Recently it came to my attention that another breed has a tattoo mutation which by itself isn’t all that surprising. However, I also discovered that when paired with another mutation theirs was very similar to Inkheart. Their mutation existed long before we had Inkheart and there has been no beef or complaints regarding our Inkheart mutation.
That being said, over the years I have tried very hard to avoid creating mutations that are present in other groups already, unless I felt I could make them unique enough to us where they simply weren’t similar anymore. I have passed up really fun mutation ideas because they were too similar to others or I found out about another group having one that is too similar.
overlap will absolutely happen, and a lot of mutations are pretty open ended, but we do not have to actively contribute to it.
For my own peace of mind in this discovery, I have decided to retire our Inkheart mutation actively on June 1st. Retirement for Inkheart will look the same as our other retired mutations where you may still breed for it or use Samhain to mimic it, but we will not allow new Starters with the Inkheart mutation, nor will we allow the mutation to be added to existing Quirlicorns (with the exception of a recessive inkheart updating to a dominant one).