Diamond Scutes

What it can come out as

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 1,786 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.

Its gene carrot

The file

common/src/main/resources/horsegenetics/genes/diamond_scutes.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.

Why it is built this way

Imported from the magic-gene intake, 2026-09-08. A diamond is two triangle waves crossing, and the format cannot intersect two bands in one mask - so each is its own WAVES entry combined with MAX, which unions the two zigzags into a lattice. The source file expected a STROKES pass to outline them; strokes on top of a wave lattice came out as noise at this scale and were dropped.

The neck chain is a band in the neck's own frame (`'space': 'local', 'axis': 'X'`), which is the crest side of it. It used to be the 90/77.94 saw-wave trick - the neck's geometry written out by hand in eleven gene files - and in this one that trick was in `part` space, where the amplitude is in normalised units, so the band was displaced clean off the horse and the chain painted nothing at all. See wiki/making-a-gene.html#local-space.

The black allele is the white one with the light taken out of it, and it sits one rung under white in the dominance series - so every combination that existed before it keeps the outcome it had, and only the pairs carrying Dsk are new. The re-toning is a mapping rather than a repaint: every achromatic target moves into the dark end of the scale keeping its order and its spacing, and every SATURATED one is left alone, because that colour is the gene rather than its lightness.

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.

Diamond Scutes

Two triangle waves running the length of the barrel and crossing, which is what makes a row of diamonds rather than a row of teeth. The same trick, tighter, gives the tail and the forelegs their smaller chain, and a saw wave lays a single band along the crest of the neck rather than round it. Every edge is straight - this is one of the two genes in the mod that is not made of curves.

1. the scute lattice down the barrel — WAVES × WAVES, painted with TOWARD
2. the chain along the neck crest — AXIS × WAVES, painted with TOWARD
3. the smaller chain down the tail — WAVES, painted with TOWARD
4. the trim round the forelegs — WAVES, painted with TOWARD

Diamond Scutes, black

The same marking as the white form with the light taken out of it: a single near-black tone.

1. the scute lattice down the barrel — WAVES × WAVES, painted with TOWARD
2. the chain along the neck crest — AXIS × WAVES, painted with TOWARD
3. the smaller chain down the tail — WAVES, painted with TOWARD
4. the trim round the forelegs — WAVES, painted with TOWARD

Diamond Scutes, coloured

The same lattice in a colour the line carries. Fully recessive - two copies, and a single copy beside the white allele draws white.

1. the scute lattice down the barrel — WAVES × WAVES, painted with TOWARD
2. the chain along the neck crest — AXIS × WAVES, painted with TOWARD
3. the smaller chain down the tail — WAVES, painted with TOWARD
4. the trim round the forelegs — WAVES, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

No scutes.

Paints nothing.