Creatures Caves

I honestly don't have a clue how to answer this question. I'll just answer with a very long and precise version of what I do every time. 83

Generally my initial setup is to find multiple agents that would assist in making the entirety of the Shee Ark and Capillata hospitable to norns of the usual (non-Toxic) breeds. My breed list is tiny, just the basic breeds and pack breeds of Norns; I don't even work with Ettins or Grendels, even installing the Grettin Switch to stop them from appearing at all. Guess I'm just a sucker for Norns, or maybe I just don't want to deal with violent things. As a counterbalance (sort of) to the tampering with the otherwise somewhat hostile environments of the engineering rooms and various "not for Norns" areas of the ship, I don't disable bacteria, don't mess directly with the Jungle Terrarium, and generally try not to make the Ark/Capillata completely sanitary.

Anyways, after this initial setup, I start hatching Norns. Generally I like the Bengal, Siamese, and Bruin Norns; though I have them, I don't touch Bondi or Hardman or Toxic. Two at a time, every time, both almost always of the same species. Very specific, very calculated, and I always watch what they're doing. Nowhere in the ship is barred off (as I said, the entire ship is about 95% safe), but they always seem to end up staying in the Meso. Pretty sure I need to add "home" smell agents (mobile emitters, etc) to the rest of the ship if I want them to think of the entire place as their house, so I'm going to try that soon.

After the initial pairing has one child, the parents and kids are all exported and a second couple of a different breed takes their place. Once they have a child (hopefully of different genders), I export parent set 2 and introduce kid 1 to kid 2. After this initial "setup" phase, Norn breeding gets looser, I start adding in other breeds from the standard Norns (again, no Bondi/Toxic/Hardman) and things tend to go from there.

I think the highest generation number I've seen is around six before I start over. I never do wolfling/feral runs, never really work with non-Norn species, and tend not to deviate from a standard. I always worry that Hardman norns will be too violent, etc. and never do anything with them. Guess I just don't like my critters beating each other up.

I'm practically always online and available to receive random Norns, but I've only ever gotten two, a male and female fast-ager pair sent at the same time that bred like anthropomorphic tribbles. I ended up exporting them and their kin shortly before my hard drive exploded again and I lost everything.

Regardless, I liked seeing something "different;" people should send their Norns to random folk all the time! What really struck me was that these were like 5000th or more generation Norns; granted, they were fast-aging and reproduced like crazy, but surely at one point or another their family wasn't. I always wonder just how long it took for them to end up that way, and how their initial owner got that far when all I've seen is single digit generations or so.

Sorry to write a book on all of this, but out of genuine curiosity, how do those breed numbers get so high? Am I playing wrong? XP