There has been a lot of genetic experiments floating around the VF forum and I tried my hand at playing around with genetics and observing the children that come out looking different than their parents.

A "rare child" as used in this topic is a child that features a head that does not belong to his/her parents' genetic pattern. For example, if you locate your bigheads00.png file in the game's Images folder, you can use this as a guideline to see how the children should look and whether or not you have a rare child on your hands!

The rare children are programmed into the game as a way to bring some different looks into the family and keep things exciting! Just like in real life, we won't all turn out looking like our parents and that's just another way we're special.

Example 1:
A lot of you have seen my rainbow-haired girl experiment in which I paired Miss Rainbow with Mr. Spike who is right next to her on the bigheads image. To make sure I don't mistaken a unique looking head with a rare child, I open up the bigheads image and find which children the parents should produce.



According to the placement of these heads, my blue spiked hair man and rainbow haired woman can create any of these heads! How? According to the genetics pattern of the game, you can get any children between the parents, the parents' heads and the heads below and above the parents' heads.

With this in mind, I continued my experiment to see if I can get the Mohawk again and try for the female blue hair.



Unfortunately I haven't gotten the blue-haired girl but since I have had the Mohawk twice already, it is possible for the families to get the heads outside of the parents' heads as long as it is placed only 1 spot above or below them.

As you can see, I also did not run into any rare children during this experiment (although this family is rare to begin with!), so this did not satisfy my curiosity too well!

Example 2:
Mynda posted in another topic that her family had a naturally born rainbow-haired girl and both parents had brown hair.



According to the chart, her children should come out like the following:



This means that Mynda has a very lucky rare child! I decided to recreate her couple and try to find at least two rare children. This will help prove that rare children are random and couples are not limited to having only a certain head show up as a rare child.



The distinct blue borders signify twins, black borders signify triplets and the green outline signifies rare children.

As you can see, I did not get any of the heads that are in that one spot above or below the parents' heads in the chart, but I did receive two different sets of rare children! This is a major contrast to the other experiment I did with my rainbow family, in which I did receive one of the heads above the parents' heads (Mohawk) but no rare children.

We can try to plan our families, but of course there will always be things that we cannot control. Keep backups and keep them updated at crucial points! Don't be discouraged by the rare children either, it's nice to have some diversity too.