Yeah I'd believe they're genetic, so that's probably why. I didn't know genetizied meant the game could pick within a range! I only though it meant there was a 50/50 chance the Sim would inherit one of the parents skintones. I suppose it gets more complicated for the game to deal with skintones the more one got. I just do hope they don't break terribly... as far as infants go. I had an issue with that once before.

I might take a look and see if there's a non-genetic version. I mean, I'd like that that they could be inherited. The issue is that they're connected to body shapes. Which could cause some trouble with finding clothes that "fits". I don't know if there's any way to know which specific skintone a Sim has. (I suppose one could check SimPE but I'm not sure I could make heads nor tails of the hexidecimals and know which skintone it represent).

Thanks for the answers.

That's how regular custom skin works. Two regular custom skins = 50/50 chance. They're always dominant over plain default skins, so custom+default = custom.

Can't remember if the skins also have some sort of recessive genetics (carrying one "allele" from each parent's skin*), or if it's always 50/50 for custom and within the parent range for default/geneticized skins (both regardless of previous generations) - but I think it's the latter.

(*Thinking similar to hair or eyes, where recessive alleles can pop up in a different generation - a sim has one allele for the shown hair/eyes, and one recessive allele, meaning two sims with for instance brown (dominant) eyes but green (recessive) eyes as the recessive allele can result in a green-eyed baby). Brown is always dominant, but if the green eyes from the parents are chosen, there's also a chance of green eyes (there are 4 options where three give brown eyes because brown is always dominant, and the fourth give green eyes because both alleles are recessive - Brown/Brown, Brown/green, Brown/green, green/green. It's similar with two dominant or two recessive eyes, but the recessivity/dominance is equal, so either one can get picked as the shown genetics - grey/grey, green/green, grey/green, grey/green).

Thanks for the through explanation! Sims 2 genetics is quite something! I know it's working off a simplified theorem, but at least it's actually genetics, not whatever half-assed attempt Sims 3/4 works off.

Still, I wish there was an easy way to know what skintone a Sim used, so I can make sure they got proper fitting clothes if I keep these skintones, (the geneticised version). I'd like the range it gives and how much support they offer for custom body shapes.

Not sure if this has been fixed in later patches (haven't played in a while), but with the default genetics in TS4 I had a couple with green + purple skins as parents. Their kids had mostly purple skin, until (at least) one popped out with turqoise skin . I don't think they had a single kid with green skin.

In TS3 I vaguely remember skin and hair colors often being all over the place for offspring, especially if the colors were slightly customized.



You can check with SimPE, and you can also extract the sim with SimPE to see their CC in Bodyshop. Not the simplest methods maybe, but also not the most difficult ones.