The breeding system is very different in Siralim 3 than it was in Siralim 2. While the process itself is largely consistent between the two games, the underlying mechanics are a lot different. In this post, we’ll explore how the new breeding system works, introduce a new type of item, and discuss some changes made to eggs.

The Breeding Process

Just like before, you’ll visit the breeding master and select two creatures you want to use for breeding. These creatures can either be of your own choosing or based on the breeding recipes you’ve collected during your travels.

Breeding does not cost any resources, nor does it cost Power Balance since PB does not exist in this game. This means that, other than the loss of the two creatures used, breeding is completely free of charge.

When you finish breeding, you’ll be given an egg, and the parents will disappear forever.

Goodbye, Gene Strength

Gene Strength does not exist in Siralim 3. While I like the idea of each subsequent offspring growing more powerful as you continue to breed your creatures, it was very difficult to balance this mechanic correctly. At the start of Siralim 2’s development cycle, players said that creatures did not gain Gene Strength quickly enough. After making several changes to make GS feel more satisfying, however, it’s clear that balance became an issue. It either allowed players to mow down difficult content without any regard for their party composition, or it caused them to hit a brick wall at some point and prevented them from progressing unless they took the time to breed their creatures.

But don’t worry – there’s a new way to boost your creatures’ base stats in Siralim 3. Remember the “Pill” items from Siralim 1? They’re making a return to Siralim 3, only with a new name: Tomes. These ultra-rare consumable items boost a chosen creature’s base stat by 1. For example, a Tome of Luck can be used to increase your Berserker Fiend’s base Luck by 1. Since creatures gain stats based on a percentage of their base stats when they level up, it’s easy to see that these are very powerful items.

I’m thinking about adding some way to acquire Tomes outside of finding them as rare item drops, but I haven’t figured out how I want to implement this idea yet.

Hello, Heredity

Heredity is a new property that is passed on to creatures through breeding. You see, in Siralim 3, creatures have a level cap of 50. Only by breeding, and subsequently increasing your creatures’ Heredity values, can your creatures surpass this level cap. Each Heredity point increases a creature’s level cap by 10. It’s not very difficult to gain multiple points of Heredity at a time, so you won’t be obligated to breed very often unless you really want to.

The amount of Heredity gained each time you breed is based on how close parents’ levels are to their own level caps. Therefore, it’s optimal to breed creatures together if they’re at their maximum level.

I like Heredity because it gives players an incentive to always try new creatures and party compositions while still maintaining a balanced game. It also provides a means to continue strengthening your party over time, although it does so more indirectly than Gene Strength once did.

I’m sure you have a lot of concerns about this new system. Won’t it be annoying to level up your new creatures each time you breed them? And even more annoying to manage your creatures’ artifacts and spell gems each time you hatch an egg? The next section discusses how these problems are tackled, but if you really hate this new system, there’s a New Game option to turn off Heredity entirely. Don’t do that, though. The new system is fun, I promise.

All About Eggs

First of all, since rituals are not in Siralim 3, you don’t need to worry about completing one in order to hatch your eggs. Simply pay some resources and you’ll be able to hatch an egg instantly.

Eggs now remember the artifacts and spell gems their parents had equipped. When you hatch an egg, you can choose to immediately equip the new creature with either of its parents’ items or none at all. It’s a very simple process that makes breeding a lot easier than in Siralim 2.

The offspring also inherits 50% of each parents’ experience points. This means that if you breed two level 50 creatures together, the offspring will hatch at level 50 as well.

Keep in mind that leveling up takes a lot longer in Siralim 3 than in previous games, and each level is more impactful. So don’t worry – you won’t need to come back to your castle after every realm just to breed your creatures. Each point of Heredity will last a pretty long time.

More Breeding Recipes

There were over 1000 breeding recipes in Siralim 2, but there are nearly 6000 recipes to collect in Siralim 3. The main benefit of having so many recipes is that you are more likely to create a brand new creature that you’ve never seen before when you choose the parents manually.

For Siralim 2, I created all the breeding recipes by hand. In Siralim 3, I used a different process: controlled random generation. Don’t worry – every player will have the same breeding recipes, but they were created by an algorithm this time around. The result is that each recipe actually makes a lot more sense than they did in Siralim 2. Warning: the information below is intended to explain how I programmed the breeding recipes and might be pretty dense. If you don’t understand it, don’t worry – it’s not something you need to know in order to play the game.

To create breeding recipes that make sense, I started by tagging every creature in the game with certain keywords based on their physical appearance, functionality, demeanor, and much more. For example, most Efreets were tagged with words like “FIRE”, “CASTER”, “RED”, “ORANGE”, “EVIL”, and “DEMON”. Yetis were tagged with “BEAST”, “MACE”, “WHITE”, “BLUE”, “ICE”, and “LARGE”. Some creatures that belong to the same race have different keywords. For example, the Frostfire Efreet also has the “ICE” keyword, while none of the other Efreets have that word.

Next, I assigned each creature an internal “tier” from 1 to 5. Tier 1 creatures have up to 15 different breeding recipes, while tier 5 creatures only have 1 or 2 breeding recipes, meaning tier 5 creatures are much more difficult to obtain than tier 1 creatures. In addition, tier 5 creatures require tier 4 creatures to breed, tier 4 creatures require tier 3 creatures, and so on. You can only extract cores from tier 1 and 2 creatures, so you’ll need to do some serious breeding if you want to acquire creatures that belong to a higher tier. The goal of this system is to give players some really rare creatures to strive to obtain. It’s also worth noting that there are far more tier 1 creatures in the game than tier 4 or 5 creatures, for example. Of course, you won’t ever see what tier each creature has since this has no relevance to players.

Finally, I created an algorithm that determines which creatures can be bred together to create new ones. For example, the algorithm will start at tier 5 and decides to create recipes for the Snowsting Yeti, a tier 5 creature. It will scan through all the tier 4 creatures in the game and determine which ones have keywords that have some matches with the Snowsting Yeti’s own keywords. The idea here is that the two parents should share common attributes with their offspring, even if they belong to an entirely different race. Once the algorithm finds suitable parents, it adds that breeding combination to the list of Snowsting Yeti recipes. Once there are enough Snowsting Yeti recipes, the algorithm will move on to the next creature until there are recipes for every single creature in the game (with the exception of a few special creatures that don’t have any recipes at all).

Some basic code output from the breeding recipe generation algorithm.