I did some further testing on the baby face thing by creating a couple with grotesque noses. Their babies were born with normal looking noses. Maybe the facial features only manifest on babies when they are of alien origin, then. The interesting thing is that, with aliens born from abductions, I don't think you can see their real nose shape until they turn into toddlers (but you can see the alien eye shape). So, only second generation abduction babies can manifest these features then. Odd. I drew a conclusion too fast thinking it's the same for all babies.

@jagerjmr: I think you misunderstand what "dominant" and "recessive" mean in the context of genetics. In your example, the baby would have green eyes because they didn't inherit any copies of the brown eye gene at all. One parent had one brown and one green gene and passed on the green one, the other had two copies of green and passed one of them on. If you use the simdna cheat, or look at his genetics in SimPE, you'll see that the green-eyed kid will not have any copies of the brown-eye gene. Genetics in the sims is based on mendellian genetics (which is a very simplified model of real-life genetics, but powerful enough that animal and plant breeders use it daily). You may want to google for that or "punnett's square" for a complete explanation on how it works.

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As far as custom skins - as far as I know, they are dominant over standard skintones, and equally dominant with alien skin when only the alien and custom skin are present. However, it is quite possible that they have the same inheritance rules as alien skin, where they're only dominant over Maxis human skins when one parent is homozygous for the custom gene. I'll create a sim that has custom skin het. for human skin and breed it with a homozygous human sim to see if I ever get any children that carry the custom gene but express the human skintone.

I did some experiments with custom hair last night and found that it works like custom eyes. Custom hair is super-dominant. However, because each hairstyle you do in Body Shop is only for one sex, and each gets their own custom genetic identifier, if the child born is of the opposite sex of the one with the custom hair, they will express the gene they get from the other parent. Fortunately, it was a completely trivial operation in SimPE to copy the genetic identifier from one sex's hairstyle package to the other. Doing that worked exactly as expected. Either parent could have the custom hair color I made, with the second parent having any one of the standard colors, and all of their kids of both sexes would always have the custom color.

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@IgnorantBliss: There is an entry in each Sim's DNA that specifies which of their facial regions will act as dominant when the facial structures are blended. Note: this is different than the deprecated "facial structure" line. You can view it in SimPE or with the simDNA cheat. If the alien dad has "eyes" listed in the "dominant facial regions" line, and the mother does not, the kids will always get something closer to the big alien eyes than their mother's eyes (obviously, not talking about color here). If it's the other way around (the mom has eyes listed, but the father does not), the kids will always have something closer to their mother's eyes. If neither have it listed, or both have it listed, the result will be closer to one or the other at random. It doesn't seem to ever try to pick the midpoint; the result is usually quite close to one parent or the other. So, you might look at a kid and go "Oh, she's got her mother's nose!", or "he's got his father's chin" or "she's got the mailman's eyes."

Which facial regions are chosen as dominant is decided randomly when a sim is created in CAS. You could create a sim twice from the same template, and this one line of their DNA would be different. Which facial regions they get as dominant is weighted somewhat based on sex (e.g. males are more likely to get a dominant brow while females are more likely to have a dominant mouth.) Babies born do inherit entries on this line, though the exact mechanism is unclear. As far as I know, all the possible regions are brow, eyes, ears, nose, cheeks, cheekbones, mouth and jaw. I've seen anywhere from two to six listed on any given sim, though I don't know if more or fewer are possible.

Pollination Technician seems to have dominant eyes, ears, cheekbones and nose at least. You can check by looking at his "unknown" entry in the neighborhood in SimPE (look it up by looking at the relations of any of your alien kids.) It is possible that it is different in each neighborhood. I know with my Multi-PT hack, that DNA line is chosen randomly when the technicians are first created by the game (it is not clear when this happens, but they do get an unknown entry in the neighborhood file just like the real PT). So each person using my hack could get wildly different results from the same technician. The same technician could pass on big eyes consistently in one neighborhood, but pointy ears instead in another.

Also, I have seen abduction babies have flat noses and tiny ears straight from birth, so it can show up in a baby. You can also tell if they will have big eyes, though it is much less obvious. I haven't been able to distinguish pointy from non-pointy ears until they reached toddlerhood. I also had a baby from the therapist that had some ugly features straight from birth (most obvious in chin and mouth area.) The poor toddler was sooo ugly, and he was even worse when he got to be a child. I almost euthanised him, but he eventually grew into his features somewhat - he became extremely homely in kind of an endearing instead of devestatingly ugly and deformed.

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I may try creating a set of default replacement skins that allow normal skinned sims to express the alien eyes. I'd like to see what they look like on a normal skintone. IgnorantBliss, you may want to download sugarandcaffiene's default replacement eyes. With those you can see the effect I'm talking about with alien eyes on normal skin. If the kid is expressing brown eyes, it will show up as the nice looking replacements. If they're expressing alien eyes, they'll show up with the original Maxis textures.

