Long story short despite my absolute best efforts to keep track, I made a mistake with my family trees due to a particular family that became a polycule early on after a few adoptions and has biobeans only registered to two parents and I lost track of that family until I started working on a family tree.

I am going to be retconning them to best friends for obvious reasons as soon as you see this (been trying to make sure the family is linked together by best friends to avoid this issue) but I think it might be best to have an item that can retroactively create family ties to help avoid this in the future.




I am gonna admit I am upset at myself about this mistake. As you can see they share several cats on their family tab that I didn't notice due to the overwhelming nature of my village resulting in me not fully able to keep track of every single cat. I am going to have to go through and check for other things like this as well...

Steps to reproduce:

Not sure why you would want to but
1. Have a polycule with 3-4 members
2. Have kittens that are not related to all parents due to either being biobeans (registered to only the two that beaned them for some reason), having cats enter the relationship with adopted kittens, or have cats adopt beans only for them (or them and 1 other).
3. Adopt in kittens that see both kittens as siblings and the parents as their parents.
4. Kittens grow up and maybe have kittens of their own
5. Due to the split early on of kittens not having all parents registered as their parents, they can become partners at any point in each other's family lines despite sharing siblings/cousins/otherwise.

@CandleTheCat this was always known to be possible especially with policules. You'll be glad to know that something to remedy this is planned:

Unfortunately this isn't really a bug as they're not technically considered related as far as the game is concerned. The relatedness checker only walks up the "parent" lines 6 times and checks if any cat IDs show up more than once.

It's definitely been a popular suggestion to have parents' partners be able to adopt their kids, but right now there's not a built in mechanic to handle things like this.

There are a few other awkward situation kinds of things that can happen where cats aren't technically related but the partnership would be pretty weird or awkward (like partnering with your cat's sibling's partner's sibling).


EDIT to further clarify - It's not so simple as to just be able to quickly add the partner as an adoptive parent either, because adding a previously unrelated cat as a parent could potentially render kittens far down the line in another person's village completely infertile if they happened to be related to both. Relationship trees are really messy so there's a lot to think about.

Thank you Squid, I'm gonna fix the relationship between these two now that you saw, and I understand it can be difficult to fix, but having it possible to make cats adoptive siblings/parents arbitrarily with an item would allow users to help mitigate this themselves and thus I am happy to know it's in the works!

Just to clarify expectations, I don't think I'd really classify this as confirmed or in the works yet. The relationship expansion update isn't planned until the end of beta, which means it most likely won't be on my radar until the end of this year at the earliest.

The adoption mechanic specifically is also listed as "tentative" on the plan because I am not close enough to know what will be possible / how it might work. There are a lot of potential problems to resolve in parents specifically being added/changed after a bean is created, and I probably won't know how/if they can be worked out until I get there.

Not that I don't want to make it possible! I just don't want to set expectations if I don't know that I can meet them yet.