NIB (aka "Clean") Breeding?

I think people maybe misunderstand the link between inbreeding and mutations, both in WD and real life. Sticking with WD for now, inbreeding does let you know which wolves are more likely to be carriers*, but it does not increase the chances of two wolves that are carriers producing a mutie baby. You can breed brother to sister 100 times, but if they aren't both carriers, you won't get any muties. On the other hand, if you breed two unrelated carriers together, your chance of getting a mutie is the same as if those two carriers were brother and sister.

WD's non-genetic mutations aren't affected by inbreeding at all, afaik.

*To explain how this works, if you breed two mutie wolves each of their non-mutie babies has a 10% chance of being a carrier. I don't know what the rate of carriers in the general population is, but I'm guessing WAY lower than 10%. So lets say I'm very lucky and have two melas, a male and a female (unrelated), and I breed them together. I get three normal-looking puppies; a male and two females. Each of those puppies has a 10% chance of being a carrier. Therefore, when those pups grow up, I might be tempted to breed them to each other, in the hopes that the male and at least one of the females is a carrier and will throw a mela. However, if the male or either of the females aren't carriers, then this inbreeding will never work - I'll never be pairing two carriers and I'll never get a mela. Hopefully I'm making some sense! XD

Anyway, to answer the question of the thread, I'll be clean-breeding for lore/RP reasons. I have no opinions on whether others inbreed or not.

I'm planning on clean breeding. I appreciate the realism it offers, even if it means waiting longer to get pretty/high stat woofs.

In the vein of Heirloom meaning wild-type, I think in Wolvden there might be room to start a new breeding challenge focusing on wolves not affected by GC marking/base changers

@Khoshehk I'd be really interested in that if someone wanted to start a club / guild / thingy for it >.>

I will be avoiding inbreeding but I'm not gonna call myself a "clean" breeder because of previous connotations associated with that playstyle as other people have already mentioned. I actually made a thread wondering if anyone else was going to use the term NIB like a week ago, but it's gotten minimal responses. Good to know that many other players are going to avoid inbreeding though!

Interesting questions raised in the thread so far.

Even in real life breeding, having a common ancestor more than 5 or 6 generations back is not considered "inbreeding" as the Lioden mechanic shows. If two wolves have one great great great grandparent in common in generation 5 of their pedigree, the coefficient of inbreeding is so low as to not make any significant difference genetically speaking. If a player decided, "I'm not going to breed anything that has the same wolves within 5 generations of the pedigree", that could be a totally valid way to play.

However, the fact that wolves are allowed to have the same names here means you could conceivably have a pedigree in which literally every wolf is named Fluffy and you have no way to know if any of them are the same as any other Fluffy or if there are just that many Fluffys in the game and they all randomly bred this one in a billion chance offspring, lol. Which makes the above method of limiting instances by generation, complicated, unless you personally know and can vouch for each and every ancestor on that list and all of their ancestors and their ancestors and so on and so on.

Keeping short heritage will probably help but without the mechanic of being able to replace a Lead or stud and keep their markings - will make breeding projects very interesting to maintain.

I don't plan to intentionally breed "clean" or "dirty" overall, I might have a line here or there that is all inbred or all heritageless just to see what happens. But I will be watching how the rest of you play with an observer's interest, because watching how it all evolves from one game to another is really fascinating.

I plan on playing clean as long as possible, but not base breeding like before because it was damn near impossible to purposely breed for malts

i was a clean breeder in Lioden, but I don't plan on being a clean breeder on wolvden.

reason being, when I first started Lioden, i was pretty.. overwhelmed. sooo many bases and markings and stuff to keep track of. it was fun and neat and new! but overwhelming. clean breeding actually made the game less challenging for me. if I saw a pretty stud and he was clean, i bred with him, simple as. no trying to juggle combo bases and markings and all that. 

now that i'm starting wolvden in early access and not so overwhelmed, I feel like I have a better grip of how the breeding mechanics work, so I want to fully embrace and have fun with them! 

Clean Dorsal breeder on Lioden, gonna continue on here. No real reason why other than my own satisfaction from achieving rare clean pups/cubs or mutations by myself, along with stats.

eh, i probably won't be- i likely won't be making much money via selling puppies, as i make most of my money selling carcasses or cave materials. I don't really care too much, myself, but i'm not gonna go out of my way to only inbreed either lol. i'm more focused on survival than I am on breeding.