Where Gecktopia's genetics come from

Gecktopia takes its inspiration from real crested geckos and the breeders who work with them. Some inheritance patterns have substantial breeding support. Others are emerging, disputed, or difficult to separate from years of selection for a particular look.

The Morph Library explains that evidence. The game chooses rules that let those characteristics pass from one generation to the next. Those rules aim to make breeding thoughtful and believable, while leaving room to explain what is still uncertain.

A name is not always a gene

A morph name can describe several different things. Cappuccino is an inherited trait with a breeder-supported dosage model. Super Cappuccino is its two-copy form. Frappuccino combines Cappuccino and Lilly White. Harlequin describes pattern coverage. Ink Spot describes the appearance of spots. A named line also carries a history of ancestry and selection.

All of these can matter when choosing a pairing. They do not all need a separate gene, and similar-looking animals can have different inherited states.

Each library entry explains what kind of name it is, what breeders report about inheritance, and how Gecktopia represents it.

What the game chooses

A game needs a working rule even when breeders disagree. Gecktopia can select one interpretation without presenting it as the only possible explanation for real animals.

Tangerine is one example. AC Reptiles describes its development through selection, while Gecko Nerd describes incomplete dominance. Gecktopia uses the incomplete-dominant model: an animal can have zero, one or two Tangerine copies, and those states influence its appearance. The reference entry keeps the disagreement visible and credits the people behind the accounts.

Base color is another example. Gecktopia represents Black and Red as alternatives at a shared game locus, with Yellow modeled separately. The library recognizes all three base colors and discusses the evidence for their relationships. Choosing this representation gives the game a consistent rule; it does not make the calculator an experiment that settles the debate.

Some settings are more explicitly simplified. The game's HQ factor helps represent Harlequin coverage, and its QS factor helps produce Quadstripe. These are useful ways to generate inherited variation. Their copy counts should not be read as a test for the genotype of a real gecko.

Reading a pairing's odds

An in-game percentage answers a specific question: given these parents' stored states and the game's inheritance rules, how likely is this outcome?

For example, under a simple recessive model, two carriers have a 25% chance of a two-copy offspring, a 50% chance of a carrier and a 25% chance of an offspring carrying neither copy. These are probabilities for each offspring, not a promise that every four eggs will contain one of each outcome.

In that example every outcome is viable, but not every pairing works that way. Under a model where Lilly White is incomplete dominant, which is how Gecktopia treats it, when two Lilly White parents are paired, each conception has a 25% chance of being two-copy, and breeder reports identify that two-copy outcome as nonviable. That 25% is a share of conceptions, not of eggs that hatch or of healthy hatchlings.

Visible appearance can add another layer. Color strength, spot density and pattern coverage may vary even when two animals share the same major-factor states. Two animals can also look alike while carrying different hidden states that matter in later generations.

Where a preview includes a nonviable outcome, that is different from a percentage among surviving hatchlings. The library explains reported welfare concerns separately from the pairing rules the game uses.

How the reference stays useful

The library records the source behind an inheritance claim, meaningful disagreements, and founder or project credit where the history can be supported. An originator's breeding account is valuable evidence, but it may have a different scope from a complete set of breeding records or independent replication.

Evidence labels describe the support for a claim. They do not decide whether a morph is interesting, whether a breeder's observations deserve attention, or whether the game may represent an emerging trait.

Each entry's In Gecktopia section explains the chosen game treatment. Generated illustrations show examples of that treatment. They help explore appearances; they are not photographs or proof that a real pairing will produce the same animals.

As evidence develops, Gecktopia's reference and game models can be reviewed deliberately. The aim is to make the choices understandable, so you can enjoy breeding in the game and use the library without mistaking a simulation rule for settled genetics.

The sources, and how they are weighed

Every entry in the library lists the sources it rests on, and links each one that has a public page. This is the whole set, and what each kind of source can carry.

• A breeder's own account of their project is the best record of where a line came from and what they saw in their own pairings. On its own it does not show how the trait passes on in every line sold under the same name.
• A collaborative breeder model, such as Foundation Genetics, pools what many breeders have seen into one interpretation of how traits are inherited. It supports that interpretation, and the entries say where other breeders read it differently.
• A shop listing or a photo guide shows how a name is used. It supports what a morph looks like, not how it is inherited.
• Published genome research describes the crested gecko's genome. It does not yet tie any hobby morph name to a gene.
• A source that could not be read in full, like an interview known only from its listing, is still named here, with that limit beside it.

Several articles about one project count as one evidence family, not as several confirmations. Gecko Nerd's Tangerine post and the slides that go with it are one account. Reptile City Korea's Cappuccino research appears on two breeders' sites and is still one piece of research. The list below is grouped by family for that reason.

Every source

Every gecko in this chapter was drawn from its own genes while you read it, by the renderer that draws them in the game. Names in the text open their entry in the library.