I've decided to do this "special" on variations because it's becoming clear to me that a lot of people don't quite understand how to make variations tie in together correctly in, say, eyelids, [Paint Ballz], [Add Ball], [Linez], and various "override" sections. Variations can be added to just about any area of the .lnz, and you can tie up specific colour, size, and fuzz etc variations in such a way that, for instance, fawn patches and eyelids will only come out on brown pets and grey patches and eyelids on white ones. You can tie in variations between baby and adult .lnz sections also, so that when you adopt a fuzzy pup or kitten from the Adoption centre, it will grow up to be fuzzy also (or not, if you so choose).

As you probably know by now if you work with variations, each section has one or more set of variations when you see a # followed by a number after it as, for instance:

[256 Eyelid Color]
#3
29
#2
19
#1
59
##

The game expects to see the # numbers diminish by one until they get to the ## which finishes off that specific variation set. Now, lets take as an example that you want to make sure that a dark grey eyelid is always on a pet with no patches and a white body; the variation is that there are grey patches on a pale grey-eyelidded white body, and that there are chocolate lids and fawn markings on a chocolate body. It so happens that your main breed [Ballz Info] balls are white.

Right, let's go back to the eyelids, and indicate to the game that this is a set of "hooked" variations. To do this we take the top # number and add a period and uppercase letter to it, so it will look like this:

[256 Eyelid Color]
#3.A
29
#2
19
#1
59
##

It doesn't seem to matter what letter you choose, so long as you always have the same letter at the start of the set which is to be "hooked" to it. And this is the point that I want to emphasise: You do not need to put a (dot)(letter) after every single # number! I've seen a lot of people do this, and they have problems with the game either not tying up the variations properly or not showing them correctly on 2nd-gens.

Okay, so you want to tie in the patches next. You want the white body of the [Ballz Info] section to have the dark grey lids, so you put #3.A followed by no data -- the game will realise what's expected. You want the white, pale-grey-lidded body to have patches, so put grey-patch data under #2, and you want fawn markings on a brown body, so we choose #1 for that here:

[Paint Ballz]
#3.A
#2
(grey patch data)
#1
(fawn patch data)
##

And then there's [Color Info Override], where your first (#3.A) is the white body so no data goes after it and it will pick up the [Ballz Info] data, your second also is the white body so no data to go under #2, and the third (under #1) is chocolate:

[Color Info Override]
#3.A
#2
#1
(chocolate ball data)
##

This works every time; it works when you want to tie in different ball sizes ([Ball Size Override] -- you may need to create this section for yourself in the adult part of the .lnz) and textures ([Color Info Override]) or fuzziness ([Fuzz Override] -- you may need to create this section for yourself too) or [Linez], [Move], etc etc -- the quantity of possible variations is enormous.
v One other thing to note is that if you are doing several variation sets in a given area -- as with the Dalmatian spots -- you separate them with lines that have a semi-colon, never a blank line (the game sees the blank line and thinks that you've finished with that part of the .lnz). So you would have:

#3
#2
(data)
#1
(data)
##
;
#3
#2
(data)
#1
(data)
##


Never


#3
#2
(data)
#1
(data)
##

#3
#2
(data)
#1
(data)
##