Impure Species

Impure species
In some biomes or events you might encounter entirely unique species that you can not get through breeding base species.

These serve as low priority genes (AFAIK that's called recessive) and when combined with base species genes (found in either hybrids or the base species themselves) will be ignored resulting in an "impure" version of the base species.

Any character where one "parent gene" is not a base species gene will be called impure by the game even though they otherwise would act as a base species specimen.

For example a fusion of a seedling Girl and Lymean would look like a Lymean, have Lymean passives, and Lymean guaranteed skills (and inherited skills from both "parents"), yet would not provide any skill points through a ritual even if base lymean was never "ritualed" (body parts would still unlock though).

Both pure and "Impure" genes are still there and are still transfered, and in absence of base species genes "impure" genes WILL resurface (with one exception AFAIK).

Continuing the example above if one were to fuse two such Lymean/SeedlingGirl characters one could chose to either create a normal lymean or a normal Seedling Girl.

You could even make a normal hybrid out of two such (base+impure) mixes, so long as base genes are different.

One "impure" genes worthy of special notice would be the human gene. It never "resurfaces", and, to the best of my knowledge, it's completely impossible to create a human in this game. Didn't run any recent tests, but in older versions any creature with both genes being human would just fail to be created. Unsurprisingly human genes would act as recessive even towards other impure genes. (So a human + seedling girl would work as an "even less pure" version of a seedling girl).

Generally, species priority would seem to be something like:

Base genes>Impure humanoid/creature genes (didn't have any normal impure humanoids on hand for testing dunno the priority of this part)>spirit genes>human genes.

With two impure genes of the same priority, parent order seems to be the deciding factor.

With two spirits (both spirits of the humanoid and of the creature variety) the second gene takes priority. With two creatures it's the first one. Dunno about normal impure humanoids. And, as stated above, with two humans it's a failure and with two base species it's a hybrid (for which the order of genes means nothing).