Skip this if you have worked with them or know how it works already. If you want an excellent general overview of vine genetics, try reading Shelyak's Vine Genetics Page.
Follow the link above for instructions on making Revelation Solvents. Basically, once you have made the solvents, you place 2 copies of the same vine (or bulb, or seed, etc.) in the left and right "splints" in the crossbreeding menu of a greenhouse. If you have the solvents in your inventory, you then get a new option to use a solvent. When you do this you get a random view of 3, 4, or 5 colors from the vine's genetic sequence, depending on which type of solvent you used. No one knows for sure yet how many colors make up the total sequence, but I am betting on 36 total. So, you get a little snapshot of a piece of that total sequence, and you have to do lots of these and fit them all together. There is no indication of what part of the overall sequence your results are from, so there is a lot of detective work (and guess work) involved.
There are 3 types of Revelation Solvents: Milky, Clear, and Glass. Milky is the cheapest to produce and you get 7 deben each time you make a batch, followed by Clear (3 per batch), and Glass (1 per batch). As mentioned, the different solvents produce different results, like so:
| Solvent | Revealed Colors | # per Batch | Mushrooms per Batch |
| Milky | 3 | 7 | 3 Bleeding Hand |
| Clear | 4 | 3 | 3 Salt Water Fungus |
| Glass | 5 | 1 | 3 Dueling Serpents |
So, you get more Milky solvents in each batch made, but when you use them you only get a random sequence of 3 colors revealed. They are cheaper (and the mushrooms are easier to find), but they produce less useful results. Clear solvents give you a random peek at 4 colors somewhere in the overall sequence of the vine, and Glass solvents (the most expensive) give you a random peek at 5 colors. The colors I have found so far are:
| Letter | Color |
| O | Orange |
| R | Red |
| G | Green |
| Y | Yellow |
| K | Black |
NOTE: Evidently there was a Blue color in T1, so the convention of using K for Black was started then.
So, you are left with a bunch of short color sequences of 3, 4, and 5 elements length (for example: RRYR for Red, Red, Yellow, Red). Some combinations of these colors are the "genes" for various traits in each vine. Other color combinations mean nothing or seem to be just filler (for example: GGGGG). However, some of these random sequences could later form genes when they are split and recombined with sequences from other vines (for example, combining RGY with YYR would produce RGYYYR and YYY is the gene for Sugar, as shown below).
Now you have to piece them together. Luckily, as you use more and more solvents on any given vine, you will start to get some results that overlap, and that tells you how all of them might fit together. If you look at my spreadsheet on the "Scratchpad" tab for a vine like Contemplation, you will see how beautifully a set of results can hang together, making it almost certain to be the correct sequence (I could still be wrong, but it looks simple and elegant to me). Some vines still have imperfect or incomplete data, however, so many alternate total configurations are possible.