Good Breeding

[JamieC]

Hi there.

So I've been breeding a lot of pokemon in my Ruby game, just trying to see how the IVs were passed on in this game, and all I have now is a box full of Arons and not a clue of whats going on :) Some of the IV's do seem to be passed on, but never reliably.

So, my question. Is there any conclusive rules on what gets passed on, is it semi-random, or completely and utterly random? Please help, before the flood of Arons take over...

[Poryhedron]

I recall it being said that some IVs are passed on, but which IVs get passed on is random. I've been wondering about this, too, though...do all of a baby's IVs come from one of the parents (the only variable being which ones come from which,) or are some of them as random as natures?

[rinku]

To the best of my knowledge and experience the rules are this:

Each baby inherits three random stats from its parents. Each stat is randomly chosen and which parent it copies is also randomly chosen. The other three stats are randomly set, but obviously will occasionaly be set to be the same as one of the parents' stats (there are only 32 different values after all).

So, a given baby may inherit:

Father's Special Attack
Mother's Speed
Mother's Hit Points
...with Attack, Defense and Special Defense set randomly.

Sometimes a baby will inherit the same stat from both parents:

Father's Attack
Mother's Attack
Father's Speed
... which will result in only *two* inherited stats as one will overwrite the other.

Because the truly random stats can be set to the same vaules that a parent has, you will sometimes see a baby that appears to have inherited 4 or more stats from its parents. This also results in less "2 stats inherited" cases than you would otherwise expect, as it is not unlikely that you will get a match on a parent from four random rolls. If each of the four stats were different,
there is a 23% chance of a match, assuming truly random distribution.

Personality *may* have an effect on which stats get inherited - I have noticed a trend in some breeding trials for one particular stat to be inherited by most babies and another to not be. At some point I may do an accellerated breeding trial on an emulator (which can be cranked up to faster speeds). But this could be just random clustering. You would need a few hundred babies from the same breeding pair to be sure of any trend.

[JamieC]

Cheers for that rinku, that explains quite a lot! It also seems to hold true (thus far) in my rather limited test sample. The Arons that have been bred from my two parent Arons do seem to get the Defence gene passed on significantly more times than not - whether this has any significance or not is anyones guess though :)

<happily wanders off to breed thousands and thousands of useless pokemon...>