

• Health Stat Inheritance

  Your puppies will inherit health stat values within the range of their parent's current points for each health stat (Eyes, Paws, Joints, Muscle, and Ears).

• Immunity Inheritance

  Your puppies will simply inherit an amount of immunity within the range of their parents' original immunity points.

• Personality & Train ability Inheritance:

  Personalities and train ability are inherited in the same way.

  Your puppies have a high chance of ending up personalities within the range of their parents' original personalities. For example: If the father's original personality was Reactive, and the mother's was Curious, your pups can be Response, Excitable, Calm or Curious.

  Tip: Take a look at the Personalities section of this guide again to see the order of personalities.

  There is also a slight chance that your puppies can end up with one personality higher or one personality lower then the average of their parents' personalities. For example: If the father was Reactive - let's call that (8) of the 10 personalities - and the mother was Excitable(7), the average would be 7.5, which gets rounded up to 8. So, you could get a pup with a 9 (+1, Dependable) or 7(-1, Excitable). In our previous example with a Reactive(8) and a Curious(5), you would have an average of 7, and would then be able to get 8 (+1, Reactive) or 6 (-1, Calm).

  The main takeaway here is that if you are looking to breed dogs and get a personality higher than the parents', your only options are to breed two dogs who have personalities that are the same or are one level different.

  Train ability is inherited in the same way: your pups can inherit a train ability number somewhere in the range of their parents' original train ability scores, or there is a small chance they will inherit a value +1 or -1 to the average of their parents' scores.

  Breed strategically to increase the personalities and train ability of your lines over the generations!

• Genetics

  You may have noticed a weird string of letters on your dog's page, followed by a detailed physical description. What is all this?

  That string of letters is your dog's genotype (a code that describes how to make your dog), and the physical description is his phenotype, what his genetics make him look like. We don't use color genetics on GoneMushing, because color breeding doesn't matter for sled dogs! But we do have a unique, in-depth system of physical genetics, which describe your dog's body type and features.

  Each breed has a unique set of genes that give it different physical features than all the other breeds. You can view information on all GoneMushing's breeds of sled dog under Help on the Breed List, and there you can also find the Gene List, which has a full list of possible alleles (the different options your dog can have for a certain gene, like different kinds of ears), their meaning, and whether each is dominant or recessive.

  A dominant gene is the one that always gets expressed, and a recessive gene is one that is only expressed in the absence of a dominant gene. Here on GoneMushing, dominant genes always begin with a capital letter, and recessive genes all start with lower-case letters.

  Let's put all this together. For example, let's say your dog has a gene pair of Cscf. This is the locus (location in the genotype) that determines his coat type. Cs is a dominant allele that makes a smooth coat, and cf is a recessive allele that makes a fluffy coat. Since Cs is dominant, your dog has a smooth coat, and the potential fluffy coat is simply a hidden genetic possibility! But when you breed him, either gene in the pair has an equal chance of being passed down to his puppies, so if his puppies inherit a cfcf gene pair, they will have a fluffy coat!

  Please Note!: GoneMushing genetics do not work exactly like real genetics. Instead of using punnett squares, it is also possible your puppies will inherit the exact gene pair of one parent even in a mixed breeding.

  You can look at the Gene List for all genetic possibilities. For each gene (like "ears"), the possible alleles are listed in order from most dominant to least dominant. Some genetic outcomes are recessive to other recessive genes, which means that they are only expressed in your dog if they are the only alleles present (like plpl, which is recessive to both Pa and ps. You'll only get a dog with large paws if his gene pair in the locus for paws is plpl.

  Purebred dogs, like the ones you purchase from the dog store, will always have the genotype standard of their breed and be homozygous for every stat, meaning both genes in a specific gene pair will always be the same (like CsCs). Mixed dogs can have anything, depending on their parents!

Inbreeding

Inbreeding

What's inbreeding?

In this game, inbreeding is simply defined as any ancestor appearing more than once on the "Detailed Pedigree" you can find on your dog's History page. ONLY the four generations visible there matter for inbreeding. If there are duplicate dogs further back than is visible, that does not count as inbreeding.

If you're going to breed two dogs, and want to know if their offspring will be inbred, compare both parents' Detailed Pedigrees. If any dog appears on both (including the parents themselves), their puppies will be inbred.

You'll know if a dog or litter is inbred because it will have a yellow Inbred flag by its name/ID number. This is also marked on their pedigree.

Inbreeding is not a bad thing in this game! Inbreeding can be a very useful tool for mushers, because first-generation inbred puppies will be "Super Dogs."

Compared to typical litters, inbred puppies will all:

• Have no Low stat
• Start with all normal stats at 10 (or up to 15 if using a user's breeder den)
• Start with all health stats at 10
• Start with Trainability of 19 or 20

This makes inbred dogs excellent for racing teams! Anyone can breed them, and they give a quick head-start to good teams!

However, inbred dogs are more of a shortcut than a full advantage, because:

• Any puppies bred from an inbred dog will be terrible. - All their normal stats and health stats will be as low as possible (1), and they will have no Major or Minor stats. This is the same if the inbred dog is bred to any dog whatsoever.

  For this reason, inbred dogs might be useful to you as neutered super dogs that can be paired with anyone on your teams!

  If you breed your inbred dog anyway, this effect lasts as many generations as the inbred flag still shows up on the puppies (which is until the original inbreeding drops off the 4-generation pedigree view). Once the original inbreeding drops off the pedigree view, these descendants would not be considered inbred anymore, would have no Inbred flag, and would have regular stats (as far as the one parent's low stats would allow, anyway).

• Inbred dogs retire at the age of 50-55 days, rather than the normal 100-105 days, and when they naturally retire, you do not earn experience points (you earn 10 exp when normal dogs retire naturally).

Basically, inbreeding is just another strategy choice!