FAQ

Breeding

A clutch is the breeding record for a female. You create it when she lays (or, if you track pre-lay, when you pair her). The clutch tracks egg counts, the sire(s), incubation outcomes, and — once eggs hatch — the babies as their own animal records.

Creating a clutch

From the female's animal page or the Clutches sidebar item, New Clutch. Required fields:

  • Dam — the female (mother). Sex must be female, status active.
  • Name — your label (F1-2025-Clutch3, whatever convention).
  • Laid date — when the eggs went into the incubator.
  • Initial total / good / bad eggs — what came out of her, with the bad-egg count for slugs and obvious duds at lay.
  • Sires — one or more males. Multi-sire is a real case (see below).
  • Notes — free text.

The app computes a due date from a per-species incubation default. The default is approximate; eggs hatch on their own schedule and the date is just a planning hint, not a deadline.

Multi-sire clutches

Females of several species (including ball pythons and corn snakes) can store sperm and use multiple sires across one clutch — sometimes deliberately (you bred her to two males), sometimes by surprise (she retained sperm from last season). Herply handles this by letting a clutch carry a list of sires, not just one. When a baby's morph clearly points to one sire over another, you can record that at hatch time (see "Recording hatchlings" below). When sires share traits and bloodline can't disambiguate, the keeper accepts the ambiguity — that's the honest answer in genetics, and the app doesn't pretend otherwise.

Why hatching is incremental

A real clutch hatches over a 2 to 7 day window. Eggs go bad mid-incubation. Sometimes you can tell sire A hatched first and sire B's babies came later. The original "Record Hatching" flow assumed one save flipped the clutch to finished — that broke on every realistic scenario.

The current model is incremental hatching: you record hatchlings in batches, one save per event. Each batch captures:

  • Date — when the batch hatched (or when an egg failed mid-incubation).
  • Sire — which male this batch came from (used by the calculator to predict offspring).
  • Hatched count — how many babies, created as animal records right there with calculator-predicted traits applied.
  • Failed count — how many eggs gave up this round (no animal records created, just a counter).
  • Notes — context.

The clutch's running totals (incubatedEggsSuccess / incubatedEggsFailed) are sums over all batches. The clutch is complete when hatched + failed ≥ initialGoodEggs. Until then, the Add Hatchlings button stays visible — same flow, repeat as needed across the hatch window.

This shape falls out naturally for staggered hatches, multi-sire batches, mid-incubation failures, and per-baby genetic records. The "single hatch event" model can't represent any of those without lying.

What the hatchlings inherit

When you save a batch, the calculator runs on the dam's current traits and the selected sire's current traits. Any trait corrections you made on the parents flow through automatically — there's no stale snapshot. Each baby inherits:

  • Visual traits with their proper expression (visual or het with a percentage).
  • Het percentages computed from the cross — the textbook 2/3 case reads as 66%, matching breeder convention. See Het percentages.
  • Compound decompositions — a baby that the calculator says is "BEL" is saved as Mojave + Lesser, not as a synthetic "BEL" trait.
  • Bloodline string — auto-computed from the visual + het traits, in the same canonical order the public profile uses.

You can edit any of those after the fact — the calculator's prediction is a default, not a contract. If you got phenotype information at hatch ("this one's clearly Champagne") that disagrees with the calculator's odds, override it.

Failed clutches and slugs

If the whole clutch fails — slugs at lay, infertile, mid-incubation crash — you can mark it as failed rather than letting it sit active forever. The numbers stay; the status just moves it off the active list.

What the app doesn't track

  • Pairing logs. When she went in with a male, what dance happened, copulation events. Useful, but a different shape and not yet built. Notes on the female's animal page is the workaround.
  • Pre-lay timeline. Ovulation, follicle development, pre-lay shed. Same shape problem.
  • Egg-by-egg incubation. The app counts eggs, not individual eggs. If you mark eggs and care which one hatched first, that's outside the model.

These are honest gaps. The tracker focuses on what becomes a record — animals that exist, sales that happened, a clutch that produced N babies — rather than the breeding-season notebook.