Recording births and creating a litter

When a pregnancy ends, you record the outcome on the breeding cycle. That keeps your records accurate and, for a live birth, can create a litter you manage as a group. This guide covers the outcome counts, what creating a litter sets up, and how parentage certainty carries through.

Record the outcome

From the dam's Breeding tab (or the cycle), record the outcome and enter the counts:

• For a live birth: born alive and stillborn (each a count, default 0).
• For a hatching (egg-layers): eggs hatched and eggs failed. If you recorded a clutch size on the breeding, these two cannot add up to more than the clutch.

Saving the outcome resolves the cycle: it moves from active to resolved, stamps the outcome (a birth or a hatch), and closes the pre-birth reminders that were counting down to this date. Resolving is what tells the rest of Creatures the pregnancy is over, so the dashboard moves the cycle out of "expecting" and into recent outcomes, and any reserved buyers are notified that the litter has arrived. (A cycle you abandon without an outcome can instead be cancelled, which closes it with no birth recorded.)

Create the litter

For a live birth, you can create a litter straight from the cycle with the Create litter button. Creatures sets it up as a count group with several things already filled in, so you track the offspring together from day one:

• The count is seeded from the birth count you just recorded (you can adjust it).
• The parents and the birth date carry over from the cycle.
• The species and breed come from the dam.
• The litter starts in a "born" state and carries a name like "{dam} litter {year}" unless you set your own.

The litter carries a "Created from" link back to the breeding, so its parentage is clear and traceable. A cycle can have one litter, so the button creates it once and then links to it. From there you manage it like any group: apply records to the whole litter, track the count, and promote individuals into their own profiles when they are ready (see Track animals by count with count groups).

Parentage certainty

The litter records how confident the parentage is, and it does so separately for the sire and the dam. The levels are:

• Confirmed: the parent is known exactly (a single named sire, or the dam herself).
• Candidate set: the parent is one of a known group, with the candidates recorded. This is what a pen breeding produces (any of the males in the pen), or an AI with a cleanup sire (either the AI sire or the cleanup male).
• Unknown: no parent information was recorded.

This is set from the service method you chose on the breeding: a natural mating or AI with a named sire is confirmed, a pen or colony breeding (with no single sire named) is a candidate set, and an unknown or imported breeding stays unknown. Whatever the cycle recorded carries through to each offspring's lineage, so the honesty of the original record is what makes the resulting pedigree dependable rather than overstated.

Related information

• Recording a breeding
• Tracking pregnancy and progress
• Track animals by count with count groups

Updated on: 23/06/2026