Yeah, I'm familiar with the genetics of the facial regions, and it's an interesting subject. However, I disagree with one thing here: Even if one parent has a dominant eye shape and the other one not, their kids will not always get the dominant one. It's more like there is a 66% chance of any child inheriting the dominant region.

When I was talking about the strong alien features earlier, I meant maybe they are stronger than regular features in the way that you can see them on babies, while usually the facial features only manifest on toddlers and older. In that case I wasn't talking about the other kind of dominance about inheriting different facial regions.

A good example is the same sim family I talked about earlier. The father, who has the alien eye shape among other alien features, has his eyes listed as a dominant feature when you look at that line in SimPE. And more than half of their babies that I produced with my experiment did have that eye shape, but not all of them. Probably like 2/3 of the babies had the alien eyes, and the remaining 1/3 got their mom's eye shape, even though in her DNA eyes are not dominant. So, the 66% rule seems to work here.

OK, you are probably right about that. Dominant, in the case of facial regions, just means that it's more likely to be inhereted, not guaranteed.

I think the fact that you can see them on babies is just that they're very extreme. Like, Pollination technician literally has no nose at all. Similarly with the therapist, he's got completely outrageous features, and they do show up a little bit on babies. But these are extreme cases. I can't imagine that all the babies look completely normal from the example that JM mentioned.

The baby face thing keeps confusing me now. I'd like to know exactly how it works. I would also like to know what kind of experiences other people have had with alien babies and their offspring, if the alien features are somehow special even in the second and third generations, or if it's just because they are so extreme in general.

I don't know about alien features. Most of my aliens from PT have inherited his lack of a nose and his eyes except for twins. In the case of twins, one displays the alien features and the other one looks normal.

fwiffo, you solved a puzzle for me. I have one family (Legacy) where the patriarch (made in CAS) had custom brown hair. He married a townie w/brown hair. Their oldest daughter (brown hair) married a townie who had blonde hair. Every male child since then has had brown hair, and every female child has had blonde hair! I could never figure it out til I read your post. Btw, their grandchildren so far display the same genetics (boy=brown, girl=blonde). His blonde hair must have been dominant over the brown for the girls.

If any of you haven't had any children by Nervous Subject, his eyes are extremely dominant. Every child that he has ever produced in my game has had his eyes except for one who was a twin. It'll be interesting to see what his grandchildren look like, lol. For twins each one seems to take his/her genetics from one parent. An example would be one twin would take on the mother's genetics and one would take on the father's genetics. Hence PT's twins where one had the huge, but human eyes and the other one was completely normal.

I haven't had the opportunity of having any children fathered by Nervous. I've only been able to have children with the female aliens so far. Maybe it's just my run of the mill. *shrugs*

i got a toddler whose eye color i want to change from brown to green & hair i want to change from black to red

but i dont seem to find how can anyone give me a simple respons

I just wait till they're teens and then go and use a mirror. I could do it when they're children, but I like the wide variety of choices, plus their general facial structures are as close to adult as any.

I think you misunderstand. Your custom brown hair should be dominant over all the maxis standard hair colors unless someone has manually modified the value for that in the .package file with SimPE. Since custom hairs, by default, are sex-linked (unless you create hairs for both genders and give them the same genetic ID instead of the unique ID created by Body Shop), the custom brown hair could only go to boys. However, his grandaughters in this case, though they could get the custom content brown gene, which is dominant over blond, but they cannot express that color because there isn't a female hair with that genetic ID, so they express the gene they get from their father (blond). The custom brown is still dominant though, and if they pass it on to their children, the boys could express it (and they are pretty likely to, since it is super-dominant, and they have a 50% chance of getting it if their mother is a carrier.) It is also possible for the grandaughters in this case to get maxis brown (since the eldest daughter should carry both maxis and your custom brown genes). The grandsons can only get either maxis brown or the custom brown, because both are dominant over blond.


You'll need to use Sim Surgery in SimPE. If you do a search you'll find a number of threads that describe the procedure.

Puhleeeeeeeze! write up an explanation! & write as though you're writing to
an imbicile....cause you will be...me. I read and re-read your "Mysteries of DNA" post but I just can't figure out how to get @ the Sound File Mapping you refered to. Help me Obi Wan Kenobi! You're my only hope!

kurtiford, if you d/l a new version of Simpe, it will say "Sim DNA" instead of "Sound Mapping." Can't get much simpler. Click on the Sim Description and find the sim you want to alter and write down the Instance #. Now Click on Sim DNA and find that same Instance # and click on it. Now click on the Plug In tab and you will see 10 strings of code. On the first page of this thread, they explain what each of the strings mean. If you want to change one of the strings, click on it to highlight it. Next, look on the right. In that window in the lower right under where it says "Value," you'll see the string that you have highlighted. Edit your string there in the "Value" window then click on "Commit" and then on File at the top and then save and then exit. I don't think your sim will look any diff, but his/her children will display the new genetics. If you want your sim to look diff, you have to use Sim Surgery for him/her.

Well, I just played that neighborhood for a little bit. I also checked in Strangetown on Nervous Subject. First of all I got Nervous' wife preggers again w/the tombstone of L&D and the sped it up and then used boolprop tce to check the child's genetics. In spite of the fact that Nervous does NOT have eyes listed on that line of facial features that are thought to be dominant, he still passes on those dumb droopy eyes! lol In Veronaville where that other family is, both parents have a recessive gene of blonde hair. That might explain why their two daughters have blonde hair, but their sons still have brown hair. Again, both mother and father have brown hair w/a recessive of blonde. The father carries a dominant custom brown hair. However, it displays dark brown. His father (CAS) had custom LT brown hair, but his mother (a townie) had dark brown hair. I'll have one of the other Legacy sons marry a brown haired lady who is the product of two brown haired sims and we'll see what happens. I'm still thinking that the game doesn't have any instance of any females w/the custom hair color so, it gives them the recessive blonde. Also I took the "jaw" off of the facial features line and then had the wife get pregnant again. The child just grew into a toddler and she has very narrow (sucked in) cheeks. I'm wondering if there isn't somewhere else in the game that determines what facial features will be dominant. Until later, I'll keep experimenting.

That a facial feature is labelled dominant doesn't mean it'll always overrule a recessive one. If one parent has a dominant nose and the other one not, each child has something like a 66% chance of getting the dominant one, not 100%. If both parents have a dominant nose, then it's 50-50.

When you create a sim in CAS, different facial features are labelled dominant randomly, but male sims are more likely to have a dominant nose, while female sims are more likely to have dominant eyes (shape). They can pass these on in any combination to their offspring, and from then on they are not gender-related anymore: a second generation female is just as likely to have a dominant nose than a male sim is.

Custom hairs are usually gender-related, so even if a female sim inherits a dominant custom hair from her dad, she can't express it, and will express any hair gene from mom.

:confused: lol

Does anybody know how I can take off those horrible droopy eyes that Nervous Subject passes on to EVERY child he produces? It's almost as if maxis made him in CAS!

My guess is that you have to remove "eyes" from the list of dominant facial features in his DNA. He can still pass them on, but the chance is lower, especially if you pair him up with a female who has dominant eyes. (I have not tried this in my own game, though, so I'm not completely sure if editing works like this)

They probably did.

Actually, Nervous' eyes aren't too bad - in the experiments I've done, they actually look quite striking in his offspring and grandchildren! Dominant, yes, but ugly? Not terribly

Last edited by aurian : 16th Jul 2005 at 11:30 AM. Reason: spelling error

First of all, he does not have eyes on the list of "dominant" features. I tried taking the brow and cheek off of the "dominant" line, but they (the eyes) still show up. I tried putting eyes on the wife's line, but the child still gets Nervous' eyes, lol. This still leads me to believe that the dominant genes for facial structure are possibly stored someplace else in the game.

Last edited by Sonshine : 16th Jul 2005 at 08:23 PM.

That's odd, because when I looked at his DNA in my game, the eyes were listed as dominant.

The next time the wife gives birth, try repeating it: when she's about to go into labor save the game, let her give birth but then exit without saving and come back. Let the birth happen again. Maybe this time the child won't have those eyes. If you tried only once, there is still a fairly large chance for the child to get the eyes, even when they are not dominant, and since the game tends to produce identical siblings, you have to re-roll the genes by repeating the birth.

In my game, he has 15 children and 14 of them have the droopy eyes! The only one who didn't was one twin. Even then he has another set of twins who both have the droopy eyes. So the eyes are very dominant.

You're clearly having the first born effect happening, then. Doesn't mean that his eyes are particularly dominant, it just means they are the "first choice" the game happens to make every time it generates a baby. If you do the birth repeating thing without saving, you have a better chance of getting a child with prettier eyes, especially because it worked with the other twin.

Well, I did some experimenting in a new copy of Strangetown and this time his chin was dominant! At first I tried w/the townie Barbara Young, and every single one of the kids had that sharp triangle shape head w/the pointed chin and HUGE cheekbones!! Talk about out of balance! Then I tried w/the townie Margaret Howe, and the kids from that weren't quite so bad, lol That tombstone of L&D is sure great! lol Anyway, it just seems to be random, when the neighborhood loads for the first time, which of his characteristics will be dominant. It also seems that no amount of editing on the facial features line of the DNA makes any diff whatsoever. At least w/Nervous Subject.

Have you looked at the other Nervous Subject's DNA, if it actually is different? It would be odd that the facial features would be assigned dominance values at random like that while all their other genes are consistent, and if Nervous was created in CAS (like he probably was), then the dominance would be assigned at the time of his creation.