Hi all, I'm in a bit of a pickle. Sorry about this wall of text! All of the threads I've searched for about mutations & retiring have had mixed and very contradictory information, and since the FAQ is currently under construction, I don't know where else to find answers but here.

My current king will be dying soon, and I've got a bobbed tail mutated heir lined up to replace him. I want to have the mutated Heir's appearance, markings and all, so my understanding is that if I retire and choose the new heir's appearance, his mutation should follow him, since that is part of his physical appearance. (Is that correct?)

Now, here's my issue. My bobbed tail heir has very low stats, so I've got a 2100+ stat replacer ready to bump his stats back up. I thought it would be that simple, and I would end up with a pretty mutated king with high stats. However, I've since been told that a mutation is tied to the stats of the lion, rather than his physical appearance (which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since a mutation is part of his looks), and if you then stat replace using an un-mutated sub, your king will lose his mutation altogether even if you choose to keep the king's appearance.

Is there any merit to that? I was hoping someone would have first-hand anecdotal info on retiring mutations, since I don't really want to use second hand opinions and then end up making a mistake that I can't undo. My low stat bobtail cost me 25 GB and my high stat replacer cost me 30GB, so it's a lot to just waste due to misinformation. Here are some threads I found to shed some light on the problem:

1. This thread (https://www.lioden.com/topic.php?id=304429219270) says that a lion's mutation is tied to his stats, so the ONLY way to have a mutated king is to replace him with an heir that is mutated. In this case, you cannot ever stat replace without losing the mutation in the process, even if you choose to keep the mutant king's appearance (or unless your high-statted replacer also has the same mutation, which would be very hard to achieve).

2. However, in this thread (http://www.lioden.com/topic.php?id=231754930030&page=1) someone proved that a lion's mutation is NOT tied to his stats at all, because they actually retired their king and replaced him with a mutated heir, whilst keeping the old king's appearance, and the new king didn't have any mutation. So it seems that keeping the old king's appearance cancels out the mutation on the heir when they take over.

3. And then this thread (http://www.lioden.com/topic.php?id=16839&page=5) throws other theories out there, insinuating mutations are part of a lion's appearance (re coding) and not stats, and that a mutation will only stay if you use a mutated stat replacer.

So, yeah. Lot's of conflicting information out there, and I don't know how to make sense of any of it. If I have to purchase a new mutated heir and level him up EVERY TIME I have to retire my king, like thread 1 suggested, then that just seems far too expensive to be worth it. I'm hoping that isn't the case. Worse than that, thread 2 suggests that even if you use a mutated heir to replace your king, and you opt to keep your old king's appearance, the mutation will not transfer over. So you would have to purchase a mutated heir and buy all of the colours and markings to make him match your old king (which in my case isn't viable, since he has a breed-only base and vit markings).

Thanks for reading. Any help or concrete info on this would be much appreciated! I'll try and be as open-minded as I can be, but I'm just worried that this isn't going to work at all, and I won't be able to have my mutated king with good stats. >.<