Post by Keyglyph on Jun 18, 2023 14:50:07 GMT
// Introduction //
Friends, I have always been an excessively sentimental Petz player. I'm the type who can't quite emotionally distance themselves enough from the game to delete anybody, or to mate two petz who don't get along, or to protect myself from feeling guilty over stressing my dogz with large litters. I very reasonably assumed I'd never be able to create my own selective breed because of this -- yet eventually I did, as my fascination with the genetics component of the game is just too strong. But do you know what happens when a sentimental player attempts a breeding project? A whole lot of data, that's what. Tons of it.
Over the course of my first breeding project I kept roughly 1530 dogz. That's right -- that's the number I kept. There are hundreds, possibly thousands more in my Returned Petz folder because, true to form, I couldn't bring myself to permanently delete any. A quick check with Windows Explorer is telling me there are 3,974 dogz files in there. YUP.
Of the 1530 I kept, all of them have at-a-glance genetics cards I created by screenshotting their GenePoolz analyses. They have also all been entered into a genealogy database I built for them, and each of them has a true name. Because I'm bananas.
So here's the thing. Now that I've seen the project through, I noticed a handful of patterns and phenomena along the way that I'd like to go back and put a closer eye on. To be clear, I'm not a hacker or modder and have zero experience with hexing; I can't tell you why anything happens with the game's genetics. But with 4000+ dogz' worth of history there will be things I will be able to confirm are happening, period, just through observation. I'd like to track some statistics, too. And thus I think my sentimentality can be put to some practical use!
This is going to be the megathread/megaramble of my thoughts as I dig through my notes and examine anything interesting. I have no doubt that a lot of what I bring up here will have already been discovered by the community, but reinforcing things is good too! These posts will most likely be ad-hoc and random in an ongoing-science-log kind of way.
Some of my immediate plans include mixing those 3,974 dogz files in with their fellow littermates so that everyone is accounted for and organized, and creating a spreadsheet for quantifying some of these phenomena I've noticed.