Breeding Project Guide
This guide is made by and for The Lioden Conservatory, and is made public to help others! Please note that this guide heavily focuses on rare breed-only traits, though many steps are applicable to many projects. This guide also assumes you have a moderate level of familiarity with the game, common acronyms, and its base level mechanics. This is not a guide for someone who just started Lioden.

Starting a breeding project can be hard. There's a lot that goes into planning, carrying out, and even just actually starting the project, and it can feel hopeless at times. Breeding projects are financially draining, I would recommend going into one with a solid foundation. They are not for users who are still establishing themselves. As much as I hate to say it, not everyone will have the resources to complete their breeding projects. The more "valuable" traits you add, the more expensive and grueling your project will become. This is a very important reality of breeding projects, the methods I will outline here are the fastest, most efficient, and therefore, the cheapest overall. They may have much bigger prices to get started with, but I promise you they are cheaper than other methods.
In this guide, I'm going to plan out a project, and walk you through the steps I would take to breed it. This project is going to be a complex one, in order to cover as many bases as possible. What are we going to start with, you ask?

Meet Tutorial! For short, we're just gonna call her Tory. She's our breeding project that I've thought up to walk you guys through this.


Tory has a LOT of difficult traits going for her. She has the Madagascar Base, which is a combo base, and she has 9 BO Traits.
She has a Royal Clay mane, Grape Eyes, and Bunting Skin. Her markings are as follows:
Slot 3: Seal Rosette
Slot 4: Dark Brown Crackle
Slot 7: Seal Brindle
Slot 8: Cream Soft Unders
Slot 10: Almond Underfelt

Before we even think about getting started, let's check her slots. We'll use these wiki pages to check: Raffle Marking Slot Rarity and Misc Marking Slot Rarity
A lot of her markings are rare, but they do exist, so we're good there! But we run into a problem at Slot 7, where we find out Slot 7 Seal Brindle doesn't exist as of writing this guide. What are we going to do? Well, we can either pick a new marking in that slot, or we can look to see if the Seal Brindle marking exists in a slot close to Slot 7. What do you know, Seal Brindle is most common in Slot 6! We can just move Seal Brindle up a slot, since our Slot 6 is empty, and....


Wow. Nothing changed. That's great!

Now that your project is finalized, here's where you start collecting the slots you need. In general, most rare slot keepers are happy to toss a few to you for cheap, but you may run into a few issues that may need you to go back to the drawing board. The most common ones are that the user is using the slot for their own project, and can't afford to toss some spares your way, or they're inactive. Since I'm not actually making this project, I picked rare slots from ones I already own, aside from a few. If you did need to buy rare slots, there's a few different ways to do this:
1. Making a Looking For Forum Post - You would make a forum post with the exact marking slots you're looking for, and hoping rare slot keepers find it. You can also advertise this thread in Sales Chat in order to get more eyes on it!
2. Checking Their Cave - If they keep many rare slots, they may have a cave (or a few!) dedicated to this. Usually, in these caves, you'll find a cave bio that will tell you if the user is open to receiving messages about rare slots. If they mention that they're open to PMs, feel free to shoot them one! Just make sure to stay polite, and state what you're willing to offer them for a lion with the slot you desire. If there is no message stating that they're open to PMs, try another method!
3. Contacting Owners - Many rare slot keepers are very serious about it, meaning you may be able to find them in Lioden themed Discord servers. Here is where you can reach out to users directly to ask about purchasing rare slots, rather than relying on looking for posts or potentially vague cave bios. However, there is a downside to this, and it's that off-site conduct is not moderated. You usually won't find an issue in doing it, but it is always a risk when dealing with users outside of Lioden itself.

It's a very important note that very rarely are users actively hoarding slots, the narrative of slot hoarding is not something that has a place in modern day Lioden. If they're unwilling to sell a slot to you, it's very likely either they are actively using it for a project or a dear friend is. Don't worry too much if this happens, usually other users might own the slot and would be willing to help you out, or worst case, you might have to shuffle your design around a bit. This is the best time to shuffle it, though, before any actual progress is made on the project.

Now that we have that out of the way, there's a few different steps we'd take towards obtaining Tory. Each step will have it's own reply, so let's look! Most of these steps can actually be done in any order, and are just done in the order below because of how I prefer to do my projects and the most efficient way to do this specific project. We're going to be using a kinging method, which is where you devote one account entirely to breeding the project via "steps", aka, replacing your king when you get a cub that's one step closer to your final product.

Please note that base is only being done last as the tutorial project is a combo base, if it was any other BO base, you would do base first

Step 1: Picking a Project Starter & Evaluating the Best Way To Accomplish the Project
Step 2: Mane Shape & Color
Step 3: Eyes & Skin
Step 4: Markings
Step 5: Base

FAQ
I'll be filling this out as questions roll in, so don't pay this any mind just yet!

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