I think some Footkerchief appreciation is in order.
Haha, thanks, I think. What's the original from?
My current understanding is this:
1) All children of a species have a chance to be of any caste of that species.
2) This chance is invariant on parents (parent's caste does not influence chances)
3) Colour, markings, etc are caste tags.
1) Correct
2) Correct
3) Color and markings, like all other body info, can be applied either to a caste or to the creature as a whole.
What precisely can we do with inheritance and selective breeding? Will children not be more or less random members of the species, not even (necessarily) of the caste of their parents?
I may just be confused.
An example, say I want only black panthers. I start with a random sample of panthers, at least one of which is black. I discard all non-black offspring, and mate the remainder. If I continue this indefinitely, will I end up with black panthers which only (barring vanishingly small chances) produce black panther children? (substitute blackness with large size as another example)
Jaguar/panther coloration came up a while ago in this thread --
it's not done via extra castes. Check the
dwarf raws, specifically the parts at the bottom with TL_COLOR_MODIFIER: "A color modifier takes a list of color patterns (every color is associated to a monotone color pattern of its color, so you can also use color tokens)
and frequencies."
Since you can specify frequencies, you don't need extra castes to make some color patterns more common than others -- that'd be overkill. The only advantage of using extra castes (in this case) would be that you could give them the proper name of "black panther" (as it stands, they're just labeled as "jaguar").
It's unclear exactly how the game assigns dominant/recessive alleles to the color variations, but yes, colors are inherited. So given enough time, the black panther breeding should work out, although they might also be small or pop-eyed or long-bodied as a result of inbreeding.
black panthers are a made as a caste of panthers, and castes are random, you can state a chance for it to happen on the raws, though, but the parents have no influence on the offspring, here.
hair color, skin color and eye color are different, though, these are actual genetics, and supposedlly are inerited from parents, even during worldgen history.
As explained above, this is incorrect -- black panthers are not a separate caste of jaguars, just a color variation, and that coloration has genetic factors just like all the other color/appearance modifiers.