There's already a lot of good comments and resources here concerning how to search and find dragons to use as breeding candidates. So instead I'm going to use one of my projects to show, as an example, what a speadsheet/Google doc might look like when you're attempting to breed two dragons to use in a final breeding pair (like for a hatchery) or when you want to breed successive generations in order to narrow down a range.
One of the projects I'm currently working on is an orange-range Gaoler breeding pair that I've been calling 'Manticora.' (I like to give all my projects names.) My goal is to breed an Orange / Sable / Cinnamon dragon and a Caramel / Sable / Cinnamon dragon.
When it comes to breeding for hatchery pairs, you want to plan for at least three generations. (Unless you get super lucky with finding good candidates with close colours, then you might be able to get away with breeding two generations.)
- First generation is your starter dragons. Ideally, all these dragons are unrelated to one another so you don't have to worry about two bloodlines being related right off the bat.
- Your first generation pairs will likely have really low odds of producing your end goal colours. That's okay. The purpose of the first generation is to breed them a LOT in order to build up a sizeable breeding stock filled with candidates that have better colours that you use to make better pairs.
- The second generation are the descendants of your starter dragons/pairs. Ideally these dragons will have at least one or two of your end goal colours and the last colour be 1-3 colours off your goal. These are the dragons that going to be the parents of your final two dragons that you'll use to form your hatchery pair.
- The second generation is where you need to be careful with your bloodlines. This is the stage where it can be easy to mix up bloodlines in such a way that the third/final generation ends up being related to one another.
- When forming second generation pairs, I like my pairs to have odds of at least 10%. My ideal odds are 15-20% or higher. This is just my personal preference, some players prefer much higher odds for their projects while others are okay with lower odds.
- Third generation is your final dragons that have the correct three colours you want.
How many dragons you buy for your first generation depends on the difficulty of your project and what dragons are available.
For most projects, I start with no least than 4 pairs (or 8 dragons) for my first generation. The logic behind this is pretty simple: if I want to make a breeding pair, I need a male dragon and female dragon. Male dragon needs to have two parents, and so the does the female. So that's 4 dragons that needs to exist in the generation before them. If we need to breed those 4 parent dragons ourselves, then we need 8 dragons to start off with (4 males and 4 females).
Ideally I like to have 5-6 pairs (or 10-12 dragons) for my first generation. Because the first generation pairs usually have such low odds, you want more pairs for the simple fact that you want to breed often. The more often you can breed, the more chances you have at getting a better dragon with colours you can work with.
This is what my sheet looks like first starting out, after I've bought suitable dragons and have figured out who they're going to breed with.
Some notes:
- Each pair has a colour assigned to them (seen in the DRAGON column). This is how I keep track of bloodlines.
- In the ID# column, you see a few cells have been greyed out. This means that those dragons are related to one another. I religiously check Assay Bloodlines for any pair I make, but this is a handy visual clue on my doc that I like having while I'm putting together pairs on the sheet.
- LINK column links directly to that dragon's bio page. Handy and way easier than having to page through my lair constantly.
- You'll notice the P. COLOUR, S. COLOUR, and T. COLOUR columns have cells that are filled in with various colours. Orange, Caramel, Sable, and Cinnamon are my end goal colours. Any dragon that already has those colours gets them filled in with the actual colour FR uses for Orange, Caramel, etc. The light yellow cells though are colours that are 1 or 2 colours off from my goal. This is another visual clue for me when trying to figure out who to breed to get the narrowest range (and thus higher odds) for my pairs.
- The RANGE column usually has the URL link of that pair's colour range from FR Color Schemer. But since this project requires my end goal dragons to have two different primary colours, I instead put "orange" or "caramel" to note if a pair was breeding for Orange or Caramel primary.
- ODDS column has links to the unique Hatchling Probability Calculator URL for each pair.
After a round of breeding, I pick out which hatchlings have the best colours and I test them against the dragons I already have to see if they have better odds.
And this is the result after Round 1 of breeding:
Not much has changed and that's pretty normal after breeding just one pair for the first time. I have however added a few additions to my doc:
- I've added notes on the side for First generation, 1st gen + 2nd gen mates, and Singles. As a refresher, first generation are my starting dragons for this project. 2nd gen are the descendants of those starting dragons.
- Related to that, you'll see that in the ID# column I've filled in some of the cells with colour. A dragon with both its DRAGON and ID# columns filled in means that it's a 2nd gen dragon. Which colours it's filled in with tell me which bloodlines that 2nd gen dragon descends from.
- So as an example: Balmar, Awela, and Lynette are all offspring of Mustela x Keiden. Since they're the purple pair bloodline, their children get filled in as purple. But if say Mustela was purple, but Keiden was idk green, then their children would get their DRAGON cell filled with purple and their ID# filled with green (or vise versa) to denote that Balmar and his siblings are descendants of the purple and green bloodlines.
- Singles are dragons that I think are good breeding candidates for the project but that don't have a mate I can pair them with just yet.
This is what my doc looks like after the third round of breeding.
A lot more has changed and it's starting to get messy. This is where colour-coding your starter pairs and bloodlines pays off.
Some of my first generation pairs have been broken up and given new mates based on if any of the 2nd gen offspring have better odds with them than their initial mates. I've also bought a couple new dragons. I find that searching for new dragons even when you're in the midst of a breeding project is important for keeping bloodlines pure and just giving you more options when it comes to mates.
Something I want to mention here is that even though I changed up some of the first generation pairs, I don't change their initial colour code. For example, Lunette and Solf were once a pair and I marked them as the teal bloodline. But now they both have different mates and I haven't changed that teal colour. This is because I've bred them at least once and kept one of their offspring, Vulcan, who has that teal colour.
Had I not kept an offspring, I would have changed Lunette's and Solf's colours to match their new mates since they're both first gen dragons and thus not related to any of my other breeding candidates. However, this doc is meant to help me track bloodlines at a glance, so I need Lunette and Solf to retain their original teal bloodline colour so that I know Vulcan is related to them and any offspring they have with their new mates.
This is what my current pairs look like, after 5 rounds of breeding.
A lot of improvement has been made in the odds of my pairs. When I first started, I had odds of ~3-12% and now I have odds of 20-50%.
And here is where you can see why keeping bloodlines from mixing too much early on is important. My Caramel / Sable / Cinnamon dragon is going to come from the orange bloodline. My Orange / Sable / Cinnamon dragon is going to come from the purple/red, red/dark green, or purple/pink bloodlines depending on the pair. Keeping those bloodlines pure for most of the project means whenever I get my final Orange and Caramel dragons, I can safely pair them up without worrying about some stray related ancestor.
Trust me, it's not easy to keep bloodlines pure. It's very tempting to want to cross bloodlines early if their offspring give you good colours. My project for
Allure x
Enthrall had a lot more bloodlines mixing early due to it being an Imperial project. Even with a spreadsheet it was hell trying to keep track of who could actually breed with one another and not have Allure and Enthrall be accidentally related in the end. (I also had to breed down 4 generations for that project, which probably didn't help lol.)
