Breeding for Gold?

[Moonfrost18]

Hello! I've been curious how breeding for green/gold stats work. Could you breed horses with greenxgreen stats and get a gold stat? Or would it have to be goldxgold or goldxgreen?
Thanks!

[Horsechronicles12]

Hello! I've been curious how breeding for green/gold stats work. Could you breed horses with greenxgreen stats and get a gold stat? Or would it have to be goldxgold or goldxgreen?
Thanks!

It just depends on the horse

[EclipticEnd]

Hello! I've been curious how breeding for green/gold stats work. Could you breed horses with greenxgreen stats and get a gold stat? Or would it have to be goldxgold or goldxgreen?
Thanks!

I'll answer as well as I can, but note that not all of my information may be accurate in the way that I explain it. Any inaccuracies might be corrected by more experienced players. For reference, here's a link to Totina's "All Breeders Report Comments" post that I'll likely talk about. I'll also be referencing this post by larissar.

The fast answer is... generally yes, GrxGr can equal Gold and GrxGo or GoxGo can as well. NonxGr or NonxGo might have the ability to do that as well if you're really lucky though NonxNon probably won't go straight to Gold.

The long answer and explanation is this...

To paraphrase larissar's post:

The 8 stats that're included in the Breeders Report (BR) are impacted by: 1. a gene that the horse has (hypothetically inherited from a parent / generated based on the parents (not necessarily a direct inheritance meaning if mom is a 1 and dad is a 2, foal might be something else and not exactly 1 or 2) / generated on adoption from the AC), 2. the horse's physical aspects (gender, height, build, etc.), and 3. the horse's conformation aspects.

The game decides on the sentence used in the BR based on an uncertain number range, meaning that two horses with the same value for speed (as an example) might have different sentences ("Your stallion/mare is about as fast as average." or "This stallion/mare runs about average, speed-wise." are examples of sentences that you might get for speed at thereabouts the same hypothetical range). They noted that there could be 5-ish comment choices per range. I'd suggest checking out the breeder report comments post to get an idea of what comments will be more likely to hypothetically increase in color tier when bred. As an example, the Tempo comment "This stallion/mare is as regular as clockwork" can show up in both green and gold form and therefore likely has a good chance to increase from green to gold with a good enough pairing.

An important thing is that "[...] If your horse has a great comment, his genes must be great, and conversely if the horse has poor comments, his genes must be poor. An average horse could be hiding great or poor genes." Conformation and such do impact how the comments are shown. Therefore, a bad confo for a stat but good BR comment can tell you that the horse has a great natural gene for that stat. This also means that while great attribute genetics can correct for bad conformation, great conformation cannot correct bad genetics.

They also give a number range for the stat colors (though whether this is hypothetical/metaphorical or not I'm unsure); 0-10 would be red and 65-100 is green. We can infer then that 11-64 are uncolored stats and 101+ is gold. This tells us that to be in red, the horse has to be at a pretty low number. There's a large distance to travel between uncolored and green and I'd assume a distance between green and gold. That being said, a horse at 64 (one away from green) would be uncolored and easily have foals in the green zone versus a horse at 11 (the lowest hypothetical number for uncolored) where there's still a long way to breed yet and may in fact lose points based on the chosen pairing to result in a red commented foal.

As larissar said, "Breeding good horses to good horses results in any range of poor, good or great horses. Breeding to great horses increases your chance of good or great horses." Therefore, GoldxGold should be pretty likely to make a Gold, GreenxGold should have a good chance for improvement but isn't a guarantee, GreenxGreen has a chance but could go either way, NonxNon probably won't make it to gold (but can to Red or Green), NonxGreen or NonxGold really depends on what the Non's genetics are like, but theoretically may be possible.

This is a bit of a convoluted and meandering way to confirm that, as Horsechronicles12 said, it depends on the horses bred as well as a little bit of luck. There's not really a set equation to decide breed these two horses together to be guaranteed a Gold, but if you have some good horses then they'll likely make good offspring. Just note that some horses produce better foals than others based on their genetics, and not every foal is an improvement even if the BR is a bit better.

I suggest checking out the linked posts for more information; they might have things explained a bit better than I do. There's likely more information in other answers or in the Guide's area. BlackOak2 also has a link in their signature to a list of helpful links to posts that may have even more information and better answers. Their name pops up a lot in the Color area if you lose the link. : )

[BlackOak2]

EclipticEnd is indeed a solid senior member to answer questions. And should attempt to remember that they're quite well informed on all aspects of the game.

And the answer given is thorough and informed.

So I'll only add one additional thing. Keep an eye on what type of horses you breed together. As an example, if you breed a log puller to a racer and both are outstanding examples of their sports, although you'll likely get a decently good looking foal, it is unlikely to be able to do much in competitions and also, you have thoroughly mucked up the careful breeding of each and will suffer through a number of generations until you again produce a horse that is able to compete adequately.

[Moonfrost18]

Thank you all so much! This helps a ton