A "food efficiency" (or something like that) stat would be nice
basically it decides how much an animal eats,200% food efficiency means the animal eats 50% less food

I think an intelligence stat could be interesting. Livestock rising up to Advanced Trainability? Wolves being as dumb as rocks and barely being able to learn anything past Guard? Why not.

Could introduce more of a utility side of breading outside of milk/wool, leather, and meat (since not all animals provide milk/wool, and some meat/leather isnt ideal for use). It might require a bit of a handful of coding, but it can make random playthroughs fun. (Intelligence could also make taming/training easier/harder as well.)

the ability to extract genes and implant them in a pregnant animal to essentially create a "third parent" so my doggo eugenics program produces super-doggos faster

A simple thing, but maybe the option to hide the genetics tab (to make things neater when showing genetic info in the animals tab)?

I'd like to see the genetics of animals i'm selling, so I don't have to rename animals to make sure I sell the correct one. Possibly a toggle for seeing the genetics of animals I'm able to buy from traders too.

My suggestion would be a modifier to wildness, to simulate domestication of wild animals

If you (the mod dev) ever want to do some more work on this plugin, I think some stats should automatically lower other stats. It seems really OP that I can create an animal which is better in EVERYTHING than another animals of same species. In reality it doesn't work like that. There's no superior race of dog, and dogs should be a good example, cause we did a lot of selective breeding on them.

First, but not the most important, and I don't know if even possible to do easily - "stamina" stat would make balancing things easier. this could be something like increasing animal run speed to 125% of "speed" stat for X time, and lowering it to 75% for Y-X time after.

Anyway, to the real suggestions. If we stay only with "speed", then any deviation from default "meat" (as muscle tissue) value should lower it (If we had "stamina stat" meat values lower than 100% should increase stamina, while lowering speed, meat values over 100% should do the opposite). Also having more milk/fur produced should probably make animal slower etc.

At first I was really hyped about the idea of selective breeding, but when I realized I can breed animals that are better in everything than any other animals, I'm thinking what I can do about it. Probably best what can be done is moving "inherited gene mutation factor" to some negative value, but this is not perfect either.

Im still hoping for an optional inbreeding penalty of some kind for players who want more balance. So far you can just keep breeding close relatives and their stats go up super high with just a few generations due to each offspring with similar good stats being able to add their good stats together by breeding them.

With a inbreeding penalty and possibily a deformity system like I suggested on the main comments where each inbred generation has a higher chance for being born with fitting negative health hediffs, it forces players to take genetic diversity into account like real life selective breeders as well force players to keep getting more animals to add their genes to the pool to prevent too much inbreeding. If inbreeding the animals get's bad enough the player would need to deal with the consequnces which can range from death only a few hours after birth due to deformities( the negative health hediffs ) after too many generations to the animal being handicap their whole by being born without a limb or a deformed one( unless you have a mod that adds animal prosthetics ), missing or deformed organs, brain damage, or simply a negative stat value added so their stats go down instead of up to simulate negative recessive traits.

All in all in it's current stat the mod is kind of OP. Definately need's more balance even if it's only optional for the more hardcore players like me

I think the best thing to add first is genes for heat and cold resistance. It would be so cool to breed deer that can survive north pole caravans.

For anyone who thinks that this is op - just lower the deviations in options.
But then again, if you don't want to breed better animals then what is the point of this mod anyway?
And inbreeding is a bad idea. It definitely overcomplicated breeding for animals you can't easily get more of. And even for the ones you can get more of it just overcomplicated the process of managing them. Just sorting through tens of animals to find the ones to keep and the ones to slaughter/neuter is more then enough work already, and controlling who to breed with who among them is just WAAAAAAY too much micro.

While I like the idea of dropping wildness, but I'm also using a mod that makes wild animals breed, and that could be weird if they change wildness with generations.

And, generally speaking, I think the current list of genes is more than sufficient. More would be an overkill.

To OP.
There's already an incubator mod that include an option for a hatching acceleration.

And while I don't think that it'd be a good idea to have items that can improve genes of grown species, I think it could be fun to have some sort of fancy "genetic incubators" that provide moderately better results (in terms of offspring's genes) than direct breeding.

Messing with reproduction rates (pregnancy time and egg laying interval) seems like a bad idea.

And now my idea/suggestion.

UI/QOL improvements:

Ability to see on the animal's gene tab what's it's “rank” in a given gene among his gender and species and what are the stats of the best one. (ie – health 112%, 3rd best, best is 115%).

Ability to filter by gender in genes tab.

Feature/balance:

Make the animal's value depend on it's genes. Though this can be tricky becasue I don't think it should matter how much health your chickens have or how much meat your boomas give. And since animals aren't tagged by roles you'd need hand-filled lists to deal with them properly.

Extra compatibility/integration:

Look towards Genetic Rim and Pawnmorpher. Kinda obvious but still worth mentioning.

You forgot the part where the inbreeding penalty if added is optional. As in, even the main page says it'll be optional if added. Everyone has different playstyles so just don't enable it if it's added. Doesn't mean other players like me who like hardcore playthroughs or challenges don't want to have at least the option to make breeding better animals more challanging.

Let's be honest, it's super easy to get super animals within a few genrations just by inbreeding animals with good genetic stats. With no penalty it makes things too easy if you decided to go that route. Shoot, in real life it's common for animals to be bred with close relatives that have similar or wanted genes. Farmers will outright abuse the inbreeding mutations in some cases to get desired recessive genes or make sure a genetic traits is retrained a generation. The thing is it's rare to do so above two generations because that's when deformities and other genetic complications can start occuring commonly.

From a balance perspective in the mod it's very little overhead on play style with how long most animals take to actually breed in game and that's only if you enable it in the first place. You would literally have almost no chance of deformity or genetic issues in the first generation anymore then a normal unrelated pair, might even get some better genetic stats based on what you breed like irl for the first or second generation. Second generation is slightly more complicated but nowhere near lethal. It's if your stubborn and refuse to add new blood to the genetic pool or don't manage your animals after three generations that big problems start happening and that would take a while so plenty of time by then unless your breeding fast breeding animals like rodents.

Then there's human likes if such a penalty applies to then when active. Believe it or not, incest is a feature in the base vanilla game for both animals and humans. It's common with animals but extremely rare to happen with colonists.. but it does happen sometimes, and with mods that add babies like CSL they can have kids too like any other couple in the game when said mods are active. I for one want to commit the warcrime of inbreeding my prisoners until they all slowly die overtime due to constant deformities and genetic penalties. If they want to raid me or steal my stuff, they can suffer like any other potential future hat or dinner.

What about a filth rate modifier?

The other thing I could think of would be a sort of 'soft cap'. Make it so that as animal stats go up, the highest stat, or the total of all stats ends up weighting the bell curve to the lower side. Effectively making it so no one species can be bred to godlike stats, as something has to give. So if you want massive meat production, your chickens need to barely be able to walk to their food, etc. Not a hard limit, but more of a weighting against perfection after some threshold.

That way you could have cows that are bred for milk, and other cows that are bred for meat. :-D

One thing that should also happen would be a lower bound on the speed and attack of manhunting predators. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I had a bloodmoon recently, and the last few werewolves that could barely move at 2 cells/second were kind of sad.

The last thing I could think of would be a 'hard mode' config button. Clicking it would set inheritance to a mean of -5, but a standard deviation of, like, 15. That way you'll need to pay attention to your animals, otherwise their gene pool would go to garbage.

please add this, just an update at least to know if it is even in development