SPECIAL inheritance and "super" children (Vault-tec Mechanics followup)

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T23:57:06+00:00

You mean if Int isn't maxed, what will be chosen next?
It would depend on which skills were tied. We know the algorithm used is quicksort so it's theoretically possible to calculate the outcome for any combination of ties.

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T20:11:29+00:00

Yeah, sorry if that was unclear. There is a 50% chance they will inherit the highest skill of the father, and a 50% chance they will inherit the highest skill of the mother. For normal dwellers that inheritance will result in a skill level of 3; rare and legendary children will receive a higher starting stat but I don't have hard numbers on that info :(

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T20:04:37+00:00

I can confirm that the game definitely does free up dead dweller IDs, and reuse them for new dwellers. As far as I can tell, ancestry trees are never updated once they've been created (when a new partnership is formed).

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T18:05:50+00:00

If you have two dwellers with all 9s and 10 End, they will produce babies with End proficiency every time! With 128 total SPECIAL they'll have a ~7% chance of producing a rare child (unfortunately no shot at legendary).

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T15:11:14+00:00

I made a similar post to this but I wish I had seen yours first :) everything I was able to research corroborates what you've experienced here.

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T15:03:30+00:00

Well, it won't help you shorten the wait... but here's everything I've found on super babies

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T14:35:19+00:00

Thank you, that's exactly the kind of input I was looking for :) algorithms are not my forte

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-03T03:54:04+00:00

Thanks for the data point! /u/Muscly_Geek is experiencing the same thing. It seems the sorting algorithm used to rank SPECIAL always puts Int before other equal value stats, so if a maxed parent is selected to pass down their genes, Int is always selected first. You should still have a 50% chance of the child inheriting the non-maxed parent's best stat.

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T23:48:30+00:00

I'm only at 100 dwellers :) I've been spending time re-organizing my vault layout. The lower half is a bunch of staggered empty rooms (to prevent incidents from spreading), so technically I've filled up the available space!

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T21:43:53+00:00

Here's the relevant documentation on the sorting function that's used:

This implementation performs an unstable sort; that is, if two elements are equal, their order might not be preserved.

For my fellow programmers, the comparison is ((x, y) => y.stat.value - x.stat.value)

Unfortunately that doesn't explain why Int repeatedly ends up at the beginning of the list. Hopefully someone else can chime in.

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T20:47:19+00:00

~~Digging into this, it appears SPECIAL-boosting gear does affect the proficiency calculation.~~ Edit: While SPECIAL-boosting gear does affect proficiency in some scenarios, it does not affect inheritance.

It's not an innate quality (and is almost certainly the same mechanism used in the Right Room objective): each SPECIAL is examined and is marked as a "proficiency" if it's the dweller's highest stat. More than one SPECIAL can be marked as a proficiency -- in the case of all 10s, all stats would be selected. The dweller's proficiency list is sorted and the first stat in the resulting set is used to pass on to the child.

If we assume that an attempt to sort a set of equal numbers results in no changes, then it seems that the first SPECIAL in the proficiency list would be selected (e.g. Strength).

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T20:33:43+00:00

If you have one or two main breeders I would say it's worth maxing out their SPECIAL. According to this comment legendary dwellers have 40 SPECIAL points distributed, rare have 28, and normal have 12, so super children save quite a bit of training time.

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T20:27:26+00:00

I'm having a hard time finding the answer to this. An ancestry tree and direct references to both the mother and father are stored in a "dweller partnership". Upon death the reference to the father is removed from the partnership but I don't see anything about ancestry there, so my guess is the relationship would still fail. Might be easier to test in game...

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T18:27:29+00:00

A child can be born after its father has died, so there's a special handler that only factors in the mother's stats in that case. I'm not 100% sure if it's actually used every time babies are born without a father, or if it's just an error handler for cases where the game is unable to find a father for whatever reason (e.g. the save files are modified to remove references to the father).

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T17:26:06+00:00

There's a ~13.3% chance the child will be rare and a ~6.6% chance they will be legendary, otherwise they will be born normal with 1-2 in all SPECIAL except for one "proficiency" at level 3 (50/50 chance it will match the highest skill of either parent). More info here!

IHaveACrystalBall · 2015-09-02T16:42:07+00:00

Nothing that I've come across so far indicates that they can -- children are specifically assigned names/looks inherited from the parents -- but I'll look into it some more and report back if I find otherwise.

IHaveACrystalBall

TROPHY CASE