Magical gene / fields and regions

Coral Bloom

The coat ruffles into overlapping coral lobes, each shading from deep sea-blue at the rim to a pale crown, with the horse's own colour left showing in the seams between them, and gold flecks over the whole of it.

What it can come out as

Outcome	Carrying
Coral Bloom	`Crb/Crb` · `Crb/n`
Wild type	`n/n`

How each one is actually drawn - region by region, and the layers it is built from - is on the coding tab.

Crossing two of them

Finding one

About 1 in 2,500 wild horses is born showing this. That is the whole of the supply: catch one, or make one with the carrot below. Breeds set their own pools and a breed built around this gene will carry it far more often than the wild population does.

Wild pair	Shows as	How often
`Crb/Crb`	Coral Bloom	0.002% — 1 in 50,000
`Crb/n`	Coral Bloom	0.038% — 1 in 2,632
`n/n`	Wild type	99.96%

Its gene carrot

The file

common/src/main/resources/horsegenetics/genes/coral_bloom.json — a data-driven gene, not a Java class. It is listed in the index.json beside it and registered by Genes' class initialiser at startup.

Key	`horsegenetics.coral_bloom`
Phase	magical — it adds signed colour in phase 3, after the pigment has resolved
Priority	279 — where it sits in the one `(priority, key)` paint order
Alleles	`Crb` · `n`
Varies per horse	4 values drawn once off the expressing allele copy, so a foal that inherits the copy inherits the look
Built from	CRACKLE, PARTS, SPECKLE, TOWARD

Why it is built this way

The two zones of a lobe are two readings of ONE tessellation - the same seed, scale and warp, with only the 'gap' moved - so the fill and the crown share a wall rather than each finding their own and opening seams between them. The band is the wider reading multiplied in and the narrower one subtracted out.

Nothing is painted in the seam. The gene used to lay a bright orange rim there, and at coat scale that rim was not a rim: the walls of a tessellation this fine cover more of a horse than the cells do, so the orange read as the GROUND and the coral as blobs floating on it. Leaving the wall bare puts the base coat in the seam instead, which is a colour that already belongs to the horse and cannot take the picture over.

The warp is what turns CRACKLE's naturally straight facets into rounded, ruffled lobes. Under close inspection the tessellation is still a Voronoi cell with flat sides; at coat scale it reads as coral, which is the whole of what it was tuned for.

No hue knob. Blue lobe, pale crown, gold fleck IS the coral idea rather than a setting on it, and a horse wanting a different palette wants a different gene.

What it paints

Each outcome, described the way the gene file describes it, and then the layers that draw it in the order they are painted. The prose is the part a reader checks a bake against; the list underneath is what the engine actually did.

Coral Bloom

The coat breaks into overlapping ruffled lobes, deep sea-blue at the rim and shading to a pale crown at the middle, divided by seams of the horse's own colour and flecked with tiny gold specks.

the deep blue field inside it — PARTS × CRACKLE × CRACKLE, painted with TOWARD
and the pale crown at the middle of each lobe — PARTS × CRACKLE, painted with TOWARD
gold flecks over the whole lobe — PARTS × CRACKLE × SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

Nothing.

Paints nothing